Comments on: Dealing With A Character’s Internal Thoughts

By: Jennifer Lerud

Jennifer Lerud — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 22:36:10 +0000

I am writing a novel that includes two people who read each others’ minds—i.e., telepathic people. I use italics when the thoughts are given like spoken words would be, and none when they are part of the character’s inner dialogue.

When I’m going back and forth between the two characters during a conversation, it gets tricky to make sure that one person’s telepathic thoughts are separated from the other person’s, because both are in italics. As with regular dialogue, changing paragraphs is necessary to distinguish when changing characters, and I throw in the occasional dialogue tag using “thought” instead of “said” to keep who is saying what straight.

I am sorely tempted to use both italics and quotation marks for long stretches of dialogue, but I haven’t seen an authority voice anywhere (yet) that says it is the right way to handle it. One website asks writers to put telepathic communications like this: “/telepathic dialogue/”. But they’re the only ones I’ve seen do this technique. So for now, I simply use italics and paragraph breaks and dialogue tags for telepathic conversations.

By: Rebecca

Rebecca — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 16:15:02 +0000

My high school and college English teachers taught me to italicize a character’s thought; some websites advise against it. Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Do you leave out “he/she thought?” Does it really matter? It’s very confusing.

By: Chancery Stone

Chancery Stone — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 19:49:19 +0000

Sorry, that should really be internal monologue – unless our hero/heroine is talking to themself in a schizophrenic way.

By: Chancery Stone

Chancery Stone — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 19:25:20 +0000

If the character’s thoughts are in the past tense they would, in general, be in the passive voice. If you would care to show us some internal dialogue written in the past tense that has the vitality of the active voice……..?

By: Maeve

Maeve — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 18:41:48 +0000

@Chancery
Your objections to the information given in this article seem to be based on an idiosyncratic notion of narrative style.

When a narrative is written in past tense, a character’s internal thoughts will be expressed in past tense. You needn’t take my word for it; do a Google search for “internal dialogue in fiction” and you will find a great many more examples of the kind I have used in this article.

Re: “Which, I can only repeat, this article definitely does not address, just avoids by recommending you put your story into a passive voice.”

Past tense is not the same thing as “passive voice.”