How to write thoughts in fiction

If you write fiction, chances are your characters will be thinking. This article shows you several different ways of conveying what’s going on in their heads.

First off, there is no rule. Instead there are standard ways and not-so-standard ways of conveying thoughts in fiction.

Rules are problematic because they lead writers down a prescriptive road that can render their fiction difficult to read, and lacking in aesthetic on the page.

Method 1: Quotation marks
The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) has this advice (13.43: ‘Unspoken discourse’):

Thought, imagined dialogue, and other internal discourse (also called interior discourse) may be enclosed in quotation marks or not, according to the context or the writer’s preference. [...]
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“I don’t care if we have offended Morgenstern,” thought Vera. “Besides,” she told herself, “they’re all fools.”

This is undoubtedly my least-favourite option. ​I recommend you use the speech-mark style with caution. I can’t remember the last time I saw this approach used in commercial fiction coming out of a mainstream publisher’s stable. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been, of course!

I dislike it intensely, and many fiction publishers seem to be choosing other methods by preference, but those aren’t good reasons to avoid it. Your style is your choice. The best reason for avoiding it is that using speech marks could confuse your reader.

The beauty of speech marks – or quotation marks – is that they indicate speech. When you put speech marks around a character’s thoughts, your reader will immediately assume they’re reading the spoken word.

Look at the CMOS example above. Only when we hit thought Vera do we realize she’s not speaking at all. She’s thinking.

Some authors might be tempted to use a different speech-mark style to indicate a thought. Again, this is confusing. Your reader might assume that you’ve not edited for consistency, as this example demonstrates:

“Jen, drop the knife. You’ll do yourself an injury.”
“No way. I’m not safe here, and nor are you.”
Jen held the blade steady and looked around.
‘Crap. I need an exit,’ she thought.

If, like me, you want something a little cleaner, something that won’t pull your reader out of the story because you led them down a speech-based garden path only to pull them up short at the gate, here are a few alternatives.

Method 2: Italic text
You can render your thoughts in italic text. For short thought streams, this is a common approach.

Let’s return to the CMOS example and see what it looks like:

I don’t care if we have offended Morgenstern, thought Vera. Besides, she told herself, they’re all fools.

The advantages of this style are as follows:

• It’s a standard approach that readers will be familiar with.
• There’s no confusion. It’s clear that Vera’s not speaking out loud because the speech marks have been omitted.

However, some readers find that large chunks of italic strain their eyes. I’m one of them. I’m much more likely to skim over huge passages of italic because it’s not a pleasant reading experience.

If that text is masking a clue, or a key character trait, information about an important event or something else that holds the plot together, it’s essential that the reader accesses it.

Look at the Vera example again. There are two thought tags – thought Vera and she told herself – just to ram the point home that she’s thinking. Some readers and writers might consider two tags overkill, but they do help to break up the italic text and don’t jar as much as they might.

But imagine if Vera’s thought stream had gone something like this:

I don’t care if we have offended Morgenstern, thought Vera. Besides, she told herself, they’re all fools. Those people at the bank, they don’t care a hoot for anyone but themselves. Like it’s their money they’re investing. We’ve trusted that bloody bank with our savings and look at what it’s got us. Nothing. Damn cheek. Vera put the letter back in the envelope and scowled.

That’s a lot of italic to get one’s retinas around. If you have a long stream of consciousness, you might prefer another method.

Method 3: Normal body text
This style forgoes speech marks and italic, and sticks to normal text. This is how it looks with the longer Vera example:

I don’t care if we have offended Morgenstern, thought Vera. Besides, she told herself, they’re all fools. Those people at the bank, they don’t care a hoot for anyone but themselves. Like it’s their money they’re investing. We’ve trusted that bloody bank with our savings and look at what it’s got us. Nothing. Damn cheek. Vera put the letter back in the envelope and scowled.

The advantage of this style is that it’s easy on the eye. However, some readers might be jarred by changes in tense.
 
If your narrative is set in the past tense and set in the third person (as in this example with Vera) and you use the same text style for present-tense direct thoughts, then in a longer thought stream you could pull your reader out of the story.
 
And if this happens frequently, your prose will be riddled with flip-flopping tenses that are at best frustrating and at worst confusing.

Method 4: Free indirect style
Another option is to use free indirect style (sometimes called free indirect discourse or free indirect speech). This style offers the essence of first-person thought but through a third-person viewpoint.

The advantages of this style are as follows:

• The character’s voice is foremost but gone is the clutter of speech marks, speech tags, and italic.
• The thoughts can be formatted in the normal body-text style but without the risk of jarring the reader because the tense will be consistent with the main narrative.
• The shift away from the thought stream and into the usual third-person narrative is seamless.

Let’s return to Vera to see how this works:

Vera didn’t care if they’d offended Morgenstern. Besides, they were all fools. Those people at the bank, they didn’t care a hoot for anyone but themselves. Like it was their money they were investing. Her family had trusted that bloody bank with their savings and look at what it had got them. Nothing. Damn cheek. Vera put the letter back in the envelope and scowled.

The free indirect style does keep the narrative distance close but it’s still not quite as immediate at the present-tense first person. So is there anything else we can do?

Method 5: Mix it up
A more creative option might be to combine direct and indirect thought styles.

In the example below we begin with two sentences that use the italic style for the present-tense first-person thought, and we retain the thought tags to break up the text.

Then we move into roman text but cast the thought stream in the free indirect style, which matches the main narrative: third-person past tense.

I don’t care if we have offended Morgenstern, thought Vera. Besides, she told herself, they’re all fools. Those people at the bank, they didn’t care a hoot for anyone but themselves. Like it was their money they were investing. Her family had trusted that bloody bank with their savings and look at what it had got them. Nothing. Damn cheek. Vera put the letter back in the envelope and scowled.

The advantages of this style are as follows:
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• It’s flexible. The character’s voice is foremost throughout. The narrative distance shifts from the immediacy of the present-tense first person but is still close – we’re still in Vera’s head even when we’re in the third person.
• The italic doesn’t dominate, so the text is easy on the reader’s eye.
• Given that the thought stream is quite long, it still doesn’t feel invasive. The shift into free indirect style gives us a breather. This approach might therefore suit you if your character is having an inner rant and the inner turmoil feels overworked.
• We’ve retained the seamless shift back to the main third-person past-tense narrative comfortably.

Summing up
As with many sentence-level decisions in fiction writing, rendering thoughts is about style choices rather than a single prescriptive rule. Choose the solution that fits your story best. This might mean making different decisions at various points in your novel depending on what’s going on.

Consider combining approaches if you have longer thought streams and want to be sure of retaining reader engagement.

And, finally, avoid speech marks when it comes thoughts. They’re called speech marks for a reason and are best reserved for talking and muttering!

Cited works and related resources

• 3 reasons to use free indirect speech
• Dialogue tags and how to use them in fiction writing
• How to punctuate dialogue in a novel
• How to use apostrophes in fiction writing
• Playing with sentence length
• Playing with the rhythm of fiction: commas and conjunctions
• The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed. University of Chicago Press, 2017
• Unveiling your characters: Physical description with style
• Why ‘suddenly’ can spoil your fiction

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.
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