The Mechanics of Writing Fiction

[fems]

Italics are the normal way to do that if you're writing your fiction in English. So to an audience whose native language is English, it would look perfectly normal, and we might find it odd or even hard to understand if you did something different.

Out of curiosity, what's the normal way to do it in your native language?

Okay, thanks. I guess I'm going to have to italicize (?) a few lines then... Would this also be the case for a single word, like when someone refers to the stargate as 'chaapa'ai' or something?

In my native language it's simply written the same way as the rest of the story, so it's not singled out. This isn't always the case in a text/article, though: in that case the foreign word(s) may be italicized or put between quotation marks and/or given a brief explanation as long as it's a word that's most likely unknown to the majority of your audience. You're not obligated to do so, although sometimes (as an alternative) a footnote would be used and I have seen this in a few books too, when the language isn't translated or the meaning made clear in another way in the story itself.


EDIT:

Oh and there was another, similar, question I had a while ago: do thoughts have to be italicized in English fiction? As in "at least that was good news, she thought to herself" or is the "she thought to herself" enough to mark the previous words as thoughts?

ETA:
I can't believe I'm not subscribed to this thread!

*goes to fix mistake*

Okay, I was (and now am again) subscribed to this thread but just didn't get a notification when you responded...

[SF_and_Coffee]

A single word like chappa-ai or anything else would also be italicized. As for thoughts, it depends. Most writers will italicize anything that seems like internal speech, such as:

He turned his attention to what must be the control unit for the Stargate. I wonder what would happen if I just pressed symbols at random? After a moment's consideration, he abandoned the idea.

But in other cases, thoughts can be done without italics, especially if they're not written in quite the form of internal speech:

She'd accidentally pressed the red button, but nothing happened. Maybe she hadn't pressed it hard enough, or perhaps it took more than one push to make the machine respond. Well, that was fortunate, she supposed.

The difference between these two examples is that in the first one, the character's internal thought is in present-tense and resembles internal dialogue he has with himself. Those are best in italics. The second example has the thought in past tense, same as the rest of the passage, and thus does not represent internal dialogue, so it doesn't take italics.

In your example, I would actually leave out "she thought to herself" altogether, and would not use italics, because you have the thought in past tense so it isn't internal dialogue the character is having with herself in realtime.

Have I made any sense here, or just muddied the waters further? I can explain in more detail if need be.

[fems]

Nope, that's pretty clear. I've decided to leave the editing of previous chapters (I'm at 12 now) for later until I've either made a lot of headway or finished the story because I'm afraid I'll get stuck in editing mode otherwise, but I shall make a note about re-evaluating the "thought to herself" tag to see if I've used it [past tense in thoughts] at other times too (this was just an example I made up). The first two examples you gave are pretty much how I would have written both, too.

Thanks for the help, SF&C. I'd green you but I can't

[SF_and_Coffee]

Happy to help! And thanks for the imaginary green!

[Whytewytch]

Just checking in and saw this thread had a response. Looks like SF&C helped you already fems, but I just wanted to echo her so you have more than one opinion.

As to the "she thought to herself" tag, I would definitely either remove it or change it to "she thought", leaving out the "to herself". Unless she's a psychic and projecting, who else is she going to think to? Dialogue tags of this sort can be tricky--you want enough to convey what's going on, but not so much that you bog your readers down. In the example, you could even use action to get the feelings across.

She'd accidentally pressed the red button, but nothing happened. Maybe she hadn't pressed it hard enough, or perhaps it took more than one push to make the machine respond. She blew out the breath she'd been holding and unclenched her fists.

It's a poor example, as I haven't written word one in a while, but you get the idea.