She suddenly began singing "Cruella De Vil Cruella De Vil If she doesn't scare you No evil thing will To see her is to take a sudden chill Cruella, Cruella She's like a spider waiting for the kill Look out for Cruella De Vil".
How do you insert a sung part without skipping lines like in a lyrics? Do you replace the line breaks with spaces? Can you do this without using line breaks? What are the standards?
I remember seeing lines separated with slashes in several books, although those were all non-fictional. This results in: "Cruella De Vil / Cruella De Vil / If she doesn't scare you / No evil thing will / [...]"
I think some form of punctuation is necessary because often lyrics have line breaks at other places than the end of sentences, making it hard to guess where they should be - if you don't know the song. Using capitalization to mark line breaks is not ideal, especially when there are names. For example, it is not clear whether "Cruella De Vil Cruella De Vil" makes up one or two (or even more) song lines.
Check out Tolkiens "Lord of the Rings." There are poems, and I think lyrics there. Some even in Sindarin (I think, to be honest, I skimmed past most of it).
It was done in italics (some editions), with an indent (left and right, in some editions; one edition looks like the block of verse is about half the width of the book page and centered [the text is left-aligned though], i.e. very large indents on both sides), and in a separate section with empty lines before and after. Like the verses in a poem.
I would do this in one of two ways.
The first case is where the singing is "mere dialogue" and not particularly important. It's simply something that a character is singing, rather than being an important part of the novel. In this case, I would put the words in italics, and punctuate them as if they were prose:
She suddenly began singing, "Cruella de Vil, Cruella de Vil! If she doesn't scare you, no evil thing will! To see her is to take a sudden chill! Cruella, Cruella! She's like a spider waiting for the kill! Look out for Cruella de Vil!"
The second case is where the words are an important part of the novel, and you want to display them in a distinct and weighty fashion. In this case, I would write the lyrics indented, with no quotation marks, in italics, with line breaks, using end punctuation only sparingly:
She suddenly began singing:
Cruella de Vil, Cruella de Vil!
If she doesn't share you, no evil thing will
To see her is to take a sudden chill
Cruella, Cruella!
She's like a spider waiting for the kill
Look out for Cruella de Vil.
I would never use slashes for lyrics in a fictional story. For one, I don't think I've ever seen slashes used that way in a published work of fiction. For two, when writing fiction, it's important to keep aesthetics in mind, and in my personal opinion, slashes just don't look very good. When writing non-fiction, it's usually important to let the reader know where the line breaks are, but in fiction, that's probably not important.
Of course, you should think about the legal aspects as well. Personally, I think that quoting a small section of a song in a novel is almost certainly fair use, but don't take my word for it.
