((The sentence between the is in italics.)) Xavier read and reread the words on the page. 'You could be standing outside with me, if you wanted.' Wend typed before she gave it any thought. Because it's written in third-person omniscient, using italics for thoughts created a way for them to become more active. My book, Fractions of Existence, has a lot of italic thoughts. There really are no hard and fast rules here, so if you think something deserves to be in italics, go for it. If you italicize all thoughts, you're giving every passing whim equal significance and this leaves you with nothing to use when you need to really hammer something home.īut don't sweat it too much. Again, you wouldn't do it for every memory, but if the words spoken were important, then they should be in italics.īasically, using italics is a way to draw attention to something or emphasize something significant. This is effective because there is a distinct contrast between the action that is not in italics and the inner monologue which is.Īnother place you might use italics in thought is where a character is remembering something that was said in the past. Often the thoughts are interspersed with action that can show the conflict the character is dealing with.

When writing in third person and a character is talking to themselves, italics can be used to show this. It's not 100% necessary to use italics in this scenario, but it is something you see often. Think of it like the narrator just dipped into the character's head and took a peek at what they were thinking. If you're writing in a more distant third person POV, you would use italics to show that a specific character had this thought. Not every thought is important, but some need some additional emphasis because they're imparting something key to the plot or revealing something special about a character. My suggestions would be to use them to draw attention to things that you believe are important. The main thing to be aware of is to use italics sparingly as they do really stand out on a page. But like so much of writing, there isn't actually a hard and fast rule. Personally, I don't tend to write thoughts in italics for just this reason. It does look weird if you have a lot of italics on a single page. One of my CPs said this is the correct way to present thoughts, but it looks weird when I have so many itallics scattered across the page. She's a fox, thought Ted, before chastising himself, Shouldn't be objectifying her like that, dude. When I'm writing a character's thoughts, do I need to write them like this? I have a technical question I hope you can help me with.

Italics iwrite