SFWritersU

Holy cow, Leesia - Seems like I posted that a hundred years ago :-)

Every book I've read used italics for thought -- I would use quotations only when there is actual words to put between:) Also, I have started to notice that some authors use italics and they use a different font (similar but different) to the original text. Hope this helps.

Thoughts are always in italics...in everything I've read.  

I'm seeing stuff written where even spoken dialogue is not put into quotaion marks, but is italicized. I think it has to do with HTML formatting in some esoteric way, like they use quotation marks to mean "perform a task" so actual quotation marks in the text make it all go haywire. Just a theory--I know nothing about HTML and want to know nothing about it. I learned COBOL BASIC and FORTRAN in the 1980's but still somehow missed the big picture of the computer boom. Should have gone into programming back then--I could know these machines from the ground up, I could have ruled the world. LOL Now I'm just a dummy dependent on Steve Jobs to make life hassle free like all the rest of the Apple Lemmings.

Anyway, could it be quotation marks are going out of fashion as being unsightly? They do sort of hang about a word. Italicizing is much sleeker. And if we are writing at the speed of light for our hummingbird attention span brains, we must make our words as streamlined as possible, right?

I would keep it in italics. Every book I've ever read with ESP or thoughts is always in italics. That's just my preference/opinion, though. I may be outnumbered. :-)

Thanks everyone.  I compromised and made my human's dialogue spoken and the cougar's dialogue thought in italics.  I think it works.  I'll post a few pages in the critique section if you'd like to have a look.  This has been really helpful!

Have you ever heard of a YA book series called Sweet Valley High? In the Sweet Valley High books, they use italics for thoughts. I wish I knew of a published ESP-themed novel that did the mental-conversation thing, so we could see how they did it, but the only book I can think of is nonfiction. In The Essential Edgar Cayce (by Mark Thurston), Cayce's dialog with a subject is put in bold print with section divisions, but the Cayce tapes are a whole other thing. They're not internal monologue.

Gary Paulsen wrote a book called Canyons, in which there are two characters. One lives in modern times; the other is a Native American, who is living through that tragic period when whites pushed westward, disregarding the rights of Native people. In this book, the two characters--the modern one and the one from the past--are tied to one another in an almost metaphysical way. Somehow Paulsen manages to make this connection through alternating chapters: one chapter will be from the 19th century Native American boy's POV; the next from the modern boy's POV. It was extremely effective, and by the end of the book, you understood that these two boys' lives were tied in a metaphysical way.

That may not be helpful, but I thought I'd throw it out there. Who knows, it might give you some ideas. :)

Dialogue that is thought instead of spoken should be in italics, not in quotes.  Quotation marks are for spoken dialogue.

I used italics for ESP and past life flashbacks in The Giuliana Legacy. It worked very well to cue the reader. I'm not sure that quotation marks would work as well. It may depend on how much ESP your story contains. I used it sparingly, for the most part. Good luck! ~ Alexis