The View from Inside
By Dave King | September 20, 2022 |
In “Happy to Be Here,” Garrison Keillor tells how, when he started out, he hoped to write a novel every two years.
To facilitate this outpouring of the spirit, I had trained myself to think the novel, mentally narrating passages of my daily life in fictional fashion. . . . When the telephone rang, I’d think, “He hesitated inwardly – a barely perceptible moment of doubt that, as his fingers touched the cold metal, was overcome by his need to talk with someone, even a complete stranger.” I turned my life into one long interior monologue, putting myself through the wringer in order to make my novels more realistic than my own life happened to be at the time in comparison to novels I had read.
Clearly you can pay way too much attention to your characters’ inner lives. But how much is enough? When do your characters come across as flat or mystifying because your readers have no idea what’s going on inside them? When are you indulging in so much self-reflection that, as Keillor put it a little later, you’re motivating your characters right into the ground? How do you tell the difference?
One thing to watch for when you’re deciding how much to dwell on your characters’ inner life is, what’s your story about? What’s the conflict that you resolve at the end? If you’re going for straightforward action, something that resolves because of things your characters do, then you don’t have to pay quite as much attention to what’s going on inside their heads. In fact, too much internal life can cost you momentum at key moments. James Patterson’s characters go pages, sometimes chapters, without any reflective interior monologue, which is one reason his stories flow right along.
On the other hand, if your resolution depends on things your characters feel – if the key to your ending is a character’s growth or redemption or a breakthrough in love — then you’ve got to put your readers inside your characters’ heads. Your readers need to see your characters reacting to events, to think their thoughts with them, to feel their feelings. Even action novels aren’t harmed if the characters grow a little bit by the end. Your characters need an inner life.
But it’s easy to go too far – as Keillor found out. So how do you get the balance right?
First, make sure your characters’ inner life doesn’t distract from the action. Thoughts happen a lot faster than we can either write or read about them, so having your characters get caught up in complex internal deliberations in the middle of a conversation or a tense moment can throw off the pace. I suspect one reason Patterson’s characters are not very self-reflective is so he can keep up the momentum his stories are famous for. Naval gazing would be a distraction.
Also, remember, it’s your characters who are self-reflective. They shouldn’t get lost in mental digressions unless it’s in their nature to do so. And the reflection should be part of their lives throughout the whole story. When they only get reflective when you need to reveal some information, readers are going to notice.
And when your characters get lost in thought, the thoughts themselves need to be interesting.
Someone who does this kind of internal life remarkably well is Alexander McCall Smith, particularly with his Isabel Dalhousie stories (The Sunday Philosophy Club series, for those of you keeping score at home). Isabel is a professional philosopher (and how often do you hear about one of those?) and the editor of the journal Review of Applied Ethics. It’s natural for her to spend her days thinking about how people should get along with one another. Here she is, from The Right Attitude to Rain, greeting Cat, her niece, who has a habit of falling for inappropriate men. Cat has just observed that her life is settled – or stuck – in Edinburgh, where the series is set.
Isabel speared an olive with her fork. “Not necessarily,” she said. “All sorts of things can happen. You might . . . “
Cat looked at her. “Yes? I might what?”
Isabel had been thinking of marriage. That was the obvious thing that could change Cat’s life and get her out of her rut, if that’s what she thought she was in. Marriage had changed Isabel’s own life – for the worse, but not every marriage did that. One would have to be massively cynical to see marriage in that light. Were most marriages happy? Somewhere she had read that with increased participation by women in economic life – as more women began to have their own careers – so the levels of happiness in marriage went down. Women in Sweden and countries like that, where women were free and independent, were apparently less happy in their marriages than women in those countries where they had less power and participated less in the working world. Well, if that were the case, she thought, then that meant that there was something wrong with conventional marriage, rather than something wrong with freedom.
She could not tell Cat that she had been thinking of marriage, because she was not at all sure whether Cat wanted to get married. So many people no longer bothered, but just lived together, or left it for years and years before doing anything about formalities. But was that what Cat really wanted? Or did she want somebody to come along and make a public commitment to her, as people used to do with marriage, as she had done with John Liamor?
“I might what?” repeated Cat.
“You might meet somebody,” said Isabel.
That’s a lot of space between a question and answer, even given that Cat noticed the gap. But Isabel’s digressions work because she has an interesting turn of mind. They’re never trite, mundane, or boring.
Fiction is the only place aside from, possibly, brain surgery where you can let your readers into your characters’ heads to watch as they think. I don’t know of a better way to show your readers who your characters really are. It’s no wonder this interior focus can be overused. But used right, there is no better way to draw your readers in.
So whom do you know who gets interior monologue right? More interesting, who gets it wrong? How have you dealt with your own interior monologue problems?
Dave King has been editing for nearly 40 years now. He is co-author of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, a former contributing editor to Writer’s Digest, and has contributed more than 100 articles over the last 12 years to Writer Unboxed. He lives on 25 acres in rural Massachusetts with his business partner and wife, Ruth Julian, who also edits his work. His other day job, at least on Sundays, is as the organist at a Lutheran church in Greenfield, Mass.
[coffee]
A question to ask about any interior passage is, does it bring the reader something new that the outer context—what’s happening—doesn’t already make obvious?
When interior material adds something, or better still surprises us, it matters. It can deepen our understanding of a character or situation or even capture a state of being. When it becomes filler, I find that it often boils down to a character’s hand-wringing.
Interior passages are sometimes used to convey information for the reader, as say about the proper watering of daisies, but that can be dry. A more effective approach is to turn the info opinion, as say the feeling that people who do not bother to learn how to properly water daisies ought not be allowed to grow them. Give them a cactus to take care of instead and good luck to that poor cactus.
Interior monologue can be the best stuff on the page but often it’s not. I’m glad you raised this topic, Dave, every fiction writer wrestles with it, or should.
Thumbs-up to your point, Don, about the need to ask whether the interiority brings something that the reader doesn’t already know.
It goes back to my favorite essay ever, the one by George Saunders about trusting the intelligence of the reader. Could the intelligent reader feel and figure out what the character is thinking/experiencing without having to be told? One test I try to put to myself, in my own writing, is to ask whether I’m having a character talk to herself about something she already knows (which real people don’t do) because I want to make sure that my reader (whom I don’t trust) will get it. If so, delete.
A useful technique, if we really do need to let the reader into the character’s inner world, is to save that interiority and, instead, offer a kind of reflection at the end of the encounter, rather than having the character talk to himself about every single gesture or line of dialogue (credit to Sandra Scofield for this one). That allows the pace to keep going and solves the problem of “time passing” that Dave refers to. That is, the world around us doesn’t freeze while we’re busy talking to ourselves. Somehow, we have to account for what has taken place during the time the character spent reminiscing, worrying, analyzing, etc. It can be as simple as having the character realize that she’s walked all the way home, lost in thought, with no clue how she got there.
Anyway, that’s become my preference. As a reader, I get so weary of stories where the protagonist is constantly reacting and emoting. It’s like the overeager salesperson in a clothing store. I want to yell, “I get it! Leave me alone!”
And yep, a hugely important topic, especially for those of us who write in close third person. Thank you, thank you, Dave!
Good point on the use of interior monologue as a crutch to tell the readers things they already know.
I almost included this in the main article. I’ve been listening recently to old episodes of a British radio talk show — In Our Time — in which the presenter, Melvyn Bragg, brings together experts in various fields for casual, informed conversation on a wide range of topics.
The show on Masculinity in Literature featured Cora Kaplin, a feminist cultural critic. To my surprise, she said she enjoyed Hemmingway specifically because he didn’t dwell on his characters’ internal lives. That left her free to supply that internal life herself, as a reader. It was an aspect of this question I hadn’t thought of before, but I didn’t know where it belonged in the piece.
The show is worth listening to in its entirety. And the series is always fun.
And thanks for your thoughts, Don. You’re right that interior monologue needs to show something — a character’s reaction to events, some sudden revelation, an aspect of their personality — that can’t be conveyed clearly through other means. And if it’s showing things that are already shown in other ways, then it needs to go.
I like the opinion technique, as well. I’ll remember that.
Another side of this: “Style, style, find your style.”
Deep ruminating immersion is a style of writing that demands real work to pull it off — and so are all of the faster-paced styles that carry a story with less of that material. So it may be that the best guide is simply picking the level we want to be consistent at, and doing the work to master it. It’s certainly the one that makes it easier for readers and branding.
(Or if we’re determined to change that style up sometimes… Matthew Norman had his piece about that yesterday: it might be best to start with a short story or two, until we’re ready to try a whole novel in a different mode.)
I think this is true. The only caveat I’d add is that style is dependent on characterization. I can easily envision novels that would be strengthened by having both action-oriented characters and characters with a rich internal life. (There’s room here for a Myers-Briggs comment, but I’ll leave that to others more knowledgeable than myself). In fact, you could control your pace by switching between different types of characters.
As always, it’s all connected.
I’m writing YA Fantasy and so reading a lot in the genre. Teenagers ruminate a lot, but I find that the best moments of interiority are the briefest , a character’s immediate reaction to a situation or event. Interspersing these with longer passages needed to clarify a situation or change in direction (inside and out), the best writers strike a balance, which creates a rhythm. Holly Black comes to mind. When a character ruminates too long and too often, I find it distancing and sometimes boring. For me, balance is the key. Great post, Dave. Thank you!
The lengthy passage from the Isabel Dalhousie book works because she is mature, well-read, and has spent a life ruminating about interesting topics. Most teenagers haven’t done that. So you’re right, adolescent interior monologue could get tedious pretty quickly.
Dave, I loved Alexander McCalls Smith’s Ladies’ Detective series and will have to check out his Sunday philosophy books–so thank you both for the excerpt and the essay. It’s always helpful to have some interior thoughts when the actions seem opposite of what you’d expect. I struggle with this, tending toward the minimum interiority. My critique partners always want more. Btw, this play of opposites can be very funny in picture books, where the text says one thing, but the illustrations show the opposite.
Something else I didn’t find the right space for in the article is something I’ve often seen in clients. They get so caught up in the action that they forget to have their characters react. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing — as Don pointed out, a character’s reaction is often adequately captured in words and action, so thoughts aren’t needed. But there are times when thought is the best approach, and it just gets overlooked.
Actually, despite an abiding love for J. L. B. Matakone, my favorite Alexander McCall Smith series is the Von Iglefield books. Herr Professor Doctor Moritz-Maria von Iglefield of the Philology Department of the University of Regensberg , author of the monumental Portugese Irregular Verbs, is a brilliant comic creation. The books are short, pithy, and immense fun.
Dave, a great reminder about interior monologue, which you drummed into my head with a first draft manuscript. In the final edits, I got it, somewhat, I think. In the sequel, I’m way ahead of the game. If there’s a natural conflicting thought after dialogue, I put IM in. And watch the flow. In your Isabel example, the first IM paragraph was a bit long and did I need to know all of that, right then? Maybe split up elsewhere. The second paragraph seemed th flow better. I find Kristen Hannah, in The Four Winds has spot on IM. Short & emotional in reaction to a situation or what someone said to her. I try to add IM that way too. A lot to think about in getting it right. Thanks for your always insightful post. 📚🎶 Christine
And thanks for reminding me of another advantage to interior monologue. What your characters think can often contrast with what they do and say, which can make for both good comedy and interesting drama.
Thanks to everybody for all the comments. This is one of the most immediately helpful articles + comments I’ve read. I definitely struggle with this because (especially with my current WIP) I often find that writing down their thoughts, as well as giving them a gesture or small action to perform, clues ME in to what the character is feeling. A lot of those (but not all!) will be edited out in further drafts, as I gain more confidence about getting my story and characters right.
I am always impressed with the quality of the comments. They often expand the original idea in ways I couldn’t have imagined.