I'm at a beginner/intermediate level, possibly leaning more towards intermediate at this point. I need more 'exercise' and I recently realized I enjoy blogging in Japanese on lang-8.com. Freewriting is fun and lets you use the vocabulary that you otherwise might forget. Well anyway, I decided to write a short story just for the hell of it. It's possibly a bit beyond the scope of what I've learned but I enjoy challenging myself.

Anyway enough BS'ing. What I'm stuck on is how to format a verbal exchange between two characters. I know the basic form of direct quotations:

しんじくんは「僕の頭が大きいですよね。」と言っています。

But when you have two characters going back and forth during a heavy verbal exchange it just seems clumsy. It certainly would seem ridiculous in English.

In English it's not necessary to put anything after the quotation every time after you've already established the order of who's speaking.

"My head is kinda big no?" Shinji said.

"Yeah it is. Rediculously so." Sochiro replied.

"Know any good head shrinkers in the area?"

"Actually, my Mom's a pretty good one"

"Oh I see."

I'm assuming it has to work a similar way in Japanese. Here's an excerpt from the story I'm writing. Pardon the grammar if there's any mistakes, this is my unedited draft of sorts. Just to set the scene, Matt, who is in Tokyo for the first time bumps into a somewhat scary looking guy (who's name isn't known to the reader yet) and spills coffee all over him.

その男は「てめ！何をしてんだよ！！」といっていました。

マットは「ああ！すみません！すみません！」中にをおじぎしてといっていました。かれははじめた
口ふきで男を拭いた。(this is supposed to say: "said while bowing deeply". He started wiping him with a napkin).

「ばか！おまえは助けてないよ！はなせ!」 (idiot! you're not helping! Let go of me!)

かれはマットを押しやった。(he pushed him away)

「あの。。。」

「うるせ！お金を上げろなさい！] (shut up! Give me your money, now!)

Is this sorta the correct way of doing this? Are you all laughing at me? XD

I just pulled out a few light novels I had laying around (and have yet to touch haha) and checked. For the most part it looks like you are on track. The bracket usage is good (save for the typo on the last speech block), but the ellipsis usage is wrong. It seems that when Japanese use ellipsis they use regular periods "..." and not ”。。。”. They additionally seem to have a different rule on the number, in English the rule is 3 dots but in the 3 novels I just checked they use 6.

One other thing, I notice that the [light] novel writers like to use long lines to show the drawing out of a bit of speech, kind of like そうですねーーーー. The IME can't turn into into a solid line though. Maybe when typed you could do そうですねぇ～～～. If you want to emphasize it.

Those are just some of the cosmetic things I saw while just flipping through the books.

Edit: Oh its worth pointing out that maybe these few pointers (like ellipsis #) only hold true when reading printed novels, because novel text is in a horizontal format (like manga; Up->Down Right->Left).

You could always do something fun like this....

「てめ！何をしてんだよ！！」
男が跳ね上がって驚いた。(or 思わず叫んだ)

But anyway, In what I'm reading it's more common to identify the speaker separate from the quote.

男が跳ね上がって驚いた。
「てめ！何をしてんだよ！！」

I don't notice a whole lot of 誰誰は「x」 formations.

But I really have no idea what I'm talking about.

どうもありがとうございます。 That's all I needed to hear. I can go crazy now writing dialog. XD

Womacks23 Wrote:I don't notice a whole lot of 誰誰は「x」 formations.

But I really have no idea what I'm talking about.

I don't know why I didn't notice that point in domokun's post, but you are spot on. Looking through again I don't see any formations like that in most normal books, but if you think about it, you don't really see that kind of stuff in English novels either. They might sometimes have "xxx," john said; as domokun pointed out, but when I think back on what I have read, I think the tendency is still to set up a back and forth dialogue between characters (For some reason I seem to call to mind some horrible scenes in George RR Martin's books where you could easily lose track of who is saying what, for that particular reason...). If you must reference who said what, you will sometimes see authors do something to the effect: "Well I refuse to go the meeting!" Johnson slammed his fist on the table.

That brings me to another question actually. How do you describe actions involving a quote? English example:

"That ramen was so delicious!" Naruto said while rubbing his stomach.

Japanese translation attempt:

鳴門くんは「そのラーメンがとてもおいしかったな！」とおなかをこすって言っていました。

or

鳴門くんはおなかをこすった。
「そのラーメンがとてもおいしかったな！」

hrmm? Which one is right?