How to write a character's thoughts
Quotation marks are the one broadly agreed mistake. Italics are a convention rather than a rule, and the strongest fiction marks nothing at all.
Italics, quotation marks, or no marker at all
Three conventions are in circulation and one of them is a mistake. Quotation marks around a thought were normal for most of the nineteenth century and they still appear in print, but on a page that also carries speech they force a reader to work out whose mouth is open. Drop them.
Italics are the convention most writers assume is compulsory. They are not. A marker earns its place when a thought arrives in the character's own words and present tense inside a narration that is neither, and it stops earning that place at about the third one on a page, because a reader who meets a slab of italic type slows down and starts hunting for the reason it is there.
That leaves the quietest option, which is the one most published fiction runs on. No marker. In first person and in close third the narration already sits inside the character, so a thought needs no passport to get in, and the writers who do this best are hard to catch at it.
Five ways to put a thought on the page
Ordered by how visible the marker is. The quiet end is where most fiction lives.
Quotation marks
The old convention, and unremarkable until speech and thought began sharing a page as often as they do now. The problem is mechanical. A reader scanning for quotation marks is scanning for dialogue, so a quoted thought costs half a second of confusion, and in a scene with two people talking it costs more.
Italics with a thought tag
The version most often taught. The thought is set in italics, in first person and present tense, with a tag such as she thought attached to it. Carrying the tag and the italics together is belt and braces, since either one alone would have done the job.
Italics with the tag dropped
Once the pattern is set, the tag becomes furniture. A reader who has met two tagged thoughts understands the italics on the third. This is the most economical of the marked options and the one to reach for when a character thinks often. Watch the density.
Reported thought
She wondered whether he had noticed. Past tense, third person, no marker, the thought folded into the narration and summarised rather than quoted. It is the workhorse. The cost is voice, because a reported thought is the narrator's sentence about the character rather than her own.
Free indirect style
The narration keeps the third person and the past tense while taking on the character's diction and rhythm. No marker, no tag. Joyce sharpened it into the tool novelists still reach for, and it is what people mean by deep point of view when they are being precise.
Four methods, in four novels
Italicised thought barely exists in the books old enough to quote freely. Some of that is the copyright wall rather than the convention, but the convention is genuinely the newest of the five.
1Quotation marks, tagged
A thought punctuated exactly like speech, with a tag saying it is not.
Sonia is alone with her fear here, so the marks cost nothing. Put the same punctuation in a room with two people in it and a reader has to reach the tag before knowing whether the words were said aloud, and by then they have already heard them in the wrong voice. Dostoyevsky can afford it because the novel spends so much of its length inside one head at a time.
Try this. Take a quoted thought from your draft and put a second character in the room. If the tag has to move earlier, the marks are costing you.
"Is it possible that he has nothing but cowardice and fear of death to make him live?" she thought at last in despair.
2Direct thought, no marker
The character's own question, tagged, with no italics and no quotation marks.
The middle sentence is a thought in question form, which is the case writers most often ask about, and Cather punctuates it with a comma and a verb. The question mark carries the tone and the tag carries the attribution, so a marker would be a third signal for a job already done twice. The thought is one beat between two physical actions.
Try this. Rewrite your longest italicised thought as a question with a plain tag, then read both aloud and hear which one sounds like your narrator.
She clucked to her team and started for the barn. I walked beside her, feeling vexed. Was she going to grow up boastful like her mother, I wondered? Before we reached the stable, I felt something tense in her silence, and glancing up I saw that she was crying.
3Free indirect style
Third person and past tense throughout, carrying her vocabulary and her panic.
Nothing is marked and nothing is tagged, and each sentence after the first belongs to Eveline rather than to her narrator. The giveaway is the repetition. A narrator would not write fold her in his arms after take her in his arms, and would have no reason to say he would save her twice, but a frightened woman talking herself into a decision does both.
Try this. Read a paragraph of your close third aloud and mark each word your character would not use. Those belong to the narrator.
She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. Why should she be unhappy? She had a right to happiness. Frank would take her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her.
4Thought fused into narration
Two thoughts in two sentences, one tagged and one with nothing around it.
The first thought carries a tag and no marker. The second carries neither. That lower-case conjunction after the exclamation mark is Woolf refusing to let the sentence restart, so the thought and the street arrive in one breath, with no seam between them.
Try this. Delete a marked thought's marker, its tag and the sentence break before it. If the paragraph still parses, the boundary was not there.
Poor little wretches, she sighed, and pressed forward. Oh, right under the horses' noses, you little demon! and there she was left on the kerb stretching her hand out, while Jimmy Dawes grinned on the further side.
One moment, three ways
The same beat, written three times. Only the method changes.
Miriam set down the tray. He has not noticed the shoes. He has not looked down once.
Miriam set down the tray. He had not noticed the shoes. He had not looked down once.
Miriam set down the tray and wondered whether he had noticed the shoes.
- Italics, direct, no tag
- Present tense and first-person logic inside a past-tense narration. The italics earn their place because the tense has changed, and a reader who met has without the marker would trip on it.
- Free indirect style
- The same two sentences moved into the narrator's tense and left otherwise alone. Nothing is marked and nothing is lost, because a narrator does not repeat a sentence in that shape by accident.
- Reported
- Faster, flatter, and no longer hers. The doubling has gone and the ache in it has gone with it.
Which method suits which point of view
The marker you need depends on how far the narration already sits from the character. The closer it is, the less there is to mark.
| Point of view | Default | Italics? | What goes wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| First person | Plain narration, tagged where the tense shifts | Rarely | All of it is interior already, so italics pile up until they carry no weight |
| Second person | Plain narration | No | The you is doing the work a marker would do, and a second signal reads as shouting |
| Third limited | Plain or reported, italics for a direct thought | Sometimes | Sliding between reported and direct in one paragraph without warning the reader |
| Third omniscient | Reported, attributed by name | No | A dropped attribution reads as head-hopping rather than as omniscience |
| Deep third | Free indirect style | No | A thought tag puts back the narrator the point of view was built to remove |
If you are unsure which of the last three you are writing, the point of view guide separates them with quoted passages.
Two ways it goes wrong
Double marking, which means italics plus a thought tag plus quotation marks all on one line. Each of the three is a complete solution on its own, so running them together tells a reader you trusted none of them, and the one worth keeping is almost always the tag.
Italic fatigue. A marker works by contrast, so the fifth italic passage on a page has stopped being emphasis and become a second typeface, and a page carrying more than two is usually one where the character is thinking where they could be doing.
Both of these are line-level notes rather than structural ones, which is the pass they belong to. The rest of that pass is under line editing.
A thought-heavy passage with an editor on it
A first draft that marks each thought, and the same passage after one pass.
Drag to compare original and revised text
Elena is one of the Prosematter editors. That is the kind of note she leaves on interiority.
Questions & Answers
- Do you italicize thoughts in writing?
- Not as a rule. Italics suit a short direct thought that arrives in the character's present tense inside a past-tense narration, and most interiority in published fiction carries no marker, because the narration already sits close enough that a reader knows whose head they are in.
- How do you format thoughts in writing?
- Pick one of five: quotation marks, italics with a thought tag, italics without one, reported thought folded into the narration, or free indirect style. Quotation marks are the one to avoid on a page that also carries speech, and whichever of the others you choose, hold to it, because a reader learns your system from the first two examples.
- How do you show thoughts in writing without italics?
- Use a tag and nothing else, as in was she going to grow up boastful, I wondered. Or drop the tag too and let the narration carry the character's own words, which is free indirect style and is what most close third person is built from.
- What is internal dialogue?
- In fiction, internal dialogue is a character's thought rendered on the page, either in their own words or as the narrator's report of them. The term also gets used in psychology for the inner voice people do or do not hear, which is a separate subject.
- Is internal dialogue a literary device?
- Yes, and it has named sub-forms. Interior monologue is an extended run of a character's thinking, stream of consciousness renders that thinking in the order it arrives rather than in the order that would make sense to a reader, and free indirect style keeps third person and past tense while taking on the character's voice.
- How do you write a character's thoughts in first person?
- Usually with no marker, because the narration is already the character thinking. Reach for italics where the tense changes to the present and the thought is happening now rather than being remembered, since a first-person narrator who italicises often ends up with a page where the emphasis has stopped meaning anything.
Know whose head you are in
Point of view decides which of the five methods a scene can use, and it is the first thing an editor checks when interiority stops working.
Read the point of view guideOuvrez un chapitre. Tout ce qu'il lui faut est déjà à côté.
Les personnages, les lieux, les règles que vous avez inventées, la note que vous vous êtes laissée en novembre. Rien à chercher, rien à synchroniser à la main — et sans ces frottements, les jours où vous écrivez commencent à s'accumuler.