In today’s Journal
* Topic: How to Indicate Unspoken Thoughts
* Of Interest
Topic: How to Indicate Unspoken Thoughts
There are generally two major ways to indicate the direct, unspoken thoughts (or internal monologue) of the POV character. Either is acceptable, depending on whom you ask and your personal preference as a writer:
1. Put the POV character’s direct unspoken thoughts in italics to visually differentiate them from narration. (I used to recommend doing this.)
2. Leave the direct thoughts in regular font like the narration. (I now recommend doing this.)
Consistency Is Key — whichever way you choose to indicate unspoken thought. Do it the same way, italics or no italics, throughout the story or novel or series.
In her post in today’s Kill Zone blog, Terry Odell explains her take on this topic. But she commits a major error in examples from her own work.
So rather than just linking to her post in “Of Interest,” I thought I would explain where her reasoning goes south. Because as it stands, she’s inadvertently passing along bad information.
I agree with her first point:
“1. Don’t use speaker attributions/tags to tell the reader someone’s thinking. | If you’ve put the reader in the [POV] character’s head, it should be obvious [the character is] thinking. Per Browne & King, removing ‘he thought’ makes [the character’s thoughts] ‘unobtrusive to the point of transparency.'”
As I wrote above, I agree. I recommend never using dialogue tags (s/he or Character Name thought) to mark unspoken dialogue. It shouldn’t be necessary. If the reader is reading unspoken thoughts, those thoughts have to be from the POV character, so no need to identify him or her.
On her second point, titled “Beware Italics,” she misses the point. This excerpt from her post shows the first three paragraphs of three versions of an example from her book Falcon’s Prey. From Terry Odell (see this post on the Journal website for the text indentations):
Fish is the POV character in this scene. First, a ‘clunky’ version.
“You two are free to get back to whatever you were doing,” Dalton said. “We’ll call if anything changes. Let’s move our seventeen hundred sitrep to eighteen hundred.”
Get back to what they were doing? What did that mean? Dalton couldn’t think Fish was getting things on with Lexi, could he?
He told himself to chill. He was reading his own thoughts into a casual remark.
Now, the streamlined version, the way it appears in the book. Thoughts should be obvious to the reader.
“You two are free to get back to whatever you were doing,” Dalton said. “We’ll call if anything changes. Let’s move our seventeen hundred sitrep to eighteen hundred.”
Get back to what they were doing? What did that mean? Dalton couldn’t think Fish was getting things on with Lexi, could he?
Chill. You’re reading your own thoughts into a casual remark.
What would the second, cleaner passage look like if all the thoughts were in italics?
“You two are free to get back to whatever you were doing,” Dalton said. “We’ll call if anything changes. Let’s move our seventeen hundred sitrep to eighteen hundred.”
Get back to what they were doing? What did that mean? Dalton couldn’t think Fish was getting things on with Lexi, could he?
Chill. You’re reading your own thoughts into a casual remark.
My point? Whether you use italics to indicate unspoken thought or leave it in regular font face, direct unspoken thought is always written in first person and present tense. Humans don’t think in third person.
Indirect Thoughts vs. Direct Thoughts
Ms. Odell was correct to leave
Get back to what they were doing? What did that mean? Dalton couldn’t think Fish was getting things on with Lexi, could he?’
in regular font face because it’s indirect thought, meaning it’s presented to the reader via the narrator. It is not the POV character’s direct unspoken thought.
If it were direct unspoken thought, it would read as follows and be italicized (since italics is Ms. Odell’s preference for indicating unspoken thought):
Get back to what we were doing? What does that mean? He can’t think I’m getting things on with Lexi, can he?
I mentioned earlier that I used to recommend italics to indicate unspoken thought. It really is a judgement call, but again, be consistent within a given work (e.g., don’t use italics in one chapter and no italics in the next).
A Few Notes
1. Never try to indicate a non-POV character’s unspoken thoughts. Unless the POV character is omnipotent, s/he can’t “hear” or “see” what’s in the mind of another character.
2. Anything the POV character is reading silently is also unspoken thought. So the note by the coffee pot from a loved one, the ransom note from the kidnappers, and the startling newspaper headline are all unspoken thought if the POV character reads them silently.
3. As Ms. Odell mentions in her post, lengthy passages of italics will tire the reader’s eyes. This is the main reason I stopped using italics to indicate unspoken thought in my own work. But there are ways around italicizing “too much,” including alternating indirect thoughts presented by the narrator with the POV character’s direct thoughts as Odell inadvertently did in her example above.
4. To reiterate the biggie — All direct unspoken thoughts — so any thoughts that come directly from the POV character to the reader without going through the narrator — is written in first person present tense. Because human beings typically don’t think in third person past tense.
Hope this helps. For more thoughts on italics, see the second edition of my Punctuation for Writers. Of course, you can also put “italics” in the Search box on the Journal website or in the Search box at HarveyStanbrough.com.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
See “‘Disembodied’ Does Not Mean That” at https://www.thepassivevoice.com/disembodied-does-not-mean-that/. In case anyone didn’t know.
See “How to Upload Your Book to KDP, Easily and Correctly [Text Instruction + Screenshots]” at https://www.thepassivevoice.com/how-to-upload-your-book-to-kdp-easily-and-correctly-text-instruction-screenshots/. Again, in case you didn’t know.
Disclaimer: In this blog, I provide advice on writing fiction. I advocate a technique called Writing Into the Dark. To be crystal clear, WITD is not “the only way” to write, nor will I ever say it is. However, as I am the only writer who advocates WITD both publicly and regularly, I will continue to do so, among myriad other topics.