Comments on: Dealing With A Character’s Internal Thoughts

By: Don Phillips

Don Phillips — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 15:18:58 +0000

Question: What if a character has his thoughts invaded by an artificial intelligence? How would one represent the dialogue between the thought life conversation? Or how would one represent the diaplogue of two characters reading each other’s thoughts in question and answer dialogue?

Thanks!

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 17:56:23 +0000

Good advice. Sir John Mortimer was good with internal dialogue too.

By: Sandy S

Sandy S — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 13:02:30 +0000

I use italics, but I am now beginning to reconsider that thought…
Maybe I have that perspective problem PreciseEdit spoke of. Oh welll, that’s what revision is for.

By: Teddy-the-Bear

Teddy-the-Bear — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 20:40:44 +0000

I thought that the short story “2 AM and Counting” for the contest did a great job of expressing the main character’s thoughts, without having to resort to quotation marks or italics.

By: PreciseEdit

PreciseEdit — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:51:25 +0000

We’re with you on this one, Maeve. We have seen both the quotation marks and the italics in rough drafts. Some clients have insisted that they be there, though we have advised them against these tricks.

If the reader’s attention is on a particular character, text that expresses thoughts will be attributed to that character, and these gimmicks will become unnecessary.

Usually, if the reader has difficulty understanding that words are the thoughts of a particular character, it is because the text has a more serious problem, one of perspective.

Each scene in a story should focus on one, and only one, character. This way, the reader knows which character is the focus of attention, i.e., which character is being used to experience the events in the scene. The reader will visualize the scene from that character’s perspective.

With this focus, the reader will understand which words are description, which are dialogue, and which are thoughts–without resorting to “he thought,” quotation marks, or italics.