Aha, she thought…

Back when I wore a younger man’s clothes and was just learning the basics of writing fiction, I remember writing something like this:

"Aha," she thought.

My soon-to-be-friend-and-mentor Tim informed me that I should drop the quotes and use italics to show the internal thoughts of characters. Eager to learn, his advice caused me to write corrected copy:

Aha, she thought.

I’m sure this resulted in gales of laughter from Tim, but our conversation was a virtual one on WDC so I didn’t get to hear his nonverbal response. Instead, he told me that thought tags—the “she thought” above—were not used because the italics alone told the reader this was an internal thought of the point of view character.

Of course, that led to questions about point of view, but that’s for another newsletter. This one is about showing internal thoughts of your point-of-view character while writing in third person limited. In particular, we will suppose that the narrative uses the third person, written using the fictional past, to recount events. The author chooses one character to provide the point of view. The idea is that readers are then limited to knowing what that character senses and thinks. Readers then experience the story through a fictional dream, via what the POV character senses, feels, and thinks. Readers meet the other characters through their words and deeds as observed by the POV character. Readers can only infer the emotions and sensations of the other characters based on these observations.

An important feature of third person limited is that there are two voices involved in revealing what’s happening: there’s the author’s voice and the point-of-view character’s voice. In some ways, the POV character’s voice dominates. For example, if your POV character is mentally diminished, as in the first part of The Sound and the Fury, then the author’s voice will reflect that. Similarly, if the POV character is a child, the author will be unlikely use a word like perspicacious since a child would not use such a word. In any case, by directly showing the POV character’s words in both thoughts and dialogue, we hear the POV character’s voice distinct from the narrator’s voice.

To see how this relates to showing the POV characters internal thoughts, some examples might be helpful. Suppose our point of view character, Ruby, is jogging on a hot, sunny day. Then we might write something like:

Ruby squinted at the sun and sweat burned her eyes. This blasted heat is killing me. What was I thinking?

This is direct discourse since it quotes Ruby’s thoughts word-for-word. The first sentence is the author, setting the scene and establishing Ruby as the POV character. The italics clearly mark the places where Ruby’s voice replaces that of the narrator.

On the other hand, we might report what she is thinking instead of directly quoting her.

Ruby squinted at the sun and sweat burned her eyes. She reflected that heat was killing her and wondered what she’d been thinking.

This second example conveys the same information, but we hear only the narrator’s voice. This is indirect discourse, since we don’t learn Ruby’s thoughts directly.

Either direct discourse or indirect discourse can be effective at revealing Ruby’s thoughts. With direct discourse, however, the jump from the author’s voice to Ruby’s internal voice runs the risk of breaking the always fragile fictional dream playing in the reader’s head. But indirect discourse tells the reader what Ruby is thinking rather than showing it, and we all know that showing is stronger than telling.

There’s a third alternative to direct and indirect discourse, kind of a mixed mode. Suppose, to continue our example, we’d written:

Ruby squinted at the sun and sweat burned her eyes. This blasted heat was killing her. What’d she been thinking?

Here, we’ve retained the feel of Ruby’s thoughts, including the “blasted” heat. But we’ve replaced first person with third person and present tense with fictional past. We haven’t broken the narrative stream, but Ruby’s voice, like that of the Gingerbread Man, is now free of the disrupting changes marked by italics, tense, and person. In this sense, then, it’s free indirect discourse.

In the final example, no punctuation delimits the change from the voice of the author to that of the character. The reader, via the fictional dream, is already in Ruby’s head, so when the narrative seems to hover between the author’s voice and Ruby’s, the reader’s imagination provides the seamless glue that holds things together. In particular, the author, the POV character, and the reader must work together to make this technique effective.

Free indirect discourse has been around at least since Flaubert and Jane Austin. Modernist authors like Virginia Woolf, Faulkner, and Hemingway used it. Elmore Leonard was a master at this technique.

Free indirect discourse is a specialized technique. Direct and reported discourse have a place. For free indirect discourse to work, the author must engage the reader with the POV character in a deep and sustained way. In third person limited, it’s not necessary to constantly immerse the reader in the emotions and sensations of the POV character; all that’s required is to establish the point of view. Absent that sustained immersion, free indirect discourse might be confusing or might even appear to be an omniscient narrator intruding to tell the readers stuff, so in this case implicit or reported discourse might be better.

But if the author pays attention and takes the reader on a deep dive into the POV character’s head, free indirect discourse is a good way to solidify point of view and increase the intimacy and immediacy of the fictional world.