This thread should be somehow cyclical. That is, anyone seeking to post a new question about italics here should be automatically redirected to the beginning of the thread and made to read every damn post in it before their new post will be accepted.
Can we just turn this into a 'life's greatest questions' thread? -Why are we here? -Did we really land on the moon? -Why are there 10 hotdogs per package and only 8 buns per package? What are we supposed to do with the last two hotdogs? Is it some sort of scam to get us to continually buy buns and hotdogs separately in a vain attempt to free us from their grasp?
There is more than one way to write a first person POV so your rule is fine in most cases but not all. I'm writing first person POV with the main character narrating the story in past tense. Occasionally I put in direct thoughts the same way one puts in direct dialogue with past tense tags. Italics works best for me in this case.
New members, new discussion. What is the point of sticking the thread if not to revisit it if a new person chooses to comment? Welcome to the forum @Brie Marie. Don't mind the sarcasm.
My reader just went over this with my book. She said that it is better just to lay out the thought without italics and then add, "she thought." That must be what she meant, I thought. However, there were some places where putting in "he thought" would have interrupted the flow of the action, so I used italics. She also said for longer sections of thought, italics work fine. I don't think there is a definitive answer on this one. Peace, Tex
Your reader? You mean a beta reader? If the publisher says change it, that has weight. But beta readers are expressing a personal preferance to maintian an old convention. It's not hard to find many best selling published books that are using the convention of italics for thoughts. I respect @ChickenFreak's beliefs and personal preference. But really both conventions are acceptable with the exception if one's publisher has a preference. One thing you probably don't want to do is long stretches of italics. If you are treating your first person POV as a narrator, then the occasional direct thought can be italicized to show the reader it is internal monologue without tedious tags. But if your first person narrator is in present tense, and you are treating the narration as internal monologue, I wouldn't italicize that.
As everybody probably knows who has been with us a while, I am a fan of italics for thoughts, provided it's just a line or two at a time. I use them myself, and see them used often in books that I read. They stand out, and read naturally, if they are written well. If somebody is speaking one thing and thinking something entirely different, or if they are being silent but thinking about pertinent things at the same time, this can be a really effective way to communicate this split personality, without using 'he/she thought' all the time. And it's also immediately obvious that it's a thought as soon as the italics appear. If you use the 'he/she thought' method at the end of a sentence or phrase, you can run into problems with the reader assuming something else, until they reach the 'thought' tag. However, there is one irritating drawback. Italics for thought are fine, as long as you're reading them silently from a printed book or e-reader. If you plan to have your work read out loud, however, the italics for thoughts can pose a problem. There isn't any good way to differentiate an italicised passage from a non-italicised one using just the voice. Unless the prose itself makes this distinction clear, you might want to tread carefully.
She's not a beta reader, she's a reader and professional editor. Her input is much more valuable than a "beta reader." Why do people assume things they don't know? You pretty much repeated what I said. So, why the kvetching? Peace, Tex Shelters
I like italics for thoughts; as I read I can hear the difference in sound you get when you're hearing your voice inside your headspace rather than through your ears. And they alert me that all is well when an author suddenly switches from past to present tense. What I'm not 100% easy about in my own writing is those times when I really, truly need to add in a "she thought" or a "he wondered" for the sake of cadence or continuity. Should I still italicize the actual thought? I have been, but I'd listen to a good argument for me not to.
Slightly off topic, but . . . A little while ago I was reading a book review blog post about the best recent releases by local authors, including one that sounded really interesting. I followed the link to Amazon and took a Look Inside. Did I buy the book? I did not. It wasn't that the author hadn't used italics for thoughts--- I could have dealt with that--- but he also used no quotation marks and few speech tags or beats or anything else to identify who was talking or if the line was a person talking at all. Maybe it was supposed to prove what a groundbreaking Artist the author was. If so, I'll be a Philistine. It was too much work.
I use italics for thoughts and I've had several audiobooks made of my work. I have no idea how the narrators manage it (because I hate listening to someone reading my stuff) but there've been no complaints. I listen to a lot of audiobooks and I think an accomplished narrator has a lot of different tones in his or her vocal repertoire. A lot of them use one voice/accent/tone for narration and a different one for the MC's dialogue; I can see a sort of mix between the two being used for character thoughts? Not sure, but I think italics-for-thoughts is a common enough tool that there'd be an accepted way for narrators to handle it.
Well, settle down - if she's your editor, you'd traditionally have said she was your editor not your "reader". And I'm not sure what distinction you're drawing between being "a reader" and "a beta reader".
Fuckin' love this thread. Seriously, you should start a new website with this as the sole premise and purpose. I'm in.
Narrators in audiobooks definitely use tones and voices for internal monologue, so if you have a good narrator a work that uses italics for thoughts works just fine. I've listened to quite a few where the authors use them.
Well, I'd hope that's true, because, as I said, I am a fan of italics for thoughts. I had the experience of reading somebody else's story out loud at my writers' group, AND also reading my own out loud. Both used italics for thoughts and it was difficult to distinguish the 'voices' that were being used, even when reading my own. I found that pausing slightly before reading the italics passage helped, but I'm not sure how it came across, or if it was clear to the people I was reading to that it was an unspoken thought, as opposed to dialogue. (Mind you, I am no actor.) It did make me think about the issue a different way. I'll still use italics for thoughts in my writing, but I'll try to remain conscious of how they will come across when read out loud. Audio books are popular—read by trained voice actors—but so are things like the Kindle Fire's text-to-speech feature, which will 'read' anything out loud. A robot does the reading in this case, and I'd be interested to hear how italics for thoughts comes across in this mode. I don't have a Kindle Fire, so I'll need to wait for an opportunity to test it out.
How does the robot-voice handle other typesetting conventions? Like, quotation marks or whatever... would the robot voice have a way to indicate that the speaker had changed, or anything? I don't think they do - I think robot readers are of limited use for a variety of reasons, not just because they wouldn't be able to distinguish italics for thoughts. Am I making sense? Like, a robot voice probably wouldn't distinguish between: He frowned at her. "Are you sure?" "Mostly." "Is that good enough?" and: He frowned at her. "Are you sure?" "Mostly. Is that good enough?" It's clear enough in writing, and it'd be clear enough with a good narrator, but I think the robot readers just... aren't that good. Not just with italics for thoughts.
Well, as I said, I'd need to test this out for myself. One of the women in my writing group has a vision problem, and she's been very impressed with the voice thing on Kindle Fire. I haven't asked her about italics for thoughts, though. She writes using Jaws, the programme for blind people, and has to hear everything she's written (conventionally typed in on a keyboard) read back to her by a robot! OMG. Her writing is lively, but I suppose it has to be, if a robot is going to make it sound interesting.
And quite possibly she'd change her writing to work better with the robot-voice. More dialogue tags, less reliance on typesetting... whatever. I can definitely see the robot voice being better than nothing. But I've tried it on my kindle, and it's not nearly as effective as a real narrator, in my opinion.
She is the writer whose work I read out loud at the meetings, because she can't read from a printed page without using a magnifying glass. So she's the one who uses italics for thoughts. I don't know how it comes across when she hears it read back to her by her Jaws programme. It must be okay, otherwise she would have changed her writing, I imagine. It's no fun being blind or sight impaired, but if you have to be, this is probably the best time in history to have this problem to contend with. So many technological aids out there that weren't around 10-20 years ago. My nephew is blind and he uses Jaws all the time, and managed to complete a masters degree course recently, using these kinds of programmes. I am in awe.
I think that there's a difference between using italics for thoughts, and needing italics for thoughts. That is, I see: 1) Occasions when they are not needed or used. 2) Occasions when they are used but not needed--the meaning can be clearly parsed even if they're removed. Some will argue that the emphasis of "hey, this is a literal thought" that is communicated by italics improves things, I would argue that it doesn't, but in either case the meaning is not inherently ambiguous. 3) Occasions when they are used and needed--the meaning is ambiguous without them. I think that (3) is not all that common, and that it's pretty easy to shift to (2) when the situation is (3). If I broke down and started adding italics, I would still write so that they weren't actually needed, and do the named-style thing so that I could just turn them on or off with one command.
Just some musings, but, maybe using italics for thoughts is the best way to keep the narrator 100% distinct from the protagonist. I like to think of my own narration (3rd person limited and no italics) as a hybridization between some invisible literary lens and the protagonist's own thoughts. Using italics enables the writer to divorce the narrator's voice completely from the character. It's "This objectively happened. Protagonist's thoughts." vs "Everything that is happening, according to the protagonist." Therefore, I think italics for thoughts may be very significant, in that it can suggest a shift in narration, otherwise, why signify a change in writing using something that transcends the actual story (the font in your novel) at all? In first person, the narrator IS the protagonist. You don't need italics. Everything is his thoughts. In a sense, italics for thoughts is almost like 3rd person limited but occasionally switching to 1st. It's too bad that using italics for thoughts looks sort of cheesy to me, because I can see that it may actually offer a distinct type of narration. Of course it also just be aesthetic.
