I don't know of any examples since none of the books I read have telepathy. But my argument wasn't against the use of italics in the first place. I was simply saying that there are other ways of doing it. Italics aren't the only way. Yet some people seem to be adamant about using italics. Using quotation marks is perfectly fine.
As a reader, when I see italicized text I have been trained to read it as either an internal monologue, or telepathy. This is because of all the examples I posted of people doing that.
No, they're the character's thoughts. In close third person, everything comes from the character. Are you saying that the story teller wants to be a hero and lead the mother away? I agree that it's more difficult in third person omniscient, which is why I don't like that point of view. But it's only more difficult, not impossible. Edited to add: And this, the idea that a thought NOT in italics must be the narrator's and not the character's, is yet another reason for me to dislike thoughts in italics. The less graceful italics are undermining people's ability to read the traditional and more graceful close third person. It's as if when I say, A motorcycle rumbled by on the street outside. I have to change it to With the two ears attached to his head, Joe could hear a sound that he was able to identify, from past experience, as a motorcycle rumbling by, on the street outside. Or, worse, With the two ears attached to his head, Joe could hear a motorcycle rumbling by on the street outside. Thrash. Gnash. Growl.
But no book out there ever starts with the words "Dear reader, this book is written in third person closed point of view, please read it that way ..." What I write as a character's thought and what you write as a character's thought will not necessarily be thought of by the reader as a character's thought. I know there's lost of discussion about show and tell but where thoughts are concerned, I will tell my readers that the character is thinking those words. I don't want my readers to stop reading to question who thought what and was it a thought or was it a bit of added narration and who exactly is thinking that and hang on, let me just read that line again ... I want my reader to be more engrossed in the story of the characters. How would the storyteller be the hero and lead the mother away?
In your opinion, not in mine. Depending on the genre, telepathic communication in a work of fiction is going to be within the normal experience in some genres, while it would be confusing to see it in other genres. And in cases like a letter or a phone call one is dealing with a single event. With some telepathic communication it's not as simple. You could have three people in a dialogue exchange, with a separate telepathic exchange going on between two of them. In such a case it would be extremely tedious to use quotes for everything and tell the reader again and again what is spoken aloud and what wasn't. It makes no sense to do that because some people can't handle a changing convention. I can see you simply advising the writer to just throw that scene out, write something else. And I notice you too throw out the style guide rules of never using quotation marks with unspoken dialogue because it confuses the reader who would naturally think the words were spoken aloud. How convenient to insist on the CMoS when it suits you, but not when it doesn't. In my opinion, you are arbitrarily calling telepathic thoughts the same as spoken dialogue. But they can just as easily be assigned the classification of unspoken dialogue. So Terry Pratchett and Anne McCaffery are sloppy amateurs? Indeed.
If written correctly, close third person can be identified within a paragraph or less, and then the reader knows the rules. As a reader, you can't know if the point of view might shift to another character, but if the writer keeps writing correctly, that shift will be clear. Exactly. And searching for every possible ambiguity and "fixing" it will drag the character out of the story. Let's imagine that a character is walking along the street and A motorcycle roared by. How do we know for sure that that's the character's observation and not the storyteller? We'd better say: Joe noticed that a motorcycle roared by. But how do we know how Joe noticed? We'd better say: Joe saw and heard a motorcycle roar by. But how exactly did Joe see it? What exactly do we mean by "roar"? How do we know where the motorcycle was? We'd better clarify some more: Joe turned his head. To his left, he saw a motorcycle moving by, in the street. It made a noise that he was accustomed to motorcycles making, one that he had often thought of as a roar. Weren't we much better off with the original? Exactly. So why would you say that that thought was the storyteller's? You stated "the thoughts, are all that of the story teller, not the character himself."
As I understand it, the argument was, how can we know if a thought is the character's and not the narrator's? (Edited to slightly rephrase here.) I would say that this is similar to an argument put as: How can we know that a sound or a sight or a sensation is the character's experience and not the narrator's? Logically, if we attribute each and every thought without trusting the reader to figure out that it's the character's thought, we should attribute each and every sensory experience without trusting the reader to figure out that it's the character's sensory experience. But we don't do that. We don't say: With the nerves in her fingers, Jane felt the softness of the cat's fur. And we don't have a convention that all character sensory experiences should be identified as such with italics: Jane felt the softness of the cat's fur. Joe heard music from the back room. John saw flames coming from the pan on the stove. After all, without those italics how can we know that John recognizes the music as music? Perhaps John has never heard music, and he just hears a variety of vaguely rhythmic sounds. We use the italics to communicate that John, not the narrator, is identifying the sound as music. We need that because the reader isn't bright enough to extrapolate beyond what he's explicitly told, right? Right? Wrong. The argument sounds silly, doesn't it? That's how I feel about the need to use italics to communicate that John, not the narrator, is having a thought. What if people did start using italics as above? After all, it would make things clearer, right? Do you find them clear? Useful? Graceful? Valuable? Or do you find them cluttered and distracting and annoying? How would you feel if they were so often used that people started to get confused without them?
Not true. That was a literal thought. No recipient other than the person having the thought. No quote marks. If I were communicating telepathically with someone, I would at some point have established "esped" (or something similar) as a verb, the telepathic equivalent of "said". Then I could have: That's dialogue. It goes in quotes like any other kind of dialogue. It really isn't all that complicated. No need to reinvent the wheel to deal with it.
That's right, because the wheel has been invented, is used regularly all the time, and is italics. Edited to add: We've got a whole lot of authors over here @Cogito, lets see some counter examples.
Bzzt. But thank you for playing. Edited to add: Read the thread, Jack. And all the others on the subject. I've covered this. If you insist on arguing, find a mirror.
@ChickenFreak: But your analogy isn't about knowing something is in one's thoughts, "felt". Your analogy is adding the mechanism by which the brain feels. My first person narrator occasionally has a present tense thought the same way she narrates the present tense dialogue in the story. Using italics for those direct thoughts is simple, clean, and I see no reason to jump through ritual sentence restructuring hoops to avoid bothering readers who are hung up about a convention that they imprinted on years ago.
I'm not following you here. Edited to add: Ah, I may follow you for my first example. But not the other three: Jane felt the softness of the cat's fur. Joe heard music from the back room. John saw flames coming from the pan on the stove.
Sorry, didn't respond to this. The difference between us is that I see it as neither simple or clean. I see it as being rather like an explanatory Post-It attached to the prose--cluttered, ungraceful, and with an unfinished feel. Edited to add: Also, where are the hoops? Imagine a sentence written with thought-italics: Jane extended her feet to admire her new red shoes. Beautiful. Maybe I should get another pair in pink. To remove the thought-italics: Jane extended her feet to admire her new red shoes. Beautiful. Maybe she should get another pair in pink. One word changed. I find the change in tense, and the fact that the story no longer works when read aloud, to be a much larger cost that has to be paid for the italics.
You have based everything you've said here on nothing more then your stated expertise, and a reference to a manual of style that doesn't say what you say it does. You're authority on the subject is deeply in doubt, and dressing it up in invective does not bestow the gravitas you think it does.
And yet no one in my critique group has ever seen it that way. Occasionally there is a comment that the narration and the direct thoughts are not well delineated, but italics has not been the issue then. Getting back to the imprinting analogy, are there other conventions you don't have an issue with when an author veers from the standard path? @Cogito advises often that one should know the rules first, but breaking them is not an absolute faux pas. And yet here you both (and a few others) are, this bothered about a changed convention that is widely accepted across the writersphere. Have you ever contemplated why you choose this one battle line? Edited: Sorry, I was working on two answers at once.
What's your definition of "widely accepted"? I see it as being used in some books of the past decade, most commonly in YA, occasionally in adult books in certain genres.
And you don't call that widely accepted? Any search of the Net turns up multiple sites that accept and even advocate the convention. I posted links to a well known style guide recommending it. Lots of well read authors and published books use the convention. How is this not "widely accepted" in your mind?
...right, but we're still waiting for examples where it doesn't happen, and haven't seen them yet. When you say "some" books, do you mean the huge effect that McCaffery had on the sci-fi community? Or the arguably more important influence of Terry Pratchett? Oh, I forgot the Animoph books do that too. Still waiting for you to back this all up.
Jack, you're talking about telepathy. In my conversation with Ginger, I'm talking about internal thoughts. If you're saying that there are no examples of novels that use internal thoughts that don't use italics, I can provide dozens of examples (I can just go to my shelves and start typing titles), but I assume that's not what you're saying.
I don't see "some" books as widely accepted, no. To me, "widely accepted" means that a substantial majority are fine with it.
