Activity

Well, I was going to cover r-m-archer and Ethryndal’s question today, but I think I should take a week more to think about it. In the meantime, we’re going to cover Kate’s question: how does one write powerful, non-tellish internal monologue?

This is actually one of my favorite topics, so you might get a long lesson.

When you really master internal monologue, you build massive empathy between your reader and the character. Unfortunately, most of the internal monologue you see in books today is very poor and full of telling. This makes it hard for us authors since there aren’t many good examples to look to. This leads to my first point.

Generally, don’t look to other books for examples — look to your own internal monologue. Yes, almost every novel has some really good internal monologue, but most of it will be sub par. (I’ll give some examples of bad internal monologue below.) Your own monologue though is a great example to follow. Sure, your IM is non-stop while you only want to share your character’s IM when fitting and there are other differences between your IM and a character’s IM, but one thing you can count on: your IM is realistic and meaningful.

When you study your own IM, there are a couple things I think you’ll find.

• You’re constantly making comparisons.
• You generally take in the present without much thought but you think a lot about the future and the past. For instance, you walk into the kitchen and smell breakfast. You start thinking about what you need to do to help with breakfast then you start thinking about how it is going to taste. That reminds you of a really good breakfast you had last week when your best friend was over. This gets you thinking about when you could invite your friend over again. Past, future, past, future. This is how we think when we are processing life, which we do most of the time.
• When we do stop to think about the present, it is generally because it is affecting our emotions or philosophy. We listen to the powerful music and bask in it. We see the poor beggar and feel compassion. Our dogmas are challenged and we need to reconsider what we believe. We notice the present during impact moments.
• You do focus on others a good deal, but when you do, you always bring it around back to yourself. How should I react? Am I better or worse than this person? Etc.
• OKAY! Here’s your homework for this week. Study your own internal monologue and look for patterns. Do you notice anything I didn’t cover? Report back here and share your amazing discovery with the rest of us!

Another thing about our IM is that we rarely think in terms of conclusions about what we are specifically analyzing. We do make “conclusions”–it’s twelve o’clock, my wife is going to yell at me, I like Spain better than France, etc–but these are more observations than conclusions. If we’re in a dark, abandoned, dilapidated house at midnight alone and it sounds like there is someone else in the house, would we hear these thoughts rush through our mind: “Danger! Danger! I need to get out right away!”? Probably not, though this the type of IM what we might see in your average novel. Instead, our thoughts would probably sound something more like this: “What was that?! Oh, no… I did not just imagine that. The steps are — whatever it is is between me and the steps. Okay Daeus, don’t think about the hight. It’s two stories, but you’re going to be okay.” You see, in this situation, what are we analyzing? We’re analyzing a threat. ‘Danger’ and ‘I need to get out right away’ are both conclusions about that threat. In the second example, I avoided drawing conclusions about what I was analyzing–the threat–and instead processed things related to the threat: was the noise that made me feel threatened real or imagined? What are my routes out of here? Which route makes the most sense? You see, I’m processing things here, I’m not drawing conclusions–at least not about the subject that is being analyzed. The threat is definitely the subject of this scene, but we don’t touch it directly. We “beat around the bush” as I like to call it. I’ll talk a little more about beating around the bush in just a moment, but first I want to point something out.

Hopefully you agreed with me that the second example where I was stuck in the creepy house was much better, but it isn’t something I’d copy and paste into a book I was writing. Why? Because it’s just internal monologue. IM is, well, internal, and while the mind is fascinating, it isn’t visual. We need a good mix of the internal and the external. Generally speaking, make sure to break up IM with some body language, dialogue, description, etc.

Here’s how that might look.

The floorboards creaked. What was that?! Oh, no… I did not just imagine that. Heart pounding hard enough to burst, I froze. The steps are — whatever it is is between me and the steps. Okay Daeus, don’t think about the hight. It’s two stories, but you’re going to be okay.

Okay, back to beating around the bush.

When you’re starting off with beating around the bush, it might be a little difficult, so you can think about it in terms of degrees. Let me explain.

Your average IM in a novel is very un-subtle. You might have something like this:

Squire Po stomped out of the room. Sir Claudius Jesuvius Fredicus was impossible to deal with. He never listened to him! Po didn’t know how he was going to cope.

Full of conclusions, right? It also deals a lot with the present, but Squire Po is processing, so he is more likely to be thinking about the future or maybe the past. We want to be more subtle, but how subtle? Here are four examples with increasing subtlety.

1. Squire Po stomped out of the room. Sir Claudius Jesuvius Fredicus was impossible to deal with. He never listened to him! Po didn’t know how he was going to cope.
2. Squire Po stomped out of the room. Sir Claudius Jesuvius Freidcus was a wretch. He hadn’t even let him explain how the horse had gotten drunk! How did the other squires deal with him?
3. Squire Po stomped out of the room. Was this what Pickylanders called chivalry? Sir Claudius Jesuvius Freidcus was only ten years older than him. And that difference made him a slave? Po stopped in front of Mad Jilly’s wash bucket and pulled back his leg, starting to swing. His leg went limp and he put it down, hanging his head. What would his father say if he knew he handled situations by kicking buckets? He’d probably bring him over to the old stump and have long talk with him. It was easier to handle life when you had someone to talk it through with. “No words more! Out of my site squire…” Po trudged onward. Where was Mad Jilly? Maybe she would talk.
4. Squire Po stomped out of the room. When he had first signed up to be a squire, he had picked between Sir Claudius Jesuvius Freidcus, Sir Buf, Sir Ced, and Sir Lim. He had picked the one with more words in his name. It sounded noble. He sighed. Alas! Many words were not always a good thing. The cliffs could receive a constant beating from the waves, but they were very hardy. Words. I have a few of those in mind. Hopefully they would actually be effective. Hopeful wishes.  Did he think his knight was some clay that would conform to his ideals? He passed Squire Blub and scowed. How could that boy have a smile on his face? Po walked outside. There was a cliff nearby, wasn’t there? One with sharp rocks at the bottom?

Okay, these are all a bit melodramatic, but ignore that for now. Example one is very basic and tell-ish, while example four is almost hard to follow. Beating around the bush is all about subtlety, but sometimes you can beat so far around the bush that the bush is out of site. 😛  What we want to write is IM that is as subtle as possible while still being easy to follow. Of these four examples, one is not subtle at all, two is an improvement, four is too hard to follow, and three is just about right.

That’s how you beat around the bush.

@mcnoggin @cindy @kate @ethryndal @elizabeth @girlsetfree @theresa-play @r-m-archer @literatureforthelight @livgiordano @lady-iliara @m_corinnemusic @j-parkhurst @gabbyj @sierra @cassandraia