You Think Italicized? You Should See the Other Guy!

It’s easy to decide when to put speech in quotation marks. For us, it’s much less obvious when to put characters’ thoughts in italics. You’re probably saying right now, “Direct thoughts go in italics, and indirect thoughts don’t.” Duh.

Helpful as that is (and here’s a great writeup on the direct/indirect thing), it still leaves Rune Skelley at loose ends. One of the telltales for direct thought is viewpoint. We write in a very tight third-person, deliberately blurring the distinction between the POV character and the narrator. With that line blurred, we have a judgement call about when something should get italicized.

If that sounds like it’s a problem of our own creation, that’s only because it is. We do it on purpose, and we do it to ourselves. And before you ask, it’s not that we just haven’t realized it should be in first person. We’d typically end up with eight or ten first-person narrators, and that’s not how we roll.

So, okay, you think this is how it needs to be, and it makes the decision hard. Fine, it’s hard. Just make the decision and move on. Well, you’ve just gotten to the heart of the matter. (Thanks!) Making the decision.

This is one way that working with a partner becomes more complicated. A soloist author needs to fret (maybe) about where to draw the in/direct line, and then just go forth and make it happen. Whereas for us, in addition to the fretting, there’s debate and sometimes disagreement. We struggle to agree on where the line should be drawn, and then we struggle over where it actually winds up. Mostly, this problem is Kent’s fault. He admits it (that’s the first step, so maybe he’s not beyond help). He really dislikes the appearance of italicized text, and finds it very distracting. He also wants to point out that, unlike quotation marks, italics are used for multiple things — foreign words, titles, emphasis, excerpted text — all of which come up in Rune Skelley’s fiction often enough to make it an issue. Jen has a far less complicated relationship with oblique letterforms and is a paragon of patience. She just wishes we could settle on a technique and stick to it.