Free indirect discourse

You want the reader inside a character's head, but the machinery keeps showing. Italicized thought interrupts the narration's flow. A tag like "she thought" pins the sentence down and adds a beat of delay. Plain narration avoids both problems and stays outside the character, cool and distant. Free indirect discourse is the fourth option, and if you write close third person, it is probably already happening in your prose whether or not you have named it.

What it is

Free indirect discourse is third-person narration that has soaked up a character's voice: the character's judgments, diction and rhythm, delivered in the third person without quotation marks, italics or a reporting tag. Wikipedia's article on the technique defines it as writing "a character's first-person thoughts in the voice of the third-person narrator", and notes that it drops quotation marks and introductory expressions such as "he asked" or "she said". The sentence stays grammatically third person while the mind inside it is the character's. Gerard Genette's formulation, quoted in the same article: "the narrator takes on the speech of the character, or, if one prefers, the character speaks through the voice of the narrator."

Three modes on one page

• Plain narration. The narrator reports from outside: "She was annoyed that he was late again." Accurate, and at arm's length.
• Direct thought. Tagged or set off: "Why is he always late when it matters? she thought." Close, but the tag puts the thought in a display case.
• Free indirect discourse. "He was late again. Of course he was. He was always late when it mattered." Same facts, no tag, no italics, no exit from the narration. The irritation is hers; the grammar is the narrator's; the reader hears one voice doing both jobs.

Why it is the workhorse of close third

Writers.com's guide calls it "a narrative technique that only applies to the third person point-of-view": "It is when the narrator writes from the third person perspective with the intimacy of the first person." That is precisely the bargain deep limited point of view offers, and free indirect discourse is how the page delivers it sentence by sentence. You keep third person's flexibility of tone and distance, and gain first person's intimacy without handing the whole book to an "I". It also carries show, don't tell into the narration itself: instead of announcing that she was furious, the narration runs her fury through its own syntax, and the reader infers the feeling from the voice.

The technique has a real family tree. The Wikipedia article credits Goethe and Jane Austen as the first novelists to use it consistently (citing the scholar Roy Pascal), points to Flaubert's Madame Bovary as its sustained exploitation, and follows it through Virginia Woolf and James Joyce into literary modernism. You meet it wherever the narration starts sounding like the person being narrated, from Austen's ironies to Woolf's interiors.

It is not head-hopping

Because both involve voice inside third-person narration, free indirect discourse is sometimes confused with head-hopping. They are opposites. Free indirect discourse deepens a declared viewpoint: one mind's language saturates the narration of that mind's scene. Head-hopping is an unmarked mid-scene jump into somebody else's private thoughts, and it reads as a slip precisely because the scene's declared owner is still on stage. If a paragraph suddenly carries a second character's diction and judgments with no scene break, that is head-hopping. Free indirect discourse never changes whose head you are in; it only turns up that head's volume.

How to write it, and how to revise it

1. Stay third person in grammar, first person in attitude. Keep he, she, they and the past tense; let vocabulary, rhythm and judgment belong to the character.
2. Cut the tags. Search the draft for "she thought", "he wondered", "she realized". Most are removable: if the sentence already sounds like the character, the tag is scaffolding left standing.
3. Run the person-swap test. Rewrite a suspect passage in the first person. If it reads as natural interior monologue, it is genuine free indirect discourse. If it reads as the author explaining, rewrite it in the character's voice or cut it.
4. Watch for voice bleed. Each viewpoint character should color the prose differently. If every viewpoint in a rotating book sounds identical in free indirect passages, the voice is the author's, not the characters'.
5. Keep it distinct from stream of consciousness. Writers.com draws this line too: stream of consciousness transcribes thought raw and unfiltered in real time, while free indirect style passes the same material through a shaped, stylized filter. The two can coexist, but they are different tools.

The short form of all of it: the narration is the character, thinking, in the third person. The glossary entry on free indirect discourse keeps the one-line version, and the choosing of a viewpoint in the first place has its own guide.