For what it's worth, I agree that every novel that I know to depict telepathy uses italics. I don't like it one little bit, but I agree that I can't point to any other accepted standard.
But "fine with it" is different from "use the convention". It looks to me like a substantial majority are fine with it. It's commonly done and from all I can find, only a minority of hold outs have a problem with it. Many published books and authors use the convention. You act like only the unwashed masses do.
Many published books and authors use all sorts of things that many people dislike. I'm not required to approve of the writing style decisions of every writer that can make it to a publisher.
There's something I wanted to mention earlier but forgot. Some writers use italics as a crutch. That is, passages that have telepathic conversations or a bunch of thoughts are written in italics because without them the passage would be very hard to follow. That's why I think it's important to take out the italics, see how the passage reads, make any changes to improve clarity, and then add in the italics if you really want (or leave them out; your choice). If you don't think this is important, consider audiobooks as an example. Thoughts and telepathic conversations are made clear through context, and this is what writers should be aiming for.
Prove it. When push comes to shove all you have here is your opinion that it's a crutch. I doubt you can show evidence "crutch" is the causation/motivation even if you had evidence of a correlation. Selective memory is likely at work. When you read something crappy and you see italicized thoughts you remember it. When you read something good and you see italicized thoughts you don't. I listen to audiobooks almost every day. I play them in the car and I'm in the car a lot. The reader has to indicate a lot of things you can't see on the page and while I've not listened to any books with telepathic exchanges, I would imagine without the right audio cues of a good reader it probably gets confusing whether the text has italics or not.
Yeah, it's an opinion. Quite honestly, I don't have the time or the patience to search for passages with italicized thoughts. I don't even think any of the novels I have with me at the moment have italicized thoughts in them, so I'd have to go out of my way to find examples. If you have access to any books that do this (or if your own work does this), take out the italics, read the passage again, and decide for yourself. Also, what ChickenFreak said. Trust me, that's not what's happening. In an audiobook, I think a simple "he said telepathically" would be enough. It's clear and to the point. I hate the thought of having audio cues to show telepathy (or anything else for that matter).
No but that wasn't the point. I said it was widely accepted and you questioned that statement. Your personal preferences are your own. I don't have an issue with people not liking italicized thought. Certainly I wouldn't judge someone who didn't do it. Actually, no, I didn't miss that. I am challenging the claims in this thread that using italics for inner monologue is used as a "crutch," or because one is being "lazy," or one is "unskilled," etc etc. These things have been claimed without supporting evidence. The underlying premise is faulty that one uses italics because one lacks the skills to do otherwise. That accusation is no more than unsupported opinion. Where is the evidence using italics for inner monologue is related to skill rather than style choice? We know both skilled and unskilled writers use the convention. I've not even seen evidence there is a correlation, let alone more than coincidental association. It was just asserted that the choice was due to lack of knowledge how to write any other way. I assure you I know how to write, I thought, should I choose to use the tag in my first person narrative. It's not any harder than writing, I said.
You do realize that I'm not advocating writing "I thought", right? I'm not advocating tagging OR italicizing thoughts.
You're also missing the point. What leads you to believe skill, crutch, laziness, or any of these other conditions are connected to using italics for inner monologue? I'm trying to point out to people that they've come to accept these unsupported assertions as facts. The point is, people are assuming a relationship without thinking critically about that conclusion. I have no doubt you've read crap by an author that used italics for inner monologue. But if that author chose not to use the italics, chances are their work would still be crap. That is my point. And many excellent authors that use italics for inner monologue have been mentioned. Clearly it's not a sign they are lazy or incompetent writers. Trust me, it more than likely is exactly what is happening. It's the way our brains work. Good audio book readers generally indicate such things with a voice change. They don't add tags. Saying I heard her voice in my head is fine, when you are referring to a single passage. In the example I gave earlier, three people were talking aloud and two of them were speaking telepathically in the same exchange. So you essentially have 5 speakers. It's tedious enough to write John, Jane, and Mary said, over and over, but readers are forgiving and the 'he saids' fade into the background. Now add to that John said telepathically to Jane, Mary said, Jane said, Jane said telepathically to John... OMG, that is so tedious and unnecessary. Now suppose it was a number of members of the Borg conversing telepathically with each other while conversing with several members of the Enterprise crew. What is the reason for avoiding italics there? What is the benefit? I don't see any reason it is better written without the italics. And if you can use them with telepathic dialogue, why not use them for inner monologue? Personal preference? Sure, no problem. You hate seeing them? Fine, there's a lot of stuff I hate seeing like certain tropes. But it's being claimed people use italics because they can't write without them when the evidence suggests the use of italics doesn't imply anything about their writing skills which might be good or bad regardless. It was an example to state a point, not a passage to win an essay contest.
When writers use italics for thoughts, why do they do it? I'm willing to bet that in most cases it's to make things clearer for the reader. So I want to amend my original statement and say that using italics this way isn't a stylistic preference because it's being used as a crutch for poor writing (sort of like if I used blue ink to show that a character was whispering). On the other hand, if the writing is just as clear without italics, only then would I say it's a stylistic preference. If they took the time to do what I said before (take out the italics and revise the passage accordingly), I have no doubt the piece would improve. There's really no other way, unless you want to use audio cues, which I mentioned I hate because they sound gimmicky. Going by what I said earlier, if the writing is clear without italics, then I'm fine either way. But if italics are being used because the writer can't make the scene clear through context, that's when I have a problem. What evidence? That list of writers that was posted earlier? You're going to have to do more than just name names because of how subjective writing is. Post passages to back up your claim. Simply listing a writer's name isn't going to convince me one way or the other.
But it's relevant to my position, because my position is that both "Jane thought..." and an italicized thought are ungraceful and break the flow. If one is completely unavoidable once in a while, I'll go with "Jane thought..." because that avoids adding the whole italicized convention for those very few occasions. But the issue is not primarily about the choice between those two; the issue for me is avoiding both.
In my case, I don't care if the motivation for italics-for-thought is laziness or the product of a tremendous amount of effort. I still think that it doesn't work. It's similar to the fact that I think that using a bunch of different identifiers for the same person: Joe the young man the teen the dark-haired boy the soccer player the skinny adolescent doesn't work. I don't care if someone spent hours with a thesaurus to come up with those identifiers. I don't care if they put in more work than they would have put in to rephrase to avoid all those identifiers. The identifiers still don't work for me. And the effort to avoid "said" while still keeping dialogue tags: he said he stated he uttered he opined he verbalized he spoke similarly doesn't work. I don't care how hard the person works. I don't care if they spent a year making charts to ensure that they distribute the different tags evenly throughout the book. It still doesn't work for me. And, yes, I believe that just changing those things, without improving the writer's writing in any other way, would make the work better. And I don't care if italics-for-thoughts exist in published books. The two strategies above also exist in published books, though less often than the italics. I don't care that Neil Gaiman is (1) a good writer who (2) uses italics-for-thoughts once in a while in his books. I appreciate that he uses them very, very seldom, but all the same, and even considering that he's a very good writer, I think that eliminating those italics would make the pages on which they appear better. I choose to hope that the italics were inflicted on him by his editor rather than chosen by him, but even if they weren't, I still say they're a bad idea.
no no no... The sounds narrated are heard by everyone in the story, why would they just be in the character's head only? Put another way then, get rid of italics altogether but give the thought a thought-tag as you would a speech tag. That's when you need to tell the reader it's a character's thought, not show it as a thought.
In your sentences, which came across as the thoughts of the storyteller. I can't blooming scroll back to see them now. Grrr.
Exactly. It's common sense that when we're in a close third person point of view, a thought is the POV character's thought. We don't need italics to let us know that.
We don't always write in closed third person POV. In fact, I never have. Mine are either first person present or third person Omni past.
Third person omniscient with thoughts in italics sounds so very strange to me. I see third person omniscient as very old-fashioned, and thoughts in italics as very new-fangled. Are there any published books that use this? I'm not saying that the lack of examples means that it can't be done, I'd just like to have an example to get an idea of how it works. I struggle to even think of any modern books using omniscient, much less omniscient-with-thoughts-in-italics.
Off the top of my head one book springs to mind. Mine, which I'm not going to advertise here except to say the parts written in first person let me explore one MC's life the way she sees it. The other parts, in third Omni, allow me to explore the second main character's life while also exploring those around him and the other MC through his eyes. I'm told it works well.
I'm suddenly curious: When did the use of italics for internal thought become not-too-unusual? I say "for internal thought" as opposed to their use for telepathy or possession or split personality or delusions--for example, I Never Promised You A Rose Garden, 1964, seems to use them for the characters in Deborah's internal visions... though I do wonder if perhaps that's editing in later editions. But for regular ordinary people having regular ordinary thoughts, when did that convention get started? My perception is that it's not more than ten or twenty years old, but perhaps that's because it's hardly ever used in any of the genres that I read.
The way you put this suggests that you're using third person limited with two different POV characters. I'm not telling you that's what you're doing, of course, but the "through his eyes" strongly suggests third person limited. In omniscient, you wouldn't need his eyes.
I'll rephrase. I have two main characters. One is written first person. The other is written third person Omni so that he can pass the camera to a number of sub characters who all take turns to take us through parts of the story. This means I don't have to keep info dumping or recapping the day from the pov of my main character. It also means that I can move my reader from one place to another fluidly and without such lines as "Meanwhile, back at the ranch ..." and so on. And, it also adds suspense because the reader knows things the MC (in first person) does not. Obviously the first person MC catches up eventually, giving the reader that sigh of relief moment. The sub characters, while starting off as sub characters, will become more important members of the story as it progresses, to the point of having their own parts in a later book. One reason I did this was so that I could explore the whole story from different angles therefore giving different reactions to the same situations. I didn't want the story to be one sided but I also wanted a first person character.
