Yeah, using a comma to punctuate internal dialogue is way old. Off the top of my head I can think of narratives written by Hawthorne and Irving that include internal dialogue punctuated with just a comma. I'm sure there are better examples, but I'm not feeling very good at the moment and don't feel like looking anything up. not their words, but ie: What am I going to do, he wondered. There was no way of knowing, I thought. If only she had left something of hers behind. Yes, he thought. I am the only one left. Personally, I hate italicized thought. It lessens the potential impact of words, when you italicize for emphasis. But trends are trends, as they will always be. Doesn't mean they're for good reason, though.
absolutely!... at 75, having been a voracious fiction reader for 70 years, I can attest to the fact that italics use is what's 'new' and it annoys the bleep outa me, too, since good writers don't need to resort to fancy fontery to let their readers know when a character is thinking... to me, it's the lazy writer's copout, or the poor writer's crutch...
" thoughts without either italics or explicit thought attributions are old, and the italics thing is new-fangled " that makes no sense.
Totally agree.. this obsession with italicizing thoughts makes me wonder if the people who do and love it have ever considered the thousands of pages written by 'masters' that do not contain italicized internal dialogue. And as far as this subject goes, I'm always thinking, these great writers have managed without italicizing thoughts for entire careers. If it was such a good idea, why didn't Vonnegut write that way? Or Bradbury? Hemingway? Saramago? Munro? If there was something to it, I feel like they would have seen a practical application and used the shit out of it. Hell, even the Grisham novel's I've read didn't have italicized thoughts. Anyway, I'm not saying we have to be like them. Of course we can never be like them. We are only ourselves, with only our own voices. But they didn't use italics for thoughts because they probably felt they didn't need to, had trusted they already had the tools at their disposal to make it more than clear their characters were thinking in narratives, even sometimes seamlessly transitioning from reality to a character's head then back into reality without using obvious thought attributions to clue the reader in. To me, that shows just how skillfully they could manipulate words, and how they relied on nothing but those words alone to communicate to a reader. No short-cut was taken. No parlor trick was employed. They just used words and correct ( most of the time, ;p ) punctuation. Shrug, I don't know about you guys, but if Bradbury can write 1k+ pages without italicizing a thought, I'm pretty sure I can, too.
As with most things in literature, it boils down to one's individual preference and perhaps more importantly, consistency. There's nothing worse than a writer using a method such as this to denote thought when elsewhere they revert back to more traditional means of conveying it.
For sure, and that is something else I totally agree with. Yet more often than not, the case is not one of preference, but one of following what is believed to be a 'professional' norm and writing accordingly.
Based on the publish literature, there isn't really a professional norm for this. Plenty of good writers use italics for thought. The idea that doing so magically transforms writing into lazy or incompetent doesn't make sense. It's just a style of presentation, and like much else can be done well or poorly.
@GoldenGhost I'm not a huge one for convention though, as long as you don't delve so far into self indulgence as to become unpalatable or damn near illegible, I say try new things. Blaze your own trail. Literature is like any other art form, without left field, avant garde, conceptual thought, we run the risk of textual homogeneity. Guys like James Joyce were thought of at the time as being rather radical in their approach to their prose yet if we try to emulate that style now, it would be seen as dated.
Writers who wrote using typewriters or paper didn't have the ability to use italics anyway (and underlining would get tedious I imagine), so the fact that italics weren't used back then might just be a technological issue.
I was going to bring up the very same point, not a moment ago. I concur that this is, in all probability, the primary reason behind it; technology affords us the opportunity to alter our styles as we choose (in this respect).
Want to hear something interesting? Faulkner originally wanted to use different colored ink to show all the time shifts in Benjy's section in The Sound and the Fury because he thought it would make it easier for the reader to follow. Because it was impractical and difficult to do this at the time, the book was published without colored ink (it uses italics instead). This just goes to show you that even writers like Faulkner sometimes wanted to use unconventional methods.
I think there is a logical error in some case. People point out that it is not necessary for a good writer to use italics. That's certainly true - there is little that is strictly necessary in fiction, and stylistically there may be nothing. People then proceed from that original statement to conclude that if one does use italics, then one is not a good writer. That doesn't follow. It isn't necessary to use italics or not to use them, and a good writer may do either. It seems to me that avoidance of italics in this instance is an old rule (maybe for reasons stated above) that has gone by the wayside (just wander through a Barnes & Noble and pull books off the shelf). People certainly have preferences as readers, but the evidence that italicized thoughts are acceptable as professional writing is quite easy to find.
There is colored font usage in House of Leaves, as well as any number of other stylistic approaches to the text that I'm sure the author would have been told would result in never having the book published, had he frequented writing forums.
Have any of you read Irvine Welsh's Filth? He uses a kind of thought bubble that literally overlaps the text and is the internal monologue of a tapeworm that the protagonist of the story has inside his body. I'll admit, my initial thoughts were that it was self-indulgent gimmickry but as the book progresses, it really does work. I will say however, that had it not been for the phenomenal success of his first work 'trainspotting', then I sincerely doubt whether any publisher would've allowed him this indulgence. It just occurred to me while writing this that the thought bubble was in all probability, supposed to represent the tapeworm's form.
I have read one (1) book that uses italics for thoughts. I can believe that there are genres where they are commonly used; there are also genres where they are almost never used.
I think you're right. I read mostly general fiction, and I don't see italics used to denote thoughts very often.
I don't see it a lot in general fiction. I see it a lot in Fantasy, and particularly in Urban Fantasy. Come across it in some science fiction, and in YA regardless of genre. Some thrillers as well, though it seems to me that it is less common there. I'm trying to think of horror novels where I've seen it. I'm sure there have been some, but I can't think of any off hand.
I prefer to use italics for anything in the mind- and i use them quite a bit. My book involves thoughts, telepathy, visions, and memories, but i am constantly aware of making sure that the reader can tell the difference. Well... actually as for visions would you call having someone else's memories in your head visions? hmm....
haha. I think "Visions," is a pretty flexible term, in that it can be applied to anything you're seeing in your mind, or, from a more fantastical perspective, anything outside of your own mental pictures. So, see the past, present, or through someone else's eyes could all be referred to as having "visions." If I were you, though, Keit, I would look for how often you're using the italics. Personal preference aside, large blocks of italics can be extremely irritating.
Whoa. That's a whole lot of mind stuff. And would I call them visions? I guess I'd have to see an example.
I don't think this is true. Using italics is a stylistic choice. It's not indicative of a writer's talent.
