Interior monologue in first person

You probably should it all in the same point of view. If you want the narrator to have internal dialogue, then it (the whole book) should be in first person.

People who think something's not right with what they read would suggest changing something that is not common, something original. Even if the problem lies somewhere else.

Follow the advice of all people in the business and you're gonna end up with Style Zero, undistinguishable from thousands and thousands of other beginning authors. Imagine what your agent would say to Bukowski or Vonnegut. "You don't draw assholes in a literary novel!!"

I like what you're doing there. But I'd also drop the italics. It would give the narration a better flow. Switching to the first person would be signal enough that we're in the character's head.

Snick -- as you can see from the OP's examples, he does that not only with the protagonist, other characters (Martha?) too.

I think it is poor style. It makes it less clear which characer is involved. Having multiple narrators is fine, when the narrators are separated. Switching from third person to first person just doesn't work. Of course there is the matter of using third person omniscent and having the narrator look into the characters' minds.

First person interior monologue simply does not work when writing in third person. It's jarring, confusing, and would, I think, make almost every read stop as soon as he encountered it. Instead of reading the writing, I had to stop and say, what the heck is this writer trying to do? It's also unnecessary and pointless. A poor gimmick, at best.

This agent would say the same thing to any writer, and be right. Originality is sometimes good, and sometimes horrible and wrong. And style is not what you're after. Style is something you know is bad as soon as someone realizes it's style.

The idea of writing is to communicate, and to give readers a story and characters they want to spend hours enjoying. This won't do either.

Come on, all RJ Keith is doing is just omitting "he thought" and "she said to herself". It's a regulard 3rd person narration with access to characters' thoughts unencumbered by unnecessary hethoughts.

EDIT:
He clawed in the darkness for the bedside lamp and almost knocked it off the nightstand turning it on. I'm in my own room, he thought, my own bedroom, here in Santa Donate, here in California, here in America.

By Stephen King. Hardly a Joycean obfuscator & experimentalist.

What I always understood is that if you could put the internal dialogue in quotes and make it regular dialogue, it works. Reading your examples, that rule of thumb works, so I don't understand what the objection is.

When you write dialogue, it becomes first person present tense, so why is internal dialogue different? Italicizing thoughts has been done longer than I've been reading books (roughly 45 years), so I don't see anything wrong with what you've presented.

Perhaps I'm out of touch, but I'm still seeing this in recently published books, so color me confused why there's a problem.

I think first person interior monologue in a third person story is jarring. I tried it in my novel (now out for query), but I changed it and made it blend in with the interior monologue.

I've noticed your sentences are a bit wordy. For your examples:

Seconds later, his hip hit the mud, hit hard, nearly knocked knocking him loose. , but the The boat kept going, plowing into the mud, . He had totally missed, missing the goddamn creek.

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You're in his point of view. We can feel what's going on inside of him via the action.

At eight o'clock, the alarm set, Martha curled up under the quilt, knees close to her chin. , She clutching clutched the serpent, the root in her fist. I can do this. I'll be all right if I can just get some sleep. Sleep would give her the energy to carry through.

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These are just my examples, and may not even be what you are looking for. Good luck!

For me, RJ, the first person italicized thoughts work with your stream of consciousness style.

I don't think there are any rules – that's the lovely thing about writing: you pull it off or you don't.

Although, I also love what JAR had to say about style.

ETA: deleted a contentious bit.

goldmund said:

Come on, all RJ Keith is doing is just omitting "he thought" and "she said to herself". It's a regulard 3rd person narration with access to characters' thoughts unencumbered by unnecessary hethoughts.

EDIT:
He clawed in the darkness for the bedside lamp and almost knocked it off the nightstand turning it on. I'm in my own room, he thought, my own bedroom, here in Santa Donate, here in California, here in America.

By Stephen King. Hardly a Joycean obfuscator & experimentalist.

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I'm in agreement here. Op's using direct thought with the tags removed. It's no different to direct speech with the tags removed.

I've seen a few in-house guidelines want internal thought in italics, and I've read many a book where it's been done. Point is, though 'style' is the main thing here. What's good for one publisher may not be good for another.

Personally, I don't like to rely on it too much. But that's just me.

Stick to it!

If this example you posted is what you have done regularly throughout your novel then stick with it. It's just a nice way of getting inside a character's head.

And there are plenty of published novels out there written like that.

To me, they're okay as they are. I don't see anything wrong with telling the p.o.v. character's thoughts. And I like italics for direct quotes of thoughts, as long as they don't go on for paragraph after paragraph.

If you really want to eliminate the italics, you can do them as reported, not directly quoted thought, and in the first, you wouldn't really need "he had."

Seconds later, his hip hit the mud, hit hard, nearly knocked him loose, but the boat kept going, plowing into the mud. Totally missed the goddamn creek. Lousy, lousy day.


The second, though, I think you'd have to say At eight o'clock, the alarm set, Martha curled up under the quilt, knees close to her chin, clutching the serpent-root in her fist. She could do this. She'd be all right if she could just get some sleep.

I use the idiom and find that it works for the POV character when used sparingly and with only brief thoughts. I learned the practice from my writing coach a long time ago.

I use italics and put the thought quote into its own paragraph.

It should be clear, however, that the thought is a first person quote of the character. Otherwise the reader could confuse it with the 3rd person narrator's comment.

Example of ambiguous thought:

The non-disclosure agreement prohibiited him from disclosing proprietary information.
If only they knew.
He signed it...

Somewhat better:

He smiled to himself as he read the non-disclosure agreement. He reflected on the clause about not disclosing proprietary information.
If only they knew.
He signed it...

RJ Keith said:

I'm doing some re-writes requested by an agent and one of my problems, according to the notes, is that I sometimes use first person and italics for interior monologue.

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My bold. I wonder if the problem lies in your inconsistency, rather than in the fact that you do this at all?

Snick said:

I think it is poor style. It makes it less clear which characer is involved.

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It can do: but if the writer makes it work as it should, it won't. (That sentence makes perfect sense in my head.)

RJ Keith said:

Thanks, everyone, for all the thoughts and debate on this. I think my approach in the rewrite will be to continue using this technique, sparingly, where it really seems to work.

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My bold again. I think this is a very good way for you to proceed.

Jamesaritchie said:

First person interior monologue simply does not work when writing in third person. It's jarring, confusing, and would, I think, make almost every read stop as soon as he encountered it. Instead of reading the writing, I had to stop and say, what the heck is this writer trying to do? It's also unnecessary and pointless. A poor gimmick, at best.

This agent would say the same thing to any writer, and be right. Originality is sometimes good, and sometimes horrible and wrong. And style is not what you're after. Style is something you know is bad as soon as someone realizes it's style.

The idea of writing is to communicate, and to give readers a story and characters they want to spend hours enjoying. This won't do either.

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Seems to have worked for international best selling author Melissa Marr. She used the technique (third person narration, first person interior monologue in italics) in her debut Wicked Lovely. Her agent clearly had no problem with it.

I don't see the problem with italicized interior monologues either. Lots of authors do it—some quite extensively. I'm reading a novel by Trudi Canavan at the moment, and she does it throughout the book.

My only concern with this would be that, well, no one does it in real-life. It doesn't mean you shouldn't do it in your book, but it makes it a bit harder to make it believable. (Well, maybe it's just me. I'm not in other people's minds. )

Jamesaritchie said:

First person interior monologue simply does not work when writing in third person. It's jarring, confusing, and would, I think, make almost every read stop as soon as he encountered it. Instead of reading the writing, I had to stop and say, what the heck is this writer trying to do? It's also unnecessary and pointless. A poor gimmick, at best.

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This is one of the most bizarre comments I've ever read.

Right then.

I've moved the off-topic bickering and foolishness to the landfill and I'll now reopen this. Keep on-topic this time. I expect you all to respect your fellow writer, and to remember this quote from Devil Ledbetter:

Argue against the point, not the person.

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If anyone's unhappy with that, PM me.

RJ Keith said:

I'm doing some re-writes requested by an agent and one of my problems, according to the notes, is that I sometimes use first person and italics for interior monologue.

I've tried to cut back on this, but there are places where it just seems to work better than the alternative. Here are two examples:

Original:
Seconds later, his hip hit the mud, hit hard, nearly knocked him loose, but the boat kept going, plowing into the mud—
Totally missed the goddamn creek.

Alternate:
Seconds later, his hip hit the mud, hit hard, nearly knocked him loose, but the boat kept going, plowing into the mud—
He had totally missed the goddamn creek.

Another example:

At eight o'clock, the alarm set, Martha curled up under the quilt, knees close to her chin, clutching the serpent-root in her fist. I can do this. I'll be all right if I can just get some sleep.


Would love to hear opinions on this. Thanks!

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Interior monologue is both common and acceptable.

AFAIK, there are three main ways to indicate internal monologue:

1. First person, present tense, italics

2. First person, present tense, enclose in quotation marks (in other words, treat it just like dialogue)

3. First person, present tense, no quotation marks, "dialogue" tag makes clear it's a thought and not dialogue or narrative.

Whatever method you choose, be consistent. And never say "he thought to himself" unless telepathy has already been established.

It reads okay to me without a change.

Perhaps the problem is you're using it too often?

I write in a very tight third, with lots of direct thought, which I rarely italicize; maybe a couple of lines per book, tops. The thoughts are clearly the POV character's; I just think the itals are unnecessary. You're in the MC/POV's head already; their direct thoughts should just flow.

Frex:

Original:
Seconds later, his hip hit the mud, hit hard, nearly knocked him loose, but the boat kept going, plowing into the mud—
Totally missed the goddamn creek.

Alternate:
Seconds later, his hip hit the mud, hit hard, nearly knocked him loose, but the boat kept going, plowing into the mud—
He had totally missed the goddamn creek.

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For me, the first is correct, but without the italics.

...plowing into the mud--totally missed the goddamn creek.

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We don't need the italics, because the POV character is narrating for us as we go. He's telling us about missing the goddamn creek, we know he's thought that he totally missed the goddamn creek, so why bother italicizing it? It just looks awkward, IMO.

Another example:

At eight o'clock, the alarm set, Martha curled up under the quilt, knees close to her chin, clutching the serpent-root in her fist. I can do this. I'll be all right if I can just get some sleep.


Would love to hear opinions on this. Thanks!

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For this one I agree with Bonita below. Again, we're in Martha's head. To show us her italicized thoughts feels distancing, like you're deliberately pulling us out of her head instead of keeping us in it. (And although I have no direct evidence, so take this with as large a grain of salt as you choose, I suspect this is actually what the agent's problem is: you keep pushing your reader out of the POV.)

bonitakale said:

[/COLOR] The second, though, I think you'd have to say At eight o'clock, the alarm set, Martha curled up under the quilt, knees close to her chin, clutching the serpent-root in her fist. She could do this. She'd be all right if she could just get some sleep.

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My goal is to have everything on the page be essentially filtered through my MC's head. What she sees, what happens, what she thinks. Since I'm in the middle of editing at the moment and so have a file open, here's a sample bit with internal thought, unitalicized, as part of the narrative:

The woman hiked up her dress in the back and produced a leather wallet. Shit, had she been keeping that thing in her underwear?

Yes, she had. Chess hoped to see some sort of thigh-holster or garter, but lifting the excuse for a dress showed the woman’s spindly bruise-covered legs, and they were bare.

He wasn’t coming anywhere near touching Chess with those hands again until they’d been washed. Twice. At least.

He didn’t look any happier about where the wallet had been kept, but he opened it anyway. “Got any else? Needing to see all it, dig?”

Greenback had apparently also had a watch, several small bags of pills and powders, an earring, and a few scraps of paper. That was a lot to keep in a pair of panties, Chess had to hand it to the woman for that.

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Obviously your voice isn't going to be like mine, and I'm not holding myself up as some kind of Greatest Writer to Emulate or anything, but that's how I handle internal thought. It's just part of the narrative, and every part of the narrative should have your character's individual take on the world stamped on it, basically, and should show the reader how your POV character thinks, feels, and/or sees the world.



What interests me is, a while ago I had a conversation with my CP about internal monologues and thoughts, where I mentioned that mine tend to be third-person still, or directed at myself by name rather than as "I." Like, I might be thinking that I need to get to the store, but my actual conscious thought--speaking to myself--is: Don't forget, you have to go to the store or maybe, as I park the car at home, Damn it, you forgot to go to the store. So on the rare occasions when I do italicize internal thought, it tends to be that sort of thing: She got there totally late, of course. Great, Chess, make yourself look even better instead of: She got there totally late, of course. Great, make myself look even better.

To me the second feels a little jarring, again. But it may be because of how my own internal dialogue goes. So how does yours go?