: Re: How should I format a point-of-view character's thoughts? Can you use italics in first person if you are showing the main character's inner thoughts even if the main character is also the narrator?

@Shanna875

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If the thought interrupts the description the way a piece of dialogue does, you can italicize. (Some writers use quotation marks instead, while still others capitalize the thought like a quotation, but without the quote marks.)

The point of italics is to separate the character's thought from the rest of the text and avoid any confusion between what's going on in the character's mind and what's happening in the "real" world around him.

In your case, it looks like the thoughts are part of the flow of the narration, so you don't need to separate them with italics. (If you get too heavy with the italics, it can get annoying for the reader.) However, for added clarity, you could perhaps put the thoughts in a separate paragraph from the more descriptive passages.

He began pacing in circles.

Where had he come from? Did he find Burns? And if so, did Zion and
Burns have a fight over the ruined tank?

If you don't have too many of these narrator thoughts, then by all means italicize them and run the paragraphs together.

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