The most commonly given advice for using direct thoughts seems to be to format them in italics. I am not really satisfied with that, however. I haven't seen this used anywhere (granted, I do not read contemporary fiction) and it feels strange to use italics for two purposes (the second one being putting stress on a word ). Even on stack exchange the italics are frowned upon in several answers.
My preference would be to just leave them unformatted, inserted into a paragraph of indirect thoughts/feelings of the same character. My question is, would this confuse you? eg. in the below (the last sentence is the direct thought of the heroine):
It wasn't his look that unsettled her, however. It was the realization that her anger had vanished, and that what was slowly taking over its place within her mind was fear. What have I done?
Answer
The quoted passage is completely comprehensible; it's clear that the question is being asked by the character. The alternative would be absurd - the narrator making some kind of parenthetical commentary on her own narrative! Adult readers of serious fiction will not be even momentarily confused by your example.
The technique you're using is called 'free indirect style', and has been around for a long time, although it came to occur much more frequently in the heyday of the great realist novelists: Austen, Eliot, Tolstoy, Flaubert. It is not at all old-fashioned, however. It's very commonly used today by contemporary fiction writers.
The habit of italicising characters' thoughts should be left where it belongs, in the pre-New Wave history of science fiction, and cheap pulp fiction thrillers. Unless you are writing 'young adult' or juvenile fiction, I would strongly advise you to continue to avoid italics, punctuation or any other clunky markers to separate chracters' thoughts from the enclosing narrative.
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