Editing Tips Every Friday on Word_Mage!

Billie Williams invited me to contriute an editing tip for her e-group every Friday. This is my first week, so I'm sharing it here, too. If you care to subscribe to Billie's group, send an e-mail to Word_Mage-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. When you introduce yourself, please tell the group how you found them. (-:

Anyway, here is the post. I thought I'd start of with something controversial. (-:

So, you're all going to hate me for this.

Avoid using italics to indicate internal thought. You probably don't have to use them. You will be writing from a specific POV and your reader will know those words are in that character's head anyway. Plus, there are several ways to get around having to use them that are part of a skilled fiction writer's stable of writing techniques. It's not that exceptions can't be made. (All rules were made to be broken.) But don't break guidelines or rules unless you have a really, really, really good reason for doing so.

Caveat: "Because I like it that way," is not a good enough rule.

Caveat #2: Neither is, "My reader won't understand. I'm trying to make it easy on my reader." Your reader may have read Anna Karenina. Not easy reading. No italics. We all know your reader understood it. I mean, 1,000,000 Oprah fans can't all be geniuses. Smart, but not geniuses. So I guess that's another tip. Trust your reader to be a reasonably good at what she/he does which is to read.

More to come later on how to make internal thought work without italics. Actually, how to make internal thought work well. Maybe even some related topics on something like stream of consciousness. How does that sound? (-: