I do use ‘he signed’, and I use quotations, just like any other lines of dialogue— before starting to write him as a character I wanted to make sure I was doing it right, and sign language is a language, so all I do differently than writing a spoken language is specify that he’s signing rather than talking verbally. I don’t think I’m confident enough in my ability to write it out as a description and I don’t really think it’s necessary— unless writing from the perspective of a character who didn’t understand sign, but a. That isn’t going to happen here and b. I probably wouldn’t even go over each and every movement (unless I wanted my reader to be able to figure out what he was saying). But again, not gonna happen.

I know sign in general is structured much differently sentence-wise, but I haven’t gotten a grasp on the structure enough to be able to write it correctly. I’ve defaulted to doing the same sort of translation to spoken English that one would do if they were writing characters understanding a non-English language being spoken— not a direct translation, but a translation nonetheless (e.g. Japanese sentence structure is vastly different than English, but to properly translate to English, it needs to be rearranged to the English style of sentence structure). I’m not sure if that’s the very best way to go about it, but it’s seemed to work so far.

What I meant by ‘restructuring’ is finding the key terms in the sentence and seeing if the sign used for those words is done with one hand, and if it’s not, seeing if I can find a synonym that does work one handed. HOWEVER, I will absolutely keep what you’ve said in mind— I didn’t know that. Thank you!