Today I got to talking with my husband about my writing and how I’m trying to develop and discover what exactly makes up my style. (I posted about this the other day.) The subject of the most recent short story came up and I waffled for a while on what I want to do about thoughts/internal monologue. When you have third person POV stories, when the narration is close to the characters you generally get italicized thoughts to get into the head of the POV character. This works great for those stories. Not so great for mine. It felt clumsy and weird.

And that’s where I started waffling. Now that I’m realizing that my entire narration is essentially the voice of the POV character, it felt really silly to have these random moments of italicized thoughts when the paragraphs above and below this were the same voice, just using names and he/she/they instead of “I” and “_ thought”.

Basically it’s the difference between something like:

Oh Creators, Firedrake thought. I’m never seeing that bag again and Adair's lost the ridiculous animal for good. No loss there, anyway.

and:

Oh Creators. Firedrake was never seeing that bag again and Adair had lost the ridiculous animal for good. No loss there, anyway.

Not the best examples, but the only one where I could remember the earlier version, lol. The first is how things usually get written in 3rd person POV, the second is how I’m going to try approaching things. I know this isn’t standard because most 3rd person POV stories have a kind of separate narrator from the main character. This probably wouldn’t work if I was going for anything remotely serious, but I feel like the narrative picking up the sarcasm of one POV character and the dopiness of another POV character will add to the lighthearted/silliness of it all. I don’t like 1st person, so I think this probably a good compromise.

I have no idea how much sense this makes, but basically what this boils down to is that I’m going to stop using italicized thoughts and just make sure the narrative conveys the voice of the POV character. (Although I’ll stick with internal thoughts if I write a story where the narrative isn’t the voice of the MC.) We’ll see how well this turns out as I start adjusting the novels to be this way and get more drafts completed. :)

~Meri