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Writing styles evolve. The novels of 50 or 60 years ago—think Agatha Christie, John Steinbeck, or Harper Lee—often look and feel different on the page than contemporary fiction. One notable shift is how authors handle internal dialogue or character thoughts.
While older novels frequently used italics to express thoughts, modern authors and editors are more divided. The question remains: Should you use italics to show what a character is thinking?
Let’s break down the pros and cons of using italics for character thoughts, how formatting trends have changed over time, and what today’s writers should consider when choosing a stylistic approach.
🔍 The Historical Use of Italics in Fiction Writing
In the mid-20th century, the use of italics to denote a character’s unspoken thoughts was standard practice. Classic writers like Agatha Christie or Ray Bradbury used italics as a visual cue, helping readers distinguish between narrative voice, dialogue, and internal musings.
In these decades, fiction writing was often more “formal” in tone, with a clear structure for punctuation, grammar, and formatting. Readers expected to see italics signaling a thought—just as they expected quotation marks around spoken dialogue.
However, modern fiction has become more fluid. With the rise of close third-person and first-person narratives, many contemporary writers have moved away from formatting thoughts in italics. Instead, they integrate thoughts seamlessly into the narrative, often without any visual markers.
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Have you ever read second-person fiction? While second-person fiction isn’t nearly as popular as third-person or first-person fiction, putting the reader in the perspective of the main character is something done on occasion. You are probably mostly familiar with second-person perspective as what is used in “Choose Your Own Adventure Books.” But, there are lots of popular books that have used this perspective.
Did you know that big-name authors such as William Faulkner and Leo Tolstoy have dabbled with it in the past? Self-help books often use the second-person perspective, too. However, it’s very hard to write from this perspective well. So, you may ask, what are the pros and cons of using second-person perspective in your own fiction?
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Defining Character Traits for Fiction Novels When it comes to writing a novel, it takes more than plot. You have to have relatable characters, which means they should not be perfect, and they should not conform to the standard. This means that you do not want to create the perfect “good” character, and you do not want to create a 100 percent evil character. Instead, you should strive for a balance. A good character can be flawed, and an evil character can have some good traits. For these reasons, it’s important to define positive and negative character traits either prior to writing the novel or at some point during the writing process.
Types of Character Traits
Character traits can fall into many different categories, including physical, emotional and psychological. The traits you choose may depend on the type of character you are creating or the overall theme of your fiction novel.
Physical Traits
The physical traits of your characters include their height, eye color, hair color, tattoos and body modifications, but you can go beyond this and give your characters certain physical defects, like one limb shorter than the other, a defined limp from an old injury and even ailments that limit their physical movements. Don’t be afraid to give your characters physical flaws or even a chronic illness or condition because they can enhance the appeal of the book, deepen the writing and even contribute to the subplots or main plot.
Emotional Traits
When we think of emotions, we tend to think of the basics, happy, sad, angry, in love and jealous or greedy. While these are a good start, don’t forget about the lesser tackled emotions and emotional malfunctions, including being impulsive, having anger management disorders, depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorders and even drug and alcohol dependency. How a character deals with or doesn’t deal with their emotional hang-ups can make for great writing. For example, if your character has a drug addiction, like Avia, in AVIA I – Thunderstorms and .45s, getting that next fix may be just as important to your character as solving or committing the crime and create a conflicting duality in goals and actions that can lead to interesting plot twists.
Psychological Traits
Your character’s psychological traits make up his or her personality. Think of these as they relate to the Meijer Briggs Personality test. These are the traits that make your character tick, define how they relate to others and can even impact actions. The Meijer Briggs personality test defines 16 different types of personalities. For example, writers tend to be introverts. They like to be left alone with their thoughts. For that reason, most writers fall under INTJ (The Mastermind), INFP (The Idealist) and ISFP (The Composer). Of course, this doesn’t mean that your introverted self or character can’t have moments of extroversion, but it is something to keep in mind because extroversion for an introverted person or character leads to exhaustion and a need to “recharge” alone. Knowing your character's personality type can define the actions your character takes when confronted with challenges or problems and greatly enhance the depth and breadth of your character development and new novel.
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Let’s talk about first-person fiction. These are the stories that are written with the pronoun “I” verses he or she. That’s self-explanatory – right? We’re used to reading first person in blogs, journals and memoirs. After all, you probably don’t want to refer to yourself in third person very often. What’s less common but becoming more common are fiction books written in first person.
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For any new writer, there is a guide in which to follow known as the five draft method. For those of us who have followed this method, we have come to know the steps quite well. There is, of course, the first draft which is more or less dumping ideas onto a page, sort of a vomit stage, second draft which is making sense of it all perhaps even creating an outline to follow for the story, the third which is starting to put the novel into manuscript form creating the rough draft, the forth which is basically doing surgery where grammar punctuation along with overall flow of novel is looked over and edited. Then comes what many consider the most critical stage of all, the fifth and final draft. This one is perhaps the most crucial of them all and in doing it there are some helpful hints that could keep a writer on task.
Read more: How to Write the Fifth and Final Draft of a Novel