I've been hanging out around the NaNoWriMo forums lately and decided to devote a blog post to a question that seems to come up there with some regularity: how to represent characters' thoughts.

Let's get one option out of the way up front, to clear some space. Don't use quotation marks. Quotation marks are for direct speech. Although I might imagine contriving some occasion where placing thoughts in quotation marks was appropriate (a dialog between creatures who communicate exclusively by telepathy, perhaps), it's best to just leave this possibility behind and move on.

The remaining questions are

• direct or indirect?
• italics or not?
• tag or not?

Thoughts, like speech, can be reported directly or indirectly.

Direct:
"The sunset is beautiful," Mark said.
The sunset is beautiful, Mark thought.

Indirect:
Mark said that the sunset was beautiful.
Mark thought that the sunset was beautiful.

The direct forms are almost always preferable, following the oft-cited advice "show, don't tell." They create a sense of immediacy that the indirect forms lack. Indirect reporting tends to make a piece feel more like nonfiction. Notice the difference in verb tense between direct and indirect forms. If you go direct, don't cast the verb in the past tense ("The sunset was beautiful, Mark thought.")

There are some things to be careful of when using direct reporting of characters' thoughts. If you are writing in a first-person point of view, things are pretty easy: everything that's not speech is taken to be the viewpoint character's thoughts:

I stepped onto the platform. Meredith was waiting by the turnstile. She was early. There must be something brewing.

Notice how easily narration and thoughts flow into one another in first person. This can be effective in third-person limited as well:

Isaac stepped onto the platform. Meredith was waiting by the turnstile. She was early. There must be something brewing.

If Isaac has already been established as the viewpoint character, readers will infer that the last sentence represents his interpretation, not the author's or some other character's. Be careful not to jump into this cold (as I did at the beginning of one of my stories). If the sentence above were the first sentence of the story, readers will not know who the final thought belongs to—Isaac? Meredith? The author? A first-person narrator we haven't met yet?

Things can also become a bit uncomfortable in third person when first- and second-person pronouns might be used. In first-person point of view, it is easy enough to write

Meredith held a worn copy of the atlas. That's my copy! Well, I'd better not find your doodles in it, girl.

You can move this directly into third person, if your readers are already primed to hearing the main character's thoughts in such a direct way. The above sentence need not change at all. Mostly, though, third-person point of view puts a bit more distance between the character and the reader. This is where italics or thought tags ("he thought") can help:

Meredith held a worn copy of the atlas. That's my copy! Well, he thought, I'd better not find your doodles in it, girl.

Generally, it is not necessary to use both italics and a thought tag. They accomplish the same general thing: to alert the reader that a thought (which might otherwise be mistaken as narration) is actually direct from the character's mind. Which to use? The use of italics is more immediate, because there is nothing except the actual words of the character's thought. It's the equivalent of quotation marks without a dialog tag to represent speech: it's quick, dramatic, and vivid. Also, because italics are used to emphasize words, any thoughts in italics will appear more important. This is a good thing if the thought is emotional or dramatic in some way (like a verbatim recollection of some momentous words).

If you're in your character's head a lot, though, italicizing every thought can become messy and start to look amateurish. For most purposes, I think regular type works best, with thought tags when needed to provide a bit of distance or mark off the thought from simple narration.

Here is a sample paragraph using all three modes (why did I make the choices I did?):

Isaac sighed when Meredith entered the room with her cousin Jay. He had never warmed to Jay. Too much style, too little substance. I'll keep it short, he thought, and get downstairs as soon as I can. But it was too late. Meredith and Jay cornered him, and Isaac soon found himself listening to a pompous lecture on post-structuralism and Pinter. Oh God, have mercy.

Bottom line: if you represent your character's thoughts directly and without quotation marks, you'll be in good company. (In fact, if you're writing in first person, that's just about the whole story.) To fine tune, you can then use italics (sparingly) and thought tags to balance the demands of immediacy, clarity, and point of view. How you strike that balance is a matter of personal style.