I was looking at another post on short stories and came across a problem. When doing speech the following is permissible:
"Why did I do that?" he asked himself.
But if you turn that into thoughts you run into the problem of the question mark, don't you?
e.g.
Why did I do that?, he thought.
The above is wrong, so how do you do it? Do you have to seperate them? Can you drop the question mark? You don't if it's speech.
I am sure it's really simple, so if someone could tell me I would be grateful. There have been a few stories where I have wanted to tag a thought question, for pacing reasons etc. but didn't know how to do it. Consequently, I have had to work around it.
[This message has been edited by skadder (edited November 15, 2007).]
Since the person is thinking, it is implied they are thinking to themselves. Unless they are part of some hive collective.
I could be wrong about this.
Why did I do that? There is no definition of dumb that you fail to satisfy.*
*No Country for Old Men (not an exact quote... lazy... very lazy)
In fact I learned this strategy from Card, though I rarely employ it:
[something like this]
Ender brushed the back of his neck, the monitor was gone. Now I'm just like everybody else, just like Peter. No, not like Peter...
The push into first person is sort of an internal monologue and it is perfectly clear who is giving the thoughts, and it isn't the narrator, so the glide from third to first and back is seamless and natural, when done properly.
Johnny walked outside into the cold.
Should have put my coat on.
It was going to snow.
[This message has been edited by JeanneT (edited November 16, 2007).]
Alex walked down the road with his head down, kicking the soccerball ahead every few steps. I'll never be as good as Joe. And that's not fair, Joe's such a jerk. A passing car splashed water on him from the gutter. Alex shook himself off and punted the ball into the street.
quote:
Well, in a print manuscript, the traditional way to indicate italics is to underline, because it's hard to tell just from looking at italics and regular. A heavy amount of either means (or used to mean) a lot of work for the typesetters...
I just want to add amen to that. (I've done some typesetting recently and the manuscripts had italics on them, and I'm quite sure that I missed some.)