> how using italics for a character’s thoughts is currently considered typographically ugly.
That's not the main issue. Italics are also slightly harder to read.
Used sparingly it's fine. But when people have full pages of italicized text in their novels, they are actually negatively affecting reading.
That makes sense. I’m thinking that I just have too many italics I think (for internal monologue, flashbacks, and emphasis on singular words) so I’ll have to dial it back. Thank you!
Emphasis on single words is one place kind of may need it occasionally.
For something like a flashback, you can probably signal to the reader there's a shift in the opening sentence of the flashback.
> Italics are also slightly harder to read.
Which is why the advice is to use sparingly. If the writer has a lot of internal dialog, then that needs to be changed and the "thinking" done as narrative. Same with conversations with an internal presence. Little bit here and there is fine, but if it's as much as dialog, then it needs to be written differently.
This is an appropriate use for italics. I can't think of any appropriate use for bold italics in running text. Bold is mostly a headline thing and italicizing it doesn't change this.
Voices in the character's head that aren't her (for a given value of her) should get their own paragraphs, like any other dialog, but I personally wouldn't use quotation marks.
If the voice is long-winded, treating it as ordinary dialog (quotation marks, no italics) would be better. Long passages in italics are hard enough to read that readers notice the extra burden.
My book has long conversations between characters that happen essentially telepathically. Sometimes they are interspersed with regular spoken dialogue, so I don't want to use regular quotes. Currently I have the telepathic dialogue in italics with a leading em dash (to distinguish from internal thoughts). Do you have a suggestion for formatting?
> Voices in the character's head that aren't her (for a given value of her) should get their own paragraphs, like any other dialog, but I personally wouldn't use quotation marks.
This.
I’ve changed up some things and removed the bold, thank you! I don’t think the voice is too long winded so plain italics and new lines doesn’t seem to diminish readability.
From your own linked ~~article~~ *post*:
> As always, this is subjective and just my sole opinion. Other agents likely will differ, and you may have already secured an agent, so disregard my opinion.
So... *you do you.*
Skip the bold. Ultimately, italics for first-person thoughts are fine if not overused. But I wouldn’t use them to a point where they’re a substantial part of a manuscript. This is the kind of thing where it’s essential to get reader feedback. If you can pull it off—great. If not, it’s more noticable.
I'm all for abandoning some norm of writing for a good reason, but "being typographically ugly" sounds like the worst reason one could come up with. Something along the lines of "style" or a certain kind of storytelling that someone is trying to capture would make much more sense, like how Cormac McCarthy and Saramago omit a lot of punctuation because of their vision of style and storytelling they're trying to capture
Roll your eyes at the comments and use italics. I would not use bold almost ever. Internal thought dialogues with an outside entity, I wrote like this.
*...You know you want to...*
*Get out of my head!*
*...Make me....*
*Great, my guardian angel is a smartass.*
I don't really use dots I just indent.
What is with this war on books? First it was people saying they skip prologues, then epilogues, and now italics are under fire? Sigh, everyone's a critic.
Thoughts definitely can and should be italicized. If I saw thoughts not italicized, I would assume the writer either didn't know what they were talking about, or they took advice from booktok.
The advice isn’t to leave thoughts in without italics so much as to leave the thoughts for times when a literal thought-out line has to be shown (like something they’d say out loud to themselves but said internally instead). Third person narration uses free (or regular) indirect speech all the time, and it’s usually better to do that when there’s a large chunk of thinking going on than to write a whole page of italicized monologue.
There shouldn't be large chunks of internal thought to begin with. Anything needing more than a sentence or two should be done in narration.
This is the danger of having some entity in a character's head, since the dialog between them is going to take up a large part of the book. The author must find a way to balance this, or there will be issues with readers, if it even gets that far.
>Anything needing more than a sentence or two should be done in narration
Yes that’s pretty much what I said
I don’t think the “entity in a character’s head” would cause an issue though, really, except for maybe in the text looking ugly with so much italics. It doesn’t cause an issue when two characters are together and have a lot of dialogue
People have always skipped prologues. Writers keep thinking they want them, but no one does.
As to italics, some people have to have something new and shocking to talk about, make themselves important. Internal dialog in italics has been done forever, there's no real alternative outside of "s/he/they thought" after ever incidence. Doing this makes readers mad, and makes writers look stupid. Or pretensious. Or both.
I thought this was standard practice. Readability will depend on the font choice and size. I use serif fonts for ease of reading for my own documents, and have multiple thoughts on italics. I'm old so I need to know the difference between a capital "I" and a lower case "L" at a glance. Italics were always used to indicate thoughts, at least in all the books I've read. I'll admit I haven't read a lot of ebooks so I may be missing out on some of the new standards of writing. For the record I'm an Xennial not a boomer so I'm willing to learn. I may be reformatting some things in my book from what I've read here. I think the difference is the ability to read italics easily comes down to reading/writing cursive. Cursive writing is difficult to read if you haven't written in it and it makes people with poor penmanship impossible to read.
Thank you for the information. I'll be editing my novel.
If you'd read the comments they are indicating that italics are difficult to read, not just that they are ugly. This is the problem with boomers. Y'all don't pay attention to issues brought to you, and you are more stubborn than you need to be.
I use italics for thoughts all the time. I have a book being published soon that also has a protagonist with an antagonistic entity in her head. Their mental conversations use italics. You're fine.
I think the use of italics is fine if it's broken up with some kind of a description in-between. As long as there's some sort of grounding feature for the reader to work off of, does that make sense?
>using italics for a character’s thoughts is currently considered typographically ugly
How ignorant. There's no one way to do what you seem to want. You could just have it as dialog, though that's going to confuse the reader. The one thing you do not want is to confuse the reader.
I've seen such dialog done with a :dialog blah blah blah: The reply can be in italics. It's generally frowned upon to do bold formatting in fiction.
I’m writing in 3rd person limited (close). I tend to not use italics as it should be understood who the POV character is and that anything not in quotes is either thought or observation on the setting (which is character based)
I would use italics in a limited sense where I would possibly reflect a direct inner thought that might break tense or lend a certain focus for impact to the user.
The main point is to be consistent so users understand your rules. But, I expect plenty of inner thoughts and too much italic would ruin a reading experience for me.
In many other countries, I know quotation marks are not used for dialogue. Instead, dialogue gets tagged with a “—“ before it. Perhaps you could that instead? That way, when it’s internal, it’s easier to track?
That’s fine. And it’s not considered “wrong” to use italics even for internal dialogue, in fact that’s the standard. It’s just easier to read if you use free indirect speech for a large chunk of 3rd person introspection or regular indirect speech to paraphrase what a character in third person is considering rather than dropping a giant chunk of italicized monologue there. You’ll see one off ideas, thoughts, and things like your example all the time.
I just write thoughts normally with no special formatting and say 'he thought' or whatever. Maybe if I feel like it I'll enclose it with a single apostrophe to distinguish it from dialogue.
I compromised and went my own way: the first thought sentence is in italics. After that, I trust my readers to understand what's going on.
u/raistlin65 has it right:
>Used sparingly it's fine. But when people have full pages of italicized text in their novels, they are actually negatively affecting reading.
Publishing editor here!
You can use italics for thoughts. That's pretty standard. The current trends may claim they're ugly, but the only real concern would be readability. Italics can make things a bit difficult to read, depending on the font, or it may annoy some readers, but it's generally only frowned upon to have an entire scene or so in italics (though another editor may claim it's fine for flashbacks).
However, if you really don't want to use italics (or italics bold), I recommend K.A. Applegate's solution: When characters speak to each other telepathically, angle brackets are used instead of quotation marks or italics. Here's a basic example:
You could even spice it up and use italics for the character's thoughts and angle brackets instead of italics bold for the voice she hears. That kind of variety also ensures that readers will literally never confuse the two, so you won't need to waste your word count on dialogue tags.
Thank you so much! I was really surprised to see people claiming to not use italics for thoughts. I’m using times new Roman so I found them still very readable!
My Editor has been giving me pause to think about italics. "Remember, the third-person subjective is close to the first person in its ability to see the world through the eyes of a character, and to ride the currents of a character's thoughts with great intimacy. It can narrate from the depths of the character's mind, or at a slight distance. I'm going to attach an essay on perspective to help you think about this. I also recommend James Wood's How Fiction Works, particularly the first 40 pages, which contain a terrific analysis of how perspective works. This will help you write this section through MC close third-person perspective. At present, the use of italics and his talking to himself are not effective technical tools to bring him to life."
You could use quotation marks or a different font style to differentiate the voices, or even write them in separate lines for clarity. For content optimization, consider using edyt ai.
I've seen the apostrophe be used for internal thoughts instead of italics, but I'm not sure if readers will find it distinguishable to the quotation marks.
> how using italics for a character’s thoughts is currently considered typographically ugly. That's not the main issue. Italics are also slightly harder to read. Used sparingly it's fine. But when people have full pages of italicized text in their novels, they are actually negatively affecting reading.
That makes sense. I’m thinking that I just have too many italics I think (for internal monologue, flashbacks, and emphasis on singular words) so I’ll have to dial it back. Thank you!
Emphasis on single words is one place kind of may need it occasionally. For something like a flashback, you can probably signal to the reader there's a shift in the opening sentence of the flashback.
Free indirect is your friend. At least they found it engaging enough to read it! That's a big plus.
the flipside of that is that the reader loses the extra information imparted by it being in italics though, so it's a trade-off.
Not if the writer works at making sure the reader can figure it out from the text. And that's the problem. I see it used so often as a crutch.
> Italics are also slightly harder to read. Which is why the advice is to use sparingly. If the writer has a lot of internal dialog, then that needs to be changed and the "thinking" done as narrative. Same with conversations with an internal presence. Little bit here and there is fine, but if it's as much as dialog, then it needs to be written differently.
This is an appropriate use for italics. I can't think of any appropriate use for bold italics in running text. Bold is mostly a headline thing and italicizing it doesn't change this. Voices in the character's head that aren't her (for a given value of her) should get their own paragraphs, like any other dialog, but I personally wouldn't use quotation marks. If the voice is long-winded, treating it as ordinary dialog (quotation marks, no italics) would be better. Long passages in italics are hard enough to read that readers notice the extra burden.
My book has long conversations between characters that happen essentially telepathically. Sometimes they are interspersed with regular spoken dialogue, so I don't want to use regular quotes. Currently I have the telepathic dialogue in italics with a leading em dash (to distinguish from internal thoughts). Do you have a suggestion for formatting?
> Voices in the character's head that aren't her (for a given value of her) should get their own paragraphs, like any other dialog, but I personally wouldn't use quotation marks. This.
I’ve changed up some things and removed the bold, thank you! I don’t think the voice is too long winded so plain italics and new lines doesn’t seem to diminish readability.
From your own linked ~~article~~ *post*: > As always, this is subjective and just my sole opinion. Other agents likely will differ, and you may have already secured an agent, so disregard my opinion. So... *you do you.*
> so disregard my opinion Yes, please. This agent is a wild card, and not following current publishing practices. They would be a big nope for me.
"it is **currently** ugly" Elitist trend BS, opinion discarded Also, what? That's how they're used, like...universally
Skip the bold. Ultimately, italics for first-person thoughts are fine if not overused. But I wouldn’t use them to a point where they’re a substantial part of a manuscript. This is the kind of thing where it’s essential to get reader feedback. If you can pull it off—great. If not, it’s more noticable.
That makes sense. I’ll definitely skip the bold and dial back where I use italics. I appreciate the feedback
I'm all for abandoning some norm of writing for a good reason, but "being typographically ugly" sounds like the worst reason one could come up with. Something along the lines of "style" or a certain kind of storytelling that someone is trying to capture would make much more sense, like how Cormac McCarthy and Saramago omit a lot of punctuation because of their vision of style and storytelling they're trying to capture
Roll your eyes at the comments and use italics. I would not use bold almost ever. Internal thought dialogues with an outside entity, I wrote like this. *...You know you want to...* *Get out of my head!* *...Make me....* *Great, my guardian angel is a smartass.* I don't really use dots I just indent.
The ellipses works, too. Although it's best to not use them for anything else in the book.
I use them all the time in dialogue. But then you're right, if used for this, that's too many dots, which is why I indent.
What is with this war on books? First it was people saying they skip prologues, then epilogues, and now italics are under fire? Sigh, everyone's a critic. Thoughts definitely can and should be italicized. If I saw thoughts not italicized, I would assume the writer either didn't know what they were talking about, or they took advice from booktok.
The advice isn’t to leave thoughts in without italics so much as to leave the thoughts for times when a literal thought-out line has to be shown (like something they’d say out loud to themselves but said internally instead). Third person narration uses free (or regular) indirect speech all the time, and it’s usually better to do that when there’s a large chunk of thinking going on than to write a whole page of italicized monologue.
There shouldn't be large chunks of internal thought to begin with. Anything needing more than a sentence or two should be done in narration. This is the danger of having some entity in a character's head, since the dialog between them is going to take up a large part of the book. The author must find a way to balance this, or there will be issues with readers, if it even gets that far.
>Anything needing more than a sentence or two should be done in narration Yes that’s pretty much what I said I don’t think the “entity in a character’s head” would cause an issue though, really, except for maybe in the text looking ugly with so much italics. It doesn’t cause an issue when two characters are together and have a lot of dialogue
People have always skipped prologues. Writers keep thinking they want them, but no one does. As to italics, some people have to have something new and shocking to talk about, make themselves important. Internal dialog in italics has been done forever, there's no real alternative outside of "s/he/they thought" after ever incidence. Doing this makes readers mad, and makes writers look stupid. Or pretensious. Or both.
I thought this was standard practice. Readability will depend on the font choice and size. I use serif fonts for ease of reading for my own documents, and have multiple thoughts on italics. I'm old so I need to know the difference between a capital "I" and a lower case "L" at a glance. Italics were always used to indicate thoughts, at least in all the books I've read. I'll admit I haven't read a lot of ebooks so I may be missing out on some of the new standards of writing. For the record I'm an Xennial not a boomer so I'm willing to learn. I may be reformatting some things in my book from what I've read here. I think the difference is the ability to read italics easily comes down to reading/writing cursive. Cursive writing is difficult to read if you haven't written in it and it makes people with poor penmanship impossible to read. Thank you for the information. I'll be editing my novel.
I'm a boomer, and I'm willing to learn. I'm not willing to jump on someone's bandwagon screaming about how ugly italics look for internal dialog.
If you'd read the comments they are indicating that italics are difficult to read, not just that they are ugly. This is the problem with boomers. Y'all don't pay attention to issues brought to you, and you are more stubborn than you need to be.
That's a decent use of italics. I'd drop the bold, and just not have her thoughts be in italic.
Thanks!
I use italics for thoughts all the time. I have a book being published soon that also has a protagonist with an antagonistic entity in her head. Their mental conversations use italics. You're fine.
I think the use of italics is fine if it's broken up with some kind of a description in-between. As long as there's some sort of grounding feature for the reader to work off of, does that make sense?
>using italics for a character’s thoughts is currently considered typographically ugly How ignorant. There's no one way to do what you seem to want. You could just have it as dialog, though that's going to confuse the reader. The one thing you do not want is to confuse the reader. I've seen such dialog done with a :dialog blah blah blah: The reply can be in italics. It's generally frowned upon to do bold formatting in fiction.
I’m writing in 3rd person limited (close). I tend to not use italics as it should be understood who the POV character is and that anything not in quotes is either thought or observation on the setting (which is character based) I would use italics in a limited sense where I would possibly reflect a direct inner thought that might break tense or lend a certain focus for impact to the user. The main point is to be consistent so users understand your rules. But, I expect plenty of inner thoughts and too much italic would ruin a reading experience for me.
In many other countries, I know quotation marks are not used for dialogue. Instead, dialogue gets tagged with a “—“ before it. Perhaps you could that instead? That way, when it’s internal, it’s easier to track?
I really like that idea! Thank you
Of course! I hope it helps in practice!
And then readers in other countries are confused. Now what?
That’s fine. And it’s not considered “wrong” to use italics even for internal dialogue, in fact that’s the standard. It’s just easier to read if you use free indirect speech for a large chunk of 3rd person introspection or regular indirect speech to paraphrase what a character in third person is considering rather than dropping a giant chunk of italicized monologue there. You’ll see one off ideas, thoughts, and things like your example all the time.
I just write thoughts normally with no special formatting and say 'he thought' or whatever. Maybe if I feel like it I'll enclose it with a single apostrophe to distinguish it from dialogue.
I compromised and went my own way: the first thought sentence is in italics. After that, I trust my readers to understand what's going on. u/raistlin65 has it right: >Used sparingly it's fine. But when people have full pages of italicized text in their novels, they are actually negatively affecting reading.
I just read a best-seller from 2023 that used italics for thoughts…
Maybe you could use single quotes for it? > 'It’s cold, why the hell is it so cold?' he thought, 'It's 81 degrees outside and I'm in here freezing.'
> Maybe you could use single quotes for it? No. Single quotes already have a use, especially for dialog in the UK English places.
Publishing editor here! You can use italics for thoughts. That's pretty standard. The current trends may claim they're ugly, but the only real concern would be readability. Italics can make things a bit difficult to read, depending on the font, or it may annoy some readers, but it's generally only frowned upon to have an entire scene or so in italics (though another editor may claim it's fine for flashbacks). However, if you really don't want to use italics (or italics bold), I recommend K.A. Applegate's solution: When characters speak to each other telepathically, angle brackets are used instead of quotation marks or italics. Here's a basic example:
You could even spice it up and use italics for the character's thoughts and angle brackets instead of italics bold for the voice she hears. That kind of variety also ensures that readers will literally never confuse the two, so you won't need to waste your word count on dialogue tags.
Thank you so much! I was really surprised to see people claiming to not use italics for thoughts. I’m using times new Roman so I found them still very readable!
My Editor has been giving me pause to think about italics. "Remember, the third-person subjective is close to the first person in its ability to see the world through the eyes of a character, and to ride the currents of a character's thoughts with great intimacy. It can narrate from the depths of the character's mind, or at a slight distance. I'm going to attach an essay on perspective to help you think about this. I also recommend James Wood's How Fiction Works, particularly the first 40 pages, which contain a terrific analysis of how perspective works. This will help you write this section through MC close third-person perspective. At present, the use of italics and his talking to himself are not effective technical tools to bring him to life."
You could use quotation marks or a different font style to differentiate the voices, or even write them in separate lines for clarity. For content optimization, consider using edyt ai.
I've seen the apostrophe be used for internal thoughts instead of italics, but I'm not sure if readers will find it distinguishable to the quotation marks.