Sometimes a disagreement gives me pause to explore how I see a certain style of writing and why. In this case, a member of my critique group and I differed on the use of italics for inner dialogue, or thoughts. He hates them. I use them. It has caused some strong discussion. (Yes, we remain good friends.)
I know what I like, how I write and what I like to see when I read. Still, in the interest of fairness and to educate myself further I did a little research. Continue reading “The “Rules” on Writing Inner Thoughts in Books”
If you’re like me, you have different groups of friends, both in real life and on Facebook. I have my bookish friends (that’s you guys), my music friends (music fans, music writers, and a few actual musicians), my poker buddies, family, and the list goes on and on. As a rule, these groups don’t intersect very often, and odds are that people in group A don’t even realize that you’re involved in subject B. Twice lately I’ve seen someone from a group other than my bookish friends talking about a book they’re writing or hoping to see published, and my immediate thought is, “I wonder if they know …” After writing a couple of emails that were way too long, I realized it would be great if I could just send them a link saying “read this.” Even better, those IU readers who don’t think my take is too far out there can do the same.
A few years ago, I detailed my first experience with 
My main difficulty when I switched from writing plays to novels was my use of pauses. It took me a long time to figure out that the time sense of a person conversing in real life or watching a play is very different from the time sense of someone reading prose. And that has repercussions in novel writing and the use of punctuation.