I think once the use of italics or quotation marks are used, it stands out by itself. That is my opinion.
But that's not necessarily what we're talking about. It's not as if an agent is sitting around his office, hoping against hope that someone will send him a manuscript worth publishing. I've always assumed that the agent is sitting in his office, trying to decide which of the three dozen books worth publishing he's going to take on. If the genre for that book doesn't usually use italics for thought, and the book has italics for thought and will require a rewrite sweep to eliminate them, well, why not move on to one of the other couple dozen that are just as good and don't involve that extra work? I think that this is part of what I call, in my own mind, the "genius model" of publishing submittal. Many authors seem to assume that their book will be the work of genius, clearly better than every single member of the competition, and that therefore an agent who turns it down for some relatively small reason will be choosing to pettishly ignore the obvious superior value of the work. What if it's not superior? What if it's just one of a whole bunch of good books? What if the agent is staring at all those manuscripts, desperately trying to find a reason to eliminate some--most--of them? I assume that I'm not a genius, and that I will need to play the odds every possible way I can.
How do you know, @ChickenFreak, that for every agent/publisher that dislikes italics for thoughts, there are not two agents that prefer thoughts are identified by italics?
I agree that the other things are perhaps more important, but like CF said, an agent/editor has to deal with many, many manuscripts. If using italics is a big enough issue, the agent/editor might just pick up another manuscript that involves less work. Also, if thoughts make up half your manuscript, you run into a problem. No one wants to read a manuscript where half the words are in italics. So what should the writer do if he's writing, say, a stream of consciousness piece? But I think I've mentioned this before in the italics for thoughts thread, so I'll say no more.
While not wishing to speak ill of him (I'm sure he knows for more about writing than I do), there really is something rather funny about someone who is giving typographic advice while using a bold typeface for body text to do so. I will assume it might just be down to inexperience with web design, but it just seems like a baffling mistake for a writer to make. All I can say is at least the text was black on white background. If you want something that truly assaults the eyes (and rationality) then check out this website. http://www.truthism.com/
@peachalulu - Are you trying to make that voice sound more robotic? If so, what about something like: Mr. Willoughby chuckles, rubs his forehead, and says, “Oh, like hell.” Max slaps Mr. Willoughby across the face. warning—warning—violence— I don't know if that sort of idea would work, but it's fun to think about it. Mind you, I rather like your exciteable robot!
@ChickenFreak - like I said, a literary agent actually told me to please put in italics for thoughts when she was giving me advice on my novel. Granted that's one agent. However, to assume that you're being smart about it by not including italics - on the assumption that most agents dislike it (which simply isn't true considering the sheer amount of traditionally published books that do use italics for thoughts) - seems... flawed. And it wouldn't require a rewrite to eliminate italics - you don't rewrite things for that. You just undo the italics. And that would be the author's job, not the agent's job, or so I'd assume. It's no extra work for the agent. Simply put: use italics where appropriate. If you choose to use italics for thought, then keep it consistent and avoid too many such occasions so you don't end up overusing it. If avoiding the injection of too many thoughts is impossible, the writer should probably rethink just which POV they should be writing in and thus the issue wouldn't even be about the italics anyway. If, however, you know that your writing style and/or genre generally makes italics less suitable, or you don't often see italics used in the genre you read, then by all means don't use them. I simply don't see it as either a good or bad thing, like people imply often on this forum. It's no reflection on your writing or skill. And no one's gonna stop reading your book because you used italics. (overuse is a different matter) If an agent doesn't love your book, she isn't gonna take your book on - and you don't want an agent who's only lukewarm about your book anyway. If she loves your book, a few pesky italics isn't gonna stop her. @thirdwind - lol of course you have a problem if half the page is in italics. That's overuse and overusing anything at all is a bad thing. Why would the occasional thought put in italics be somehow "more work"? Unless you chose a stupid font where italicised text is a nightmare to read lol - but then I think the glaring annoyance would be the font choice, not the italics lol. For a piece that's a stream of consciousness, I'm gonna assume it's written in first person in the first place, so you wouldn't use italics in that case at all.
But if your text is written so that the italics are needed, the italics are needed. While I dislike italics for thought, they do make it clear that a thought is a thought. Therefore, an author who uses italics for thought won't necessarily use the other bag of tricks that make it clear that a thought is a thought. They won't even necessarily possess that bag of tricks. They might need to be taught. If you're saying, always make it clear that thoughts are thoughts, so that the italics are absolutely always redundant, sure. If you do that, and have a "thought" style so that you can turn them on or off in a moment, that makes you prepared for all eventualities. But that's not my impression of the "use italics for thought" philosophy.
Yeah, like @Mckk , I question the idea that "most" agents and/or editors have something against italics per se. I've seen the sentiment expressed on writing forums, but I've never seen it backed up by much and I suspect at most people may have anecdotal evidence from one or more agents.
Well let's go here too. On what evidence are we to conclude not using italics for thoughts is better writing? I think that's because your impression on using italics for thoughts is flawed. What if a writer can do either but chooses the italics convention? You're operating on the underlying premise that using italicized thoughts is an inferior writing convention. We've seen no evidence it is inferior or shows a lack of skill. Not using italics means one has to then add more tags or blur narration with with direct thoughts. You suggest writers should go out of their way to avoid italicized thoughts, calling it better to do so. Like @Cogito, you make the unsupported assertion that your personal preference is "better writing". At least stop calling those of us who choose to use italicized thought less skilled writers than those who don't. You have every right to assert your personal preferences of disliking italicized thought. But you really have nothing left after the pages of discussion to call it less skilled writing. We all know how to use 'he thought' or 'she thinks' tags. It's not a difficult skill. There is no magical "bag of tricks" to work around the simple, clean option of italicizing thoughts. It's out of character for you to be condescending so maybe you need to hear, this is condescending: Giving you the benefit of the doubt that you didn't mean to be condescending, I think you might want to consider that the "better writing/writer" argument has been challenged. So unless you have evidence skill rather than choice has anything to do with using the convention, you might want to reconsider your premise. A person saying they think italicized thought is cleaner and more clear is not saying they don't know any other options any more than someone who doesn't choose the convention is saying they don't know how to write without thought tags.
No, I wasn't really going for a robotic voice - I don't want to draw too much attention to the robotic-ness of Not Pink as I'd have to cut back on some of his funny observations. ( One critiquer actually said I should cut them out because Not Pink shouldn't be that connected to everything. ) Mainly I was just trying to make sure the reader could understand everything clearly. I reread the critiques that sparked the issue and after going over them I see that the clarity issue was often their problem - a lot hadn't read part 1 and didn't understand that everything was in the robot's pov. They jumped into the story and were confused. Though I'm not sure how as I clearly stated Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 on the titles but that's happened to me many times before on that site ( critiquers reading a part of a story and thinking it's the whole story). Two that had read everything but still mentioned italics - one actually later on vetoed the suggestion, I think she went back and read part 1. The other critiquer said it was an open ended decision if I wanted to use italics I could. That helps a bit as I think the readers might not have mentioned anything at all if they had read the whole story or at least started at the beginning. Or maybe they would've mentioned it because they were used to reading books because of italics. Just to be safe though, I think I'm just going to go over everything and make sure the reader gets that it's Not Pink's pov in the context and leave the italics out. I don't have a major problem with them but I don't think they're right for this story.
One always has to consider some comments in any critique except maybe a beta read are going to suffer from "critiquers reading a part of a story and thinking [commenting as if] it's the whole story." It's the nature of critique. I just smile and say, thank you, when the critique wouldn't apply had they read more of the earlier story. I have this problem all the time in my critique group because we have members coming and going who haven't read the earlier chapters. In your story, people may not expect a sentient robot and those expectations affect the reader's perceptions. In my case they don't understand how I handled an educated group of hunter-gatherers. You should hear some of the critics' unrealistic expectations like, "I can't believe they wouldn't have any antibiotics." My characters are people whose great grandparents fled into the forest with nothing but knowledge. They were on a planet they knew nothing about. A small group of people needed first to establish food and shelter. Later finding antibiotics in two-three generations under those conditions is a bit of luck of the draw. It's not like they had chemistry sets and a large supply of lab rats, let alone knowing when it was safe to try something on humans. But readers who don't understand what resources went into the discovery of penicillin have mistaken beliefs about modern medicine. Had the critics read the earlier chapters I think they would understand. But coming in in the middle, not so much.
So when you oppose the idea of using italics, you're really opposing the writing method/style that blurs thoughts and narration, and you feel the thought should be rewritten in a clearer manner where italics shouldn't be necessary to distinguish it as a thought. Is that it? I can't say I can think of any occasion when a thought wouldn't be clear as a thought, or where the lack of clarity that it's a thought would necessarily be an issue either way... Do you have examples of what you're talking about? I'd be interested.
