Thoughts?

I sat down at my computer again, my hands hovering over the keys as I began my next blog post.

What should I call it?

My mind whirled through different names and ideas, the majority being deemed stupid and shoved to the deepest and darkest part of my brain.

That's it!

I rested my hands on the keyboard, their clicking echoing in my head as the title I'd come up with in my mind took form on the screen.

Did you enjoy my little "self narration"?

As you can see, the title I came up with was "Thoughts?".

Any idea what this blog post is about?

If you guessed thoughts, you'd be correct.

As promised, today, I am going to discuss the importance of showing characters' thoughts and how best to do it.

Why should we show characters' thoughts?

When you write a story and design your character, you are giving them a unique personality and outlook on situations of the world.

Each character has their own voice.

They all react to situations in their own way.

And establishing their own voice and personality is a key part of writing your book, especially if you are writing in multiple POVs (point of views).

As I discussed last blog, when you write in multiple POVs, you have to distinguish those POVs from one another. You want to try and avoid writing in the same voice with all the characters.

One of the three steps to distinguishing different POVs is your characters' thoughts. (Read my previous post "Learn Your Characters' Voices" to learn about the other two steps to distinguishing your characters' voices from one another.)

So how do thoughts help distinguish different characters from one another?

Everyone has a different personality. Everyone acts and reacts differently and those are the main things that show characters' personalities: how they act and react.

When you write out a character's thoughts, you are showing how they are reacting to whatever is happening in their life and showing what's happening in their brain.

This helps show their personality.

People think differently.

When you write out thoughts, it shows how your characters think.

That's why we should show characters' thoughts.

How do we show characters' thoughts?

The big how.

How do we do this?

Well, there are a few different methods that I know of.

Before telling you about these, I'm going to tell you what not to do.

Nothing.

Doing nothing is what, I have always felt, you should avoid.

I read a book once where the thoughts of the characters were not distinguished from the third person narration with anything but the fact they were written in first person. While you can figure out that they're thoughts, it can be confusing since there's nothing visually cueing to it.

Let me give you an example:

Diane strode across the lawn, her stance as tense as a coiled rubber band. I can't believe it! Why did he do that?

Did you catch the thoughts?

It wasn't too terribly hard to distinguish them, but wasn't it sort of abrupt? Didn't it make you almost pause and go, "Oh, there's thoughts now. Okay."

This is what I really think we should avoid. To me, this method is not proper and it's a bit confusing for your reader.

Now that we know what to avoid, let's go over what we can do.

1. Quotation marks.

The first method is quotation marks.

You can put the thoughts of the character in quotation marks.

But there is a catch for this method.

You have to write a dialogue tag such as "he thought" or "[character's name] thought" after or before it. If you don't, the thoughts could get mistaken for dialogue since quotations generally mean that.

I'm going to use the above example and write it using this technique:

Diane strode across the lawn, her stance as tense as a coiled rubber band. "I can't believe it!" she thought angrily. "Why did he do that?"

This works better than the first example, right?

But the bad thing about this method is you always have to add a dialogue tag that explains it's a thought, but it still works and you can still use it.

2. Only dialogue tags.

The next method is basically the same as above, except without the quotation marks.

Let me show you:

Diane strode across the lawn, her stance as tense as a coiled rubber band. I can't believe it, she thought angrily. Why did he do that?

Out of the methods that work, this is probably my least favorite example simply because it can get confusing when one starts to write without a dialogue tag like how I did above with "Why did he do that?".

Distinguishing thoughts can get difficult with this method, but it is still valid and will still work.

Okay, let's move on to the last one..

3. Italics

This one is the one I prefer. I've used it on past books and the current ones I'm working on.

Italics.

They aren't just used for emphasis and titles. They're actually really helpful for distinguishing thoughts from the normal narration.

In the introduction to this blog post, when I was writing my thoughts, did you notice that I put them in italics?

Yep.

This is the best way—in my opinion, of course—to show characters' thoughts. It doesn't require the "he thought" dialogue tag and it won't confuse the reader like doing nothing could.

Let's look at the example I've used for the past methods with this one:

Diane strode across the lawn, her stance as tense as a coiled rubber band.

I can't believe it!

Why did he do that?

Now, how was that?

Could you easily tell what the character's thoughts were?

Italics is another method for distinguishing characters' thoughts.

I suppose one thing you don't get with it is the ability to put an adjective to how the characters are thinking like I did for the other two methods. But this is easily fixed with the next method.

4. Italics and dialogue tags.

Simply add a dialogue tag just like this:

Diane strode across the lawn, her stance as tense as a coiled rubber band.

I can't believe it, she thought angrily.

Why did he do that?

Personally, I don't feel that it really needs it, but if you do, that method could work for you.

I hope you all learned a bit about thoughts in this blog post! Now go out with this writing knowledge and tell the world!

Maybe not the world, but you get the picture.

That's all for today, my lovely writers.

Happy writing!

-Jocelyn