Penny for your thoughts
I don’t know about you, but I seem to have a running conversation going on in my head all the time. Yeah, I talk to myself, but at least I do it silently. It’s a rare occasion that there is absolute silence in mind—so rare that I actually notice it when it occurs.
My daughter once told me that she narrates her life in her head—in the third person. It makes me wonder if she reads too much, if that’s possible.
Your characters talk to themselves too. Internal dialogue is a vital part of a novel. It allows us to know what a character is thinking and feeling. The question is, is it possible to have too much internal dialogue?
I believe the answer is yes.
When a character is thinking, they’re rarely doing anything else. This stops the action cold.
Too much of a character doing nothing but thinking and our readers are going to get bored. And then there are the other characters who are standing around waiting for the POV character to do something, but they’re just standing there, thinking. Awkward!
Rarely do writers have action and thoughts coincide. It certainly can be done, but to do so, the thoughts, by necessity, need to be short—kind of crammed in between the action. This keeps the internal thoughts to minimum.
This is a good thing.
Yes, we do really want to know what the POV character is thinking and feeling, but we’d rather see it being shown, rather than be told how he’s feeling. It’s much more powerful. The ideal is to show the characters feelings and have the internal thoughts coincide.
Too often do I see (or read, actually) characters just standing around thinking. It’s really not exciting. Yes, I want to know what they’re thinking, but I’d rather get it in little bits than in a longer dump that stops the forward momentum of the book.
Margie Lawson suggests that when you edit, you highlight your internal dialogue in yellow and your external dialogue (what people say out loud) in blue. That way you can see when you’ve got too much internal dialogue—it looks like someone peed all over your book. Not a good thing!
So, yes, do write internal dialogue. It’s a vital part of a book and really what makes novels so much more fun than reading, say, a script. But do be careful about how much thought you put in to your book. Keep things moving along, and let us know what your characters are thinking all at the same.
What do you think when the action stops in order for the POV character to think about what’s going on? Does it bother you? Do you like to know what the character is thinking? Do you also narrate your life, or just talk to yourself like I do?
