I change my vote! After flipping through a dozen or so of my favorite books, I noticed most of them used Italics alone, Italics with 'She thought', or Italics with a verb. Grandpa will be surprised to see me. Grandpa will be surprised to see me... Sophie thought Grandpa will be surprised to see me! She laughed to herself. Most of the books I checked had used all three of these in the same book.
I prefer none tbh. I guess it's a matter of preference One thing though: Don't use sometimes italics and sometimes none for thoughts, stick to one thing and one thing only, otherwise it's going to get confusing. But as Maia has said, the publisher will go through all this afterwards anyway, but ye, don't start switching, stick to one.
Having read this thread, I paid attention while reading some Patricia Cornwell I am in the middle of. She uses plain text for character thoughts, without punctuation of font decoration. The context alone makes it clear. That is of course only one example, and although I enjoy her work, she has also penned some pieces I have been less impressed by. Looking on the web, on the other hand, I saw several recommendations for italicizing character thoughts. If there is a mandate, I think it will come from the publisher who accepts the work. But whatever method you choose, be consistent within that piece. Ideally, if you are working in a word processor, you can create a named style for character thoughts; that way, you can change how it is represented at will, or at least locate all the occurrences more easily for manual repair.
you mean there's another guy speaking to him in his head, or his conscience? Hmm, ye I guess it would be apprioprate to use italics when your conscience kinda comes into it's own charachter? Generally though, besides in situations like that, it's important to stick to one method, although I could understand someone using italics for that.
Ah, now you see, this is the dilemma with religious supernatural characters in stories. After all, if someone says that "god spoke to me", then is that literally or figuratively? And how could you begin to write them in terms of actually speaking in his head or just the conscience? I'm pretty sure that there is a specific answer which, funnily enough, I don't really know for sure. But the above example is the example I would use just to play it safe. After all, what the main character is hearing is not his own thoughts but the words of another character in his head. But the approach can most definitely be argued though. If the character had appeared in person and spoken to the main character I would've written it as you normally would within a regular exchange between two characters.
That's one way of looking at it. But who's to say that the readers are going to be good readers who will understand anyway? Not every reader comes complete with the whole "package"!
Or, to put it another way: SARCHASM sar ยท chasm [sahr-kaz-uh m] -noun, origin Ivanian 1. The large gap between the writer's fantastic wit, and the reader's blatant stupidity.
Never talk down to readers, or you wiull only collect readers you need to talk down to (this is an opinion, not a well established fact).
haha I noticed it Although on a serious note Cogito is of course rgith, although I would be suprised to hear of a writer who would publicly denounce their readers, possible fan base, I would begin to question their intelligence if they did that
