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.

Italics In Your Story

Italics are slanted letters that can be used for a variety of purposes in writing. Back when manuscripts were written by hand or typewriter, it was common for authors and editors to manually underline words or phrases that should be italicized later on by the typesetters. This was a matter of expediency—typewriters didn’t have italic letters, and it’s generally difficult to tell apart italicized handwriting from normal handwriting. These days, however, computers have rendered underlines almost entirely redundant, since writers can simply italicize anything that needs to be right from the start.

Italics have several handy uses:

Emphasis: This is perhaps the most common use of italics in stories. When people converse, they use all sorts of variations in their tone, pitch, volume, and pronunciation to convey subtle nuances of meaning. Using italics to indicate that a speaker has emphasized a particular word is one method writers have of mimicking these otherwise un-type-able subtleties of speech. Italics can completely alter our understanding of a character’s frame of mind and intent without changing the story’s wordcount at all. Compare, for example, this line of dialog:

     “I can’t believe you did that!”

with this line of dialog:

     “I can’t believe you did that!”

It’s the exact same line, but it has two different meanings. Such is the usefulness of italics. Be warned, however, that too-frequent use of this trick will grow tiresome—try to only use it when the emphasis is really important, just to be safe.

Marking foreign language: If you use a foreign language in your story, it is common to italicize the word or phrase in order to highlight that it is, in fact, another language, rather than an unfamiliar or appropriated English word. This is applicable whether the foreign language is a real-life language or one you’ve created for your book. Once you’ve italicized a word once, you generally don’t need to italicize it again if you don’t want to. Examples:

     “One of my favorite words in Russian is pochemuchik. It literally translates as ‘why-ling,’ referring to a child that constantly asks the question, ‘Why?’ I have a pochemuchik of my own at home, and it’s nice to have a succinct word to describe him.”

     The sorceress raised her hands and shouted in the language of magic: “Durakin lo-tuma fei!”

Marking words referred to as words: A word is simultaneously two things—it is the item, person, creature, action, trait, or concept that the word represents, and it is also a simple word. For example:

     The castle loomed over the tiny town, always covering the villagers in its shadow.

Or:

     The word castle has six letters.

See what I mean? In the first example, we’re speaking of the concept that the word castle represents; in the second example, we’re talking about the word itself, the collection of letters before our eyes. In such cases, as you can see, it is common to italicize the word to distinguish it from the concept it represents.

Note: the same applies to letters referred to as letters (the letter A).

Titles: The titles of books, movies, television shows, radio programs, plays, operas, ballets, long poems, long musical pieces, podcasts, blogs, comics, comic strips, newspapers, magazines, journals, paintings, sculptures, photographs, and other works of art or prose should be italicized. Basically, if it is something that someone has created and given a title, that title should be italicized.

     In many issues of Batman, you can see that Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed as they were leaving a showing of The Mark of Zorro.

Yes, this is from Batman/Superman, not Batman. It's all I could find, sorry.

 There are only a few exceptions to this rule: the names of websites (other than blogs or online journals), generic titles of musical pieces (such as Nocturne in B Major), and titles of older works of art whose creators are unknown (such as the Venus de Milo) are not generally italicized.

Note also that the names of individual portions of a work of art, such as book chapters; episodes of television shows, radio programs, or podcasts; and articles in newspapers, magazines, journals, or blogs should be placed in quotation marks but not italicized. The titles of short works should be treated the same way, such as short stories, most poems, and songs.

The names of ships: Be it a boat, an aircraft, or a spaceship, its name should be italicized: USS Alabama, the Nautilus, Hindenburg, Serenity, the Millennium Falcon.

Sounds: This is an often-missed use of italics. Onomatopoeia—any words intended to represent sounds—should generally be italicized:

     His head hit the floor with an unsettling crack.

     A deafening whirr filled the room.

Character thoughts: While italics aren’t the only way to express direct character thoughts, they are one of the clearest:

     It doesn’t matter how clear I am, she always misunderstands, Katya thought. But she said nothing.

To indicate dreams or other unrealistic settings: Italics are an unusual but occasionally useful method of setting apart one section of the story from another, usually when the italicized section is a non-real sequence of events such as a dream or vision. Terry Brooks used this method in his novel Running With The Demon to highlight the prophetic dreams of one of his characters. The only problem with this method is that some people really have trouble reading entire sections in italics, so use this sparingly.

Dialog Tags: Periods vs. Commas

A dialog tag is the bit of prose that identifies who is speaking. Consider these two examples:

Example 1: "Eat some food," she said, pushing him toward the kitchen, "before you pass out."

Example 2: "Eat some food," she said, pushing him toward the kitchen. "I don't want you to pass out."

In example one, the dialog tag ends in a comma, while in example two, the tag ends with a period. Why?

Look at the dialog from example one without the tag: "Eat some food before you pass out." It is one complete sentence, and the tag was placed in the middle. When a dialog tag bisects a sentence, then it should end with a comma, to keep the sentence intact.

Example two, however, has a dialog tag between two complete sentences, so the tag ends with a period.

It is also worth noting that ending a dialog tag with a period is preferable whenever possible. Consider one more example:

Example 3: "Eat some food," she said, pushing him toward the kitchen. "Then get some rest."

This example could be written as one sentence in several different ways. "Eat some food, then get some rest," or "Eat some food; then get some rest," would both be as grammatically correct as "Eat some food. Then get some rest." But with a dialog tag, a period usually flows best, so go with it whenever you can.

Dialog Tags: Capitalization

A dialog tag is the bit of prose that identifies who is speaking. If the tag follows the dialog, it should begin with a lower-case letter, unless it is a title or name which is always capitalized. The punctuation of the dialog (i.e. whether the dialog ended in a comma, a question mark, or anything else) has no effect on capitalization.

Examples:

Incorrect:  “I’m doing fine,” She said.

Correct:    “I’m doing fine,” she said.

Incorrect:  “What do we do now?” The man said.

Correct:    “What do we do now?” the man said.

Incorrect:  “Hi there!” She said.

Correct:    “Hi there!” Sarah said.