JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #52
May 13, 2021
I probably shouldn’t do this because it sets a bad precedent, but a few days ago there was a link on this group to an article talking about using italics in fiction. I read it and decided I wanted to say a few things about italics. Like all orthographic conventions--like any convention at all--italics are usually deployed for specific purposes or in particular contexts. Obviously, the expectations for italics are different depending on what you’re writing or reading. For example, AP style eschews the use of italics completely: you will almost never encounter italics in a contemporary news story. But fiction is different. There is no centralized style guide. Authors should be able employ whatever style they want. Nevertheless, it’s a good idea to consider what some of the conventions are for using italics in fiction so that we know what readers expect them to signify.
1. A different voice. This use shows up primarily in two places. If there is a passage of text where the narrative voice or point of view that has been or will be telling the story changes for some reason, sometimes these differently voiced passages will be set off in italics. This includes introductory snippets, ancillary or interstitial material, or even epigraphs. There are other ways to set off these passages besides italics, such as hiatuses or other kinds of graphical demarcation, so italics are not always necessary.
Another version of using italics for a different voice are passages where, for example, a character is having an internal dialogue in two voices. This could be a case of possession or merely the dramatization of a character’s internal deliberation or wrestling with their conscience. Because the story is trying to portray two distinct voices as part of this deliberation, and because internal thoughts aren’t usually set off from the rest of the text with dialogue tags, quotation marks, or italics (see below), the character’s primary internal voice in these circumstances is differentiated from the alternate voice by putting the alternate voice in italics. There are probably better ways to accomplish this, but the use of italics does serve the purpose.
2. Foreign languages. This use is related to the use of italics for different voices, but here it’s used to signal that a word or phrase is from a foreign language, often suggesting that we should carry over all of the rich and complex meaning of its originating culture rather than the pared-down meaning that may have been borrowed into English. For example, I like the French word essai to describe attempts at expressing an idea in writing rather than the adopted word "essay." (Note here I’m using quotation marks to indicate I’m referring to "essay" as a word, not using it to refer to an essay. There are some contexts in which I’d use italics for the same effect, and others--e.g. academic papers in Linguistics--where single-quote marks are used to refer to a word rather than double-quotes. In papers and books in cognitive science I sometimes see single-quotes used to refer to the spoken or written word (a usage derived from Linguistics), while italics might signify the concept to which a word is attached to give it its meaning. Hence, e.g., 'chicken' means chicken. Lots of crossover and complexity here when we delve into various academic disciplines and other stylistic enclaves.)
3. Stress or emphasis. Italics are sometimes used in dialogue to indicate that the speaker is giving a particular word unusual stress. In most cases, we don’t need to use italics to indicate stress in dialogue, and there’s really no good reason to indicate special stress in non-dialogue prose. I sometimes see novice writers italicizing words that already have natural stress from the syntax of the sentence, and my advice is always to avoid using italics in that situation. In fact, it’s not very often necessary to indicate stress at all except in very unusual circumstances. We can usually rephrase a sentence to give the appropriate word the appropriate stress based on syntax without using italics. Every once in a while, maybe because of our own personal failings, we can’t. A couple of months ago I was writing a story in which I wanted a line of dialogue to have unusual stress on a particular word, and I hesitated for a very long time trying to rewrite it, to find some other way to express that stress without italics. As much as I tried, I kept coming back to the idea that it felt like the most natural way the character would say it. So I invented a rule for myself in that moment: I can use italics to indicate stress in dialogue only once in every one- or two-hundred-thousand-words worth of completed writing. Feel free to adopt this rule for yourself.
4. Internal thoughts. I’ve been moving from most acceptable to least acceptable use of italics in fiction through this essay, and now I’ve come to a usage we should try to avoid altogether. Sometimes we write a character’s internal thoughts and it just feels like we need to reinforce to the reader that these are thoughts coming from the character. Should we use quotation marks? Italics? Should we say, "she thought" or "she pondered" like clumsy dialogue tags? The answer is none of these. If we’re writing from a consistent point of view, the reader already knows how to attach internal thoughts to the character without attribution. We do it reflexively all the time when we read and we barely notice. The fact that we barely notice is why we hesitate when we write, convinced there must be something else that needs to be done, guideposts for the poor, confused reader. Nope. Not necessary.
5. Ok, I used Google to check to see if I missed anything, and one other use that came up was for the titles of books. If a character reads Moby Dick, you can italicize the title. Often short pieces, or pieces of larger works (Chapters, Articles, Short Stories, Songs) are given in quotation marks, and the larger works from which they come (Books, Journals, Albums) are given in italics. So the song "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band" is on the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. These are conventions, and not all style guides agree (see, e.g., AP): so, do what you want.
Sure, an italic typesetting is pretty, but when we distinguish some portions of a text from others by slantifying the letters, we’ve got to have a reason. Convention gives us a few, some useful, some less so. Whenever we write, we’re writing in a literary context that every reader builds up for themselves based on the hundreds, thousands, or scattered few things they’ve read before, and anything we do with our writing fights against all the expectations those prior works establish for any given reader. It’s in that arena that our use of italics must contend.