Characters that leap off the page: Using interiority to show your characters' inner world
Have you ever heard the phrase, “I want a book where the characters leap right off the page?” If you’ve ever queried before or researched agents, I’m sure you have. After all, isn’t that what everyone wants in a book?
It can be so frustrating to read an abstract goalpost like “give me a character that leaps off the page,” because obviously you, yourself, feel like your character does that, but how do you know other people will feel the same?
Besides pacing, dialogue, and world-building, there is another little-talked-about skill in the realm of writing that you should add to your toolbox immediately if you are looking for that special something that will make your characters leap off the page: Interiority.
Interiority shows up on the page as a character’s inner thoughts. Those can be in narrative, or in literal written out sentences as if their mind is having a monologue that no one can hear but the reader.
In my own writing, I strive for as much interiority as possible. I portray protagonists with generalized anxiety disorder and other mental illnesses, so getting the inner workings of their mind on the page is important to me. But interiority also serves functions of delineating your characters’ motivations and, if done well, can serve as world building and character backstory. How much interiority a work uses is defined by many things, including length, genre, and the author’s personal preferences.
AN ANECDOTE
It only occurred to me recently that other people might not have the same type of interiority I had. I was watching the pilot episode of True Blood with some friends. In one of the first scenes, a waitress character has telepathy–she can read other people’s minds. She goes up to a man, asking, “What can I get for you?” and because she can hear his thoughts, she “hears” him think, I’d like a piece of that ass.
Now, when he thought that, one of my friends said, “Man, it’s so weird how on television or in books they have people thinking in fully formed sentences.”
My friend and I stared at him in bewilderment. “Um, yeah, that’s what everyone does, though?”
And thus, we learned that apparently there are some people who don’t think in sentences. Which is super hard for me to imagine, but… it takes all kinds?
But even though people experience thought differently, developing interiority for your characters can be vital to writing because it can help your audience understand, empathize with, and relate to them.
WHAT IS AN INNER VOICE?
I define interiority in novels as the presentation on the page, either in direct thought or narrative, of a character’s inner speech. Inner speech is a psychological term referring to those fully formed sentences people think, (which apparently not all people have).
In her article for the Atlantic, Julie Beck describes inner speech as “the running conversation in your head.” She interviews Fernyhough, a professor at Durham University in the U.K., who describes the function of inner speech like so:
“If you buy into the theory of Vygotsky, inner speech is there because it’s a sort of internalized version of what we used to do out loud. As young children… we went through a stage known as private speech, where we talk to ourselves out loud. Then that becomes completely internalized, it’s all going on silently in the head. For Vygotsky, that self-directed language had all sorts of different functions, so a key one was planning out what you’re going to do…. [W]e use inner speech to reflect on the past as well. It has functions in imagination, in creating alternative realities. And it has these roles in motivation… Where people will psych themselves up, but also tell themselves off. They'll use private speech to give themselves a ticking off after they've done something dumb.”
So imagine you’re some kid trying to psych yourself up to ask a date to a movie. You’re standing in front of a mirror, practicing what you might say. Instead of having that practice conversation out loud, many people have those conversations in their heads. (I, myself, have practice arguments in the shower, where I rehash conflict from years ago. Because ✨trauma.✨)
Inner voices can also be used to evoke memories, judgment, and other details that only that POV is privy to.
Adding an inner voice to your characters creates a fuller sense of their identity, as well as fleshing out the narration and world building. So how do you use it on the page?
DAPHNE DU MAURIER’S REBECCA
Stephen King said, in a review of Rebecca (1932), that “Daphne du Maurier created a scale by which modern women can measure their feelings.” It’s taken out of context for how King meant it, but I think it nonetheless stands as a truth on its own.
Rebecca is kind of incredible to me. It’s a story from almost a hundred years ago and yet it felt so readable. In it, a young lady becomes the second wife of a Mr. de Winter. Barely knowing him, she is spirited away to his estate, Manderly, where she finds herself isolated and competing with the presence left behind by the beloved first Mrs. de Winter.
The book is extraordinary in its level of interiority. The first person narrator, Mrs. de Winter (who is never given a true name) is a woman of robust anxiety and robust imagination–qualities that I saw myself in repeatedly.
The new Mrs. de Winter is out of her depth in her new role. Coming from no good family and no money, she is so delighted by Mr. de Winter’s interest, and by Manderly, his beautiful estate, but she is also debilitated by worries that she isn’t good enough to stand in the shadow of his former wife, who was everything she was not: Well monied, well-bred, beautiful, and absolutely confident. The new Mrs. de Winter becomes obsessed with worrying what people think of her in the shadow of Rebecca, the first wife. Her fears of what others will think of her translate to profound social anxiety.
It’s fucking weird to look back at du Maurier’s work and be like, “wow, you’re a person from 100 years ago and yet you completely get me.” It feels romantic. I feel seen. This may be the first time in my entire thirty-two years that I’ve ever read a book that I feel really captures my lived experience in my brain and body as someone with generalized anxiety disorder.
Daphne du Maurier accomplishes this by giving Mrs. de Winter an exceptional level of interiority. The narrative shares Mrs. de Winter’s innermost thoughts, from her worries, to her imagination, to brutal perseverations.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PERSEVERATION
Perseveration is when the brain has trouble set-shifting or task-switching, which, to put it more simply, means the brain gets stuck in a loop. The brain seizes upon a thought and refuses to let it go, even when letting it go might be much more beneficial for the owner of said brain.
An example from Wikipedia is:
Two women are going camping, and when they briefly leave their campsite and return, they find their belongings missing. One assumes it was their neighbor and perseverates throughout the evening. “I bet our neighbor stole our chairs,” and again “it has to be the neighbor.” The woman continued the utterance, even well after the crime had taken place.
In Rebecca, perseveration appears on the page as the narrative’s many forays into Mrs. de Winter’s imaginings of what is, what was, and what will be.
For example, this passage in which Mrs. de Winter imagines what must be happening on the day that Rebecca’s boat is drawn up from the sea:
“He would be down there now, in the bay, with Colonel Julian and Captain Searle and the men from the lighter. The lighter would be there–the crane and the chain–and Rebecca’s boat coming to the surface. I thought about it calmly, coolly, without feeling. I pictured them all down there in the bay, and the little dark hull of the boat rising slowly to the surface, sodden, dripping, the grass-green seaweed and shells clinging to her sides. When they lifted her onto the lighter, the water would stream from her sides back into the sea again. The wood of the little boat would look soft and gray. Pulpy in places. She would smell of mud and rust, and that dark weed that grows deep beneath the sea beside rocks that are never uncovered. Perhaps the name-board still hung upon her stern. Je Reviens. The lettering green and faded, the nails rusted through.”
— Rebecca, chapter 21
In this passage, Mrs. de Winter is standing at Manderly, away from the bay. She is only imagining the events unfolding above. She is not even seeing the boat. This is incredible to me! Daphne du Maurier’s choice to paint this perseveration vividly on the page means that we, the audience, do see the boat. We see it in our minds' eyes just as Mrs. de Winter sees it in hers. It is beamed right into us like a radio signal.
OTHER EXAMPLES, STARRING LINDSAY LOHAN
Rebecca uses a very strong level of interiority, but it is not the only well-known story that gives its protagonists vivid, unruly imaginations to create a sense of character depth. A pop-culture hit comes to mind: Mean Girls.
In Mean Girls, Lohan’s character audibly narrates her inner thoughts. Since her character lived in Africa before changing schools, she compares cliques of students to wild animals. Because it’s a movie, the audience sees Lohan’s imaginings play out in surround sound–only for the scene to cut back to reality immediately after.
Lohan’s character even comes up with an idiom for speaking badly about her peers–word vomit.
A character’s interiority is molded by the unique life experience of that character (i.e. living in Africa with her parents) as well as the author’s discrepancy to show it on the page.
HOW MUCH INTERIORITY IS THE RIGHT AMOUNT?: INTERIORITY AS A SPECTRUM
If there was a written form that was the opposite of interiority and character uniqueness, it would be Grimm’s style fairytales. The narrative style of fairytales is perfunctory: We don’t get to see the inner workings of the wicked sorceress or the talking fox. The characters are generally only characterized as the roles they play in society. For example, the princess, the knight, the farm boy, and the witch.
This is the opposite of having great interiority. So if you had Rebecca on one side, fairytales would be on the other. Neither art form is necessarily better–both have their weaknesses and strengths. But when I am reading a novel, I generally like seeing more interiority, as it helps me see into the mind of the main character.
I have created a chart (see below), where I have attempted to delineate the different levels of interiority narration can have:
We’ve already gone over the X axis, depth of interiority–that’s how much the author decides to show a character’s inner voice on the page. But the Y axis here, uniqueness of character, refers to how detailed that character is compared to a trope.
For example: Most fairytale princesses are not different from one another. They’re all fair and kind and beautiful. The authors haven’t explored their backstory or motivations–whether they like stroganoff or dislike the color mauve. What their favorite animal is or how they like their companions.
As we get further up the chart, we get a bit more. Rudolph the Red-Nosed reindeer has a few things “unique” about him. One could imagine how he feels based on the experiences we “see” in the song. But his thoughts aren’t within the text of the song, so his tale still counts as very low interiority.
Harry Potter (the character) is an interesting example. I don’t believe Mr. Potter has a single specific thought in his head for the first 150 pages of the novel. It’s only when Mcgonnagall goes to fetch Wood that he worries, specifically, on the page, that she will cane him.
“Wood? thought Harry, bewildered; was Wood a cane she was going to use on him?”
– Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, p. 150
Before this, what Harry sees and feels is conveyed through the narrative, but not his inner voice:
“Harry heard her walking toward the kitchen and then the sound of the frying pan being put on the stove. He rolled onto his back and tried to remember the dream he had been having… He had a funny feeling he’d had the same dream before.”
– Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, p. 19
For most of Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry is meek in terms of his interiority. Most events wash over him without any specific thoughts from him in reaction. He feels fear, hunger, perhaps excitement, but all of his emotions are muted and only shown through dialogue and sometimes narration of his reaction (for example, Harry laughing or feeling like his legs have turned to jelly).
This may be stylistic. It makes sense that in a middle grade book, where word count is frequently relegated to less than 55,000 words, that authors would “cut” their protagonists’ interiority in order to focus on the magic or action. (The Harry Potter books were longer than that, but they were harkening back to a history of MG literature dominated by Roald Dahl, who generally did write shorter books.)
Throughout the series, Harry gets a bit more interiority on the page. By Prisoner of Azkaban we’re starting to see his inner voice more quickly into the story:
“It must be very late, Harry thought. His eyes were itching with tiredness. Perhaps he’d finish this essay tomorrow night….” – Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban p. 5
“He scanned the starry sky for a sign of Hedwig, perhaps soaring back to him with a dead mouse dangling from her beak, expecting praise.” – HP and the Prisoner of Azkaban p. 6-7
That second one is special because he’s imagining Hedwig as she might reappear. Hedwig is not actually appearing before him. Harry is not seeing her, but describing what he desires to see and relaying that through the narrative.
So Harry begins to show some signs of interiority, but he is still just a boy with a scar and no parents. To rephrase: He acts like a very normal and well-adjusted boy. He doesn’t perseverate about why the Dursleys never loved him, or about that time he murdered a giant snake. Honestly, he even seems to forget he has parselmouth after book two, so it’s safe to say he’s not exactly the most clever person in the world.
Obviously, since Twilight and The Hunger Games are both first-person YA novels, we get to see the interiority of their protagonists fairly frequently. I enjoy this underrated passage from Bella Swan’s inner voice:
“[Charlie] hung up his gun belt and stepped out of his boots as I bustled about the kitchen… When I came here as a child, he would always remove the bullets as soon as he walked in the door. I guess he considered me old enough now not to shoot myself by accident, and not depressed enough to shoot myself on purpose.”
– Twilight p. 35
See, this is what I’m talking about. This is cheeky. This paragraph gives the reader a sense of Bella’s dark humor–a sense that wouldn’t be there if these interior thoughts weren’t present. Without this paragraph, he’s just taking shoes off and she’s just making dinner. Snoozeville. But with the edgy contemplation of teenage suicide, it becomes ✨a phenomenon✨.
Then you have other books, such as Legends and Lattes, where you, the reader, have a sense that the main character could have a lot of great stories to tell, seeing as she’s an ex-dungeon raiding orc warrior who “discovered” coffee, but most of her adventuring is left off the page, only referred to as the life she left behind and the foil for who she wants to be now. We do get some interiority, but it’s not, you know, constantly.
RED, WHITE, AND ROYAL BLUE
I just finished reading Red, White, and Royal Blue, so it’s on my mind, but I think that it is a particularly interesting position on the chart of interiority.
Unlike Rebecca, Red, White, and Royal Blue is not in first person, but third. Alex, the protagonist, doesn’t perseverate as much as Mrs. de Winter, but his innermost thoughts are shown on the page regardless, such as here:
“So, Henry is coming, he guesses, confirmed when he checks Instagram the day of the party and sees a post from Pez of him and Henry on a private jet… Henry is smiling in a soft-looking grey sweatshirt, his socked feet up on the windowsill. He actually looks well-rested for once.”
–Red, White, and Royal Blue, p. 97
Besides showing Alex’s inner voice, the use of epistolary-style page formatting into “texts” and “emails” also adds to the sense of the boys’ characterizations: They are modern kids using the technology of the day.
Red, White, and Royal Blue also makes use of references to physical places that exist, such as museums and government buildings, as well as literary references–a large part of Alex and Henry’s letters to each other are quotes between lovers from history. When Alex quote’s Shakespeare, that means that Alex, the character, is familiar with Shakespeare. (Either that, or he googled it.) His knowledge of niche literary subjects fleshes out his character. By filling the narrative with literary and cultural/historical references, Red, White, and Royal Blue creates a lush, intellectual world.
CONCLUSION
Interiority is an artistic conceit that is able to easily convey a character’s innermost thoughts, judgements, and attitudes on the page. It can also be used to show cultural references and world-building through their thoughts. On the page, it can look like direct thoughts from your characters' brains, references to extent (or fictional) culture, and imagining situations in the form of perseveration.
If it were up to me, I’d put interiority into everything, because big interiority vibes are a part of my authorly style. But great interiority isn’t always appropriate for every work. In shorter, more perfunctory works and in works for young children, interiority might not be the best decision, but in longer works, it fleshes out the depth of your point-of-view characters as well as the world around them.
We (most of us) are used to hearing the inner voice in our heads. Giving your characters an inner voice through use of interiority is just one more way to make your novel a more vivid realization.
Knowing how to use it to expand your writing is the first step in deciding how much interiority is right for your own story.
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