A character can tell a story while repeating someone else’s words. The reader then has to follow the present conversation and the quoted conversation inside it, sometimes within a single paragraph.
Draft a short invented exchange: Mara tells Jo what a neighbour said at the gate. Before worrying about punctuation style, identify who speaks at each level and which words are being repeated exactly within the fiction.
Read it without the names
Temporarily cover the character names and inspect the surrounding cues. Does the reader still know when Mara’s report begins and when the neighbour’s quoted voice ends? If not, add a clear transition where the confusion occurs.
Keep the chosen publication’s quotation convention consistent. Different style systems handle nested quotation marks differently, so a visual pattern copied from another book may not match yours.
You can also choose indirect speech for part of the report. That changes the relationship to the original wording and may reduce clutter, but it should not accidentally turn a character’s uncertain recollection into an exact transcript.
Read the passage aloud using distinct voices, then return to the page without those performance cues. The written version must carry the speaker changes itself. A listener’s ability to follow your acting does not prove that the paragraph is equally clear in print.
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