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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/38042
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/38042
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

My own convention is to format thoughts much like dialogue, in italics, without the quotes. So I will often start a new paragraph, in italics.

_He's trying to trick me._

I will intentionally, early on, add the 'she thought' tag, to establish this convention:

> _He's trying to trick me,_ Sandra thought.

I never write to reveal the thoughts of more than one character, so this is seldom necessary, but I still do it once in a while because it sounds right, or especially for linkage:

> _He's trying to trick me,_ Sandra thought. "I'm really not interested, okay?"

Because thoughts are often not verbal in any grammatical sense, but a mix of images and feelings and intuition, I will often describe thoughts, that lead to verbatim thoughts:

> So that would explain why Mark lied about where the money came from, but why would Allen agree with him? Allen couldn't possibly know what Mark was doing, not back then. _Unless he **did.** Unless he knew all along!_

IMO thoughts expressed grammatically are rare, so I would resort to descriptive prose for them most of the time. When there is a voice or sentence in their head, it is usually short, direct and without embellishment, a declaration and not a long description. Often it is a single word: _Jerk._ To me that is a "believable" thought, and when I want to include it, I treat it as internal dialogue; and use all the rules of dialogue, just in italics instead of quotes.

Original score: 1