Some Thoughts On Thoughts

One of the greatest advantages that print mediums like novels or comics have over many other story-telling methods is an unparalleled ability to get into the heads of characters, to hear their thoughts and understand their reasoning and their view of the world. In more visually oriented mediums such as film or video games, the most common method of sharing the thoughts of a character is by means of narration or voiceover, both of which can slow the pace of the story and detract from the action. In comics, on the other hand, thought bubbles can be given equal prominence with dialog bubbles; used sparingly, they can convey thoughts without slowing the story.

Moonstone from Thunderbolts gives us a an example of good use of the thought bubble.

But it is in prose that thoughts can really shine. In prose, the audience can spend the entire story in the mind of the perspective characters. Characters’ thoughts and emotions are readily available, often acting as a filter through which the entire story and its world are related.

We’ve already discussed how a perspective character’s personality, education, and background should influence how the story is told. But we haven’t really discussed thoughts—how should you format a phrase that the character thinks, but never voices?

Option 1: No Formatting

Your first option is not to format a thought any differently than anything else—simply set it apart with some variation of the phrase, “she thought.”

     “I’ve sketched out the runes properly, but I still can’t get the spell to work,” Santtu said. “Your spellbook must not have the spell right.”

     No, you’re just an inept and arrogant idiot, Pinja thought. Out loud, she said, “Well, let’s try it together, then.”

In this example, the thoughts are simply conveyed in the same manner as dialog, but without any quotation marks.

Option 2: Italics

Italics are my preferred method of formatting thoughts, as they help the lines stand out a bit more from the surrounding prose and dialog. I particularly recommend italics if you’re writing a very thought-heavy story. When you have long passages of internal monologs, it can be easy to lose track of where the thoughts begin and end if they’re not set apart by italics. Italics also make it easier to have lines of thought without tags:

     “I’ve sketched out the runes properly, but I still can’t get the spell to work,” Santtu said. “Your spellbook must not have the spell right.”

     No, you’re just an inept and arrogant idiot, Pinja thought. Out loud, she said, “Well, let’s try it together, then.”

     “I already told you, it doesn’t work.”

     Neither do you. Pinja knelt and began sketching out the runes.

Not An Option: Quotation Marks

I’ve seen quite a few people format lines of thought with quotation marks, just as they would dialog:

     “I’ve sketched out the runes properly, but I still can’t get the spell to work,” Santtu said. “Your spellbook must not have the spell right.”

     “No, you’re just an inept and arrogant idiot,” Pinja thought. Out loud, she said, “Well, let’s try it together, then.”

I strongly recommend against this practice, as it is needlessly confusing. You don’t want your character’s thoughts to get confused with what they’re actually saying to other characters.

Many people use both quotation marks and italics for thoughts:

     “I’ve sketched out the runes properly, but I still can’t get the spell to work,” Santtu said. “Your spellbook must not have the spell right.”

     “No, you’re just an inept and arrogant idiot,” Pinja thought. Out loud, she said, “Well, let’s try it together, then.”

This is less confusing, but it is also redundant. The italics already serve to set the line of thought apart from the rest of the prose, and they do a better job of it than the quotation marks, so don’t worry about using both.

The one exception to this that I’ve seen is if you have two or more characters who are capable of communicating telepathically. In this case, quotation marks can be useful to help set apart telepathic thoughts from normal ones.