Editing, he thought, is tricky

Editing Housesitting has been an on-off task the last couple of months, but now I'm trying to get serious.

For me, editing involves re-reading what I've written (which is pretty obvious I guess, but it's step one) and then usually seeing if anything jumps out at me as being grammatically shoddy or just clumsy. Bad habits are easy to get into while writing, and it's hard to see this stuff in the heat of the moment.

Housesitting contains a lot of inner thoughts, as it's a very personal story, told almost entirely from one point of view. Because of that, I guess I felt it was necessary to delineate the main character's thoughts a lot. In some novels, writers use stylistic tropes to indicate thoughts. Frank Herbert, for example, famously had all of his characters think in italics. As there were lots of telepathic conversations in the Dune series, it made some sense.

I've done the italics thing myself, but I'm not a fan of it. I'm also not a fan of consistent 'muttering under the breath' or actual sentences being quoted as thoughts. So while writing, I found myself using the words 'he thought' a lot; but over time, and especially while re-reading, I discovered that I'd started to use it as punctuation, almost. Looking over the 'final' draft it's apparent now that frankly, most of the time when I use the phrase 'he thought' it's not needed.

So now, I'm editing the whole thing to try and remove it wherever it doesn't seem to be necessary. Take this random example with 'he thought' included. Billy is fantasizing about being exposed to... well, you'll find out:

He knew this was dangerous too, foolish even, but the idea of being exposed here somehow fitted with his fantasy scenario, where in front of Kate, his deception known, he would reach up and strip away his wig. She would gasp, he thought, her hand raised to her face in shock, but he wouldn’t stop there, he would dig his fingertips into his scalp, and find the edge of his mask... and pull downwards. Kate’s eyes would widen even further, she couldn’t possibly believe what she was seeing - and then the mask would be off, Linda would be gone, Billy would be exposed - 

It's easy to miss, but somehow, subtly, that he thought breaks the flow of the paragraph. It's also completely unneeded; I've already established, through words like 'knew' and 'fantasy scenario' that we're inside his head. So the same para without the 'he thought':

He knew this was dangerous too, foolish even, but the idea of being exposed here somehow fitted with his fantasy scenario, where in front of Kate, his deception known, he would reach up and strip away his wig. She would gasp, her hand raised to her face in shock, but he wouldn’t stop there, he would dig his fingertips into his scalp, and find the edge of his mask... and pull downwards. Kate’s eyes would widen even further, she couldn’t possibly believe what she was seeing - and then the mask would be off, Linda would be gone, Billy would be exposed - 

... works a lot better, no? It's subtle, for sure... but it helps. Of course, this doesn't mean every instance of 'he thought' is being cut from the book. There's plenty of places it's required. But, hopefully, by making sure through good writing that the reader knows we're inside the character's head... I can stop telling them that's the case every few paragraphs.