Your turn to think

There are many things you should never know your mother has, thought Lindsey. And an alligator pit is one of them. It was about twenty feet in diameter, and Lindsey had no idea how deep it was. There were four alligators in the bottom, which Lindsey could only assume would be enormous when viewed up close. But she tried not to think about it. Their sharp teeth, their scaly hides, their dead-looking eyes, or the way she had seen them swallow their food the one time she had consented to watching her mother feed them.

But what can you do? she wondered. She could drop a stick of dynamite into the pit, she supposed. But where would a twelve-year-old girl get a stick of dynamite? "Wouldn't work," she said aloud.

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Halt! No, this isn't a real story. I randomly wrote it out to make a point about internal conversations like this. Notice she's thinking to herself, the author is narrating, and she's talking to herself out loud. Did scenes like this ever bother anyone else? Well, I can't really say they bother me, I guess. I mean, it works. The reader gets the information they need, and they get it in conversation form, which is nice and doesn't require a personality-killing conversation or the introduction of an extra character for the sole purpose of explaining about, in this case, the alligator pit. It transmits the information better than just saying "Lindsey's mother had an alligator pit and Lindsey was scared of it." So I guess it's not necessarily that bad. But I still don't think highly of the method. It makes the story less believable because seriously, who thinks like that?

Anyone else have any thoughts?