Hi, I’ve got a question for you. When was the last time you italicized a character’s inner thoughts? When was the last time you read another author who italicized a character’s inner thoughts? I legitimately think I may have gone a lifetime, that’s 37 years so far, without seeing it. I cannot remember ever picking up a book when I was young, or when I was middle aged, and seeing a character’s inner thoughts italicized. If I had, I would have wondered if there was something wrong with the guy who wrote this. Like, “did he have a stroke” wrong.

I have, since May, had three people tell me that inner thoughts should be italicized. I read one of their books, and sure enough, they did it. It was really annoying, but they did it. It was really strange to see, but since then, I’ve had a beta reader and an independent publisher say the same thing. This is despite the fact that I don’t think I’ve ever heard this rule before, and I can’t remember any authors that actually followed it. I checked various online dictionaries, and they said you could italicize inner thoughts, though there were other ways to set them off. Generally, you could italicize or you could add a “thought” tag like “she thought”‘ or “she mused.”

I just find the whole idea to be bizarre. Italicization exists to emphasize that which is important. Assuredly, not every stray thought you have is important. I can vouch that most of mine are relatively asinine. Whenever I actually read this guy’s book where he italicized every direct thought every character had for 500 pages, I just stopped noticing the italicization. Overuse causes different fonts to lose any meaning. And this guy wrote about some very “thoughtful” people.

I’m not doing this. This is one rule of “good” writing I’m not following. I applied to that independent publisher and kept my thought unitalicized. It’s dumb, and I’m not doing it. I feel like this rule of writing was created by a committee of English professors meeting in Antartica at 2 am on Groundhog’s Day with the specific intent of tripping people up. You can take your italicization and shove it.