fiction - "Thought" Verbs: A sign of weak writing or a stylistic choice?

According to Chuck Palahniuk you should avoid "Thought" verbs as much as you can. These include: knew, thought, realized, believed, etc.

However, I've seen many of them in books that I read. And I think they somehow simulate real speech (useful with first-person narrative). Here's an example from my own writing:

Lying back down, I thought about what he had just said—and realized I wasn't unhappy anymore; I no longer had this pressure in my chest; I felt released, light, as if I could reach the ceiling above me.

Are "Thought" Verbs a sign of weak writing? Or just an stylistic choice?

Answer

As I understand him, Palahniuk doesn't actually mean that you must avoid thought verbs, especially not at all cost. Palahniuk does use thought verbs in his own writing. That blog post is a suggestion for a writing exercise, not a rule for how you should write for publication.

The important part in that post, to me, is what Palahniuk calls "unpacking". As I understand this it means that instead of using abstract concepts like "love", you should write out the observable behavior that we mean when we say "love" and let the reader come to the conclusion that the charakter is in love.

For example,

John loves Joan.

is an essentially meaningless sentence. It does not tell us anything about what John does or what being in love means for him. Also, it is basically untrue in that it is a claim that, if made about a real person, could never be verified. No one knows if another person is in love, and most people don't understand themselves well enough to know what is going on in them when they say they are in love. So claiming that one character in a book "loves" another reduces the real world complexity to a fake cardboard clichee.

If on the other hand you write:

Every day John bought Joan a flower and walked to the other side of town to lay it on her door step - then quickly ran away so she wouldn't see him.

that will ellicit an emotion in the reader and give him a feeling for the kind of person John is.

What the "unpacking" does is that you stop interpreting the world for your readers. When you "unpack" thought verbs and other abstractions, you become a better observer, you stop writing about the world, from a meta perspective, and instead begin to directly translate the world into words, allowing the reader to experience that world for themselves. And you allow the reader to come to a different conclusion about it than you.