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To italic thoughts, or just say thoughts?

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Gadabout

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It's a personal thing, but I don't like it. Echoing others that it puts too much emphasis on the thoughts, and if you're using italics for other things, it can get messy.
 

BarbaraKE

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I write in third-person, so I italicize thoughts. (These are his/her actual thoughts.)

I agree that 'he thought' is almost always redundant. The major exception being the first time a thought is shown. Granted, most readers associate 'italics' with 'thought', but I see nothing wrong with making that connection clear at the very beginning.
 

maestrowork

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I see nothing wrong with making that connection clear at the very beginning.

There's a good way to do that: by using 1st person and changing the tense. Your readers are smart enough to understand it's a direct thought:


He took a bite of the toast. I can't believe it's not butter! He reached for the coffee.
 

WickerWeir

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Any time you can keep from changing things visually, you're helping the reader stay in proximity to your character. Any time you change things on purpose, whether it's something like a chapter break, or a one sentence paragraph, or anything else that's not standard punctuation, you're creating an extra mental step in the reader's experience, which is necessarily distancing, even minutely.

I don't like italicized thoughts at all, especially in third person. Embed the thoughts in the narrative voice, let your narrator be as close to the character as possible, and don't waste that immediacy on something so mundane as italics.
 

Rock Throwing Peasan

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I am working through something and I'd like some thoughts. I have a character that doesn't speak, so there is internal dialogue. However, he's given objects personalities and they "talk" to him.

I think have his thoughts unitalicized and italicizing the thoughts of objects might be a solution (if consistant).
 
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