Thread: Characters thought, italic or speech marks?

I'm having a problem here. When I write a character;s thought in the middle of a paragraph, should I put them in speech marks or italics? Is is an example

Waking up in the middle of the night, he turns around. Where am I? What is this place? He keep thinking about that for a while

or

Waking up in the middle of the night, he turns around. "Where am I? What is this place?" He keep thinking about that for a while

which one is correct and preferable way to express a thought?

Some italics. Some use single quotation marks. Some use double quotation marks. I use and prefer italics because quotation marks, to me, denote speech.

I don't see a problem with italics. Speech marks are for speech. You might as easily just put his thoughts into the narrative, so

Waking up in the middle of the night, he turns around. Where am I? What is this place? He keep thinking about that for a while

becomes something a little like:

Waking up in the middle of the night, he turns around. He wonders where he is. (and then continue to describe why he doesn't know where he is) The room is dark and his head is still spinning from too much whiskey. He can't remember how he fared at the poker game and doesn't know where he's crashed.



I'd forgotten how much I dislike writing or reading in the present tense, but that's another thing completely.

I was just having this conversation two days ago. I like italics, but in the new age of writing I learned that it is important to remember to code for it when uploading work to things like Wordpress. Otherwise it is lost and can cause a reader to become confused.

I do italics mixed with single quotations.

'The sun sure is bright,' thought James as he peered into it, considering for the first time that he should listen to his mother.

Purely italics here, I don't ever use single quotes in fiction. Double are purely for speech, spoken out loud.

Damn, he thought, what do I do now?

"Damn," he said, "what do I do now?"

Simple and effective, personally.

I also prefer italics, quotations would be confusing because everyone would think the character was talking. As for single quotes... I don't know, you could try and do it for uniqueness, I suppose. Italics is the way to go for most people, though (:

For a thought I would consider<new line> parentheses
example:
I woke up in a strange way,
(where am I... what day is it)
brushing the dust off I made my way toward the exit.