5 Reasons Internal Dialogue is Essential in Fiction (And How to Use It in Your Story)
Today, I have a special treat for you guys. Author, speaker, editor and long-time W.A.N.A. International Instructor Marcy Kennedy is here to talk about internal dialogue—when to use it, why we use it and how not to get all cray-cray with it.
Trust us. As editors, Marcy and I see it all. Often newer writers swing to one extreme or another. Either they stay SO much in a character’s head that we (the reader) are trapped in The Land of Nothing Happening or we’re never given any insight into the character’s inner thought life, leaving said character as interesting as a rice cake.
Like all things in fiction, balance is key. Marcy is here to work her magic and teach y’all how to use internal dialogue for max effect.
Take it away, Marcy!
Understanding why something is important to our writing lays the foundation for bettering our writing because it acts as a measuring post. When we know why we should do something and what benefit we’re supposed to gain by doing it, it helps us recognize when we’re not receiving that benefit.
Since I’m here to talk to you about internal dialogue, let’s look at what that means specifically for internal dialogue. If our internal dialogue isn’t providing one of these benefits, then we’re either doing it wrong or we’ve tried to include it in a spot where it doesn’t belong.
With that in mind, let’s look at the main reasons why internal dialogue is important to include in our fiction.
Reason #1 – Internal dialogue replicates real life.
When we write, we want our work to feel realistic and authentic (even if it’s set on a strange planet, includes magic, or has dragons living next door to our banker). We want it to feel like these people could have lived and would have done the things we describe them doing.
In our lives, we’re always thinking—noticing things happening around us, trying to solve problems, giving ourselves a pep talk or a dressing down. If we want our characters to feel real, we need to have them do the same thing.
How to Apply This to Our Fiction:
Make sure our point-of-view character reacts to important events through internal dialogue. For example, if we reveal a shocking piece of information—like an affair—our POV character better try to come to grips with it and think it through. You would, wouldn’t you? If they don’t have an appropriate reaction, the reader will feel like the story isn’t believable.
(And just as a word of caution – remember that fiction is supposed to be “better” than real life in some ways. This means we shouldn’t share absolutely every thought that goes through our character’s head. We only share the ones that matter to the story, including to the character’s emotional growth.)
Reason #2 – Internal dialogue creates a deeper connection between the reader and the characters.
For a reader to invest their time in our story, they need to care what happens. Internal dialogue is one of the tools at our disposal to make them care because it creates an intimate connection between the reader and the point-of-view character. We hear their thoughts in the same way we hear our own, and that allows us, as readers, to share their feelings and concerns, experiencing them as our own. We also get to know them better, and they become more real to us because of it.
How to Apply This to Our Fiction:
A large part of internal dialogue is our POV character forming opinions on what’s happening around them. Make sure to let them pass judgment and interpret the events around them and the people they meet. This shows their personality in a deep and personal way because they’re not trying to put on a mask for the outside world. Their private thoughts are meant only for themselves. They’re honest and raw. (If this leads them to form false impressions and later find out they’re wrong, that’s even better.)
Reason #3 – Internal dialogue helps control the pacing in our fiction.
I once heard the analogy that pacing in fiction is like creating the perfect rollercoaster ride. If you had a rollercoaster that only went up, only went down in one continuous drop for three minutes, or stayed completely level the whole time, no one would ride it. A good rollercoaster needs the anticipation of the rise, the heart-in-the-throat drops, and the shocking loops and twists. Good fiction needs the same.
How to Apply This to Our Fiction:
If our entire book is composed of high-speed action scenes, our readers are going to grow as bored as if our whole book is a character sitting in their room and thinking. We need the internal dialogue to create the anticipation for the action, allow the reader to breathe, and build them up for the next drop. To do this, we should have “sequels” following our “scenes” where our main character slows down for a minute to react to the setback and consider their options.
Reason #4 – Internal dialogue minimizes confusion by revealing motivations.
The heart of fiction is the why. Why is our main character acting the way she is? Why does he want to reach his goal so badly that he’s willing to suffer the possible consequences?
When those motivations aren’t clear to the reader, the reader ends up either feeling confused or feeling less engaged with the story. When the reader doesn’t know or understand our POV character’s motivations, their actions seem random and, at times, can even make our character come across as stupid.
How to Apply This to Our Fiction:
Before our POV character acts, it needs to be clear what their plan is and why they’re pursuing that course of action. So, for example, don’t have them shoot their best friend in the leg unless the reader knows why they did it. (You might think that’s a ridiculous example, but in my work as an editor, I’ve seen even worse unexplained events perpetrated by a POV character.)
Reason #5 – Internal dialogue conveys information that can’t be given any other way.
If, for example, you have a character who needs to deceive everyone around them, you’ll have them acting one way and thinking another. Another example of this is backstory that influences who our characters are and why (there’s that word again) they act the way they do.
They might not think that events in their past are influencing them, so they’d have no reason to talk about it with anyone else, but we can make the reader aware of it through their thoughts.
How to Apply This to Our Fiction:
Inserting backstory can be tricky. The key is to share only backstory that’s essential to the front story, to drip feed it, and to use a present event to trigger our character’s thoughts about the past events.
Need More Help with Internal Dialogue?
Check out my book Internal Dialogue: A Busy Writer’s Guide. In it you’ll learn the difference between internal dialogue and narration, best practices for formatting internal dialogue, ways to use internal dialogue to advance your story, how to balance internal dialogue with external action, clues to help you decide whether you’re overusing or underusing internal dialogue, tips for dealing with questions in your internal dialogue, and much more!
It’s available in print and ebook format and most places (so you can grab it from Amazon, Kobo, Apple iBooks, or Barnes & Noble).
If you prefer live teaching, I’m running a webinar called Internal Dialogue: The Voice Inside Our Characters’ Heads on Saturday, August 15.
The webinar will be recorded and made available to registrants, so even if you can’t make it at the scheduled time, you can sign up and listen later at your convenience.
Click here to sign up for Internal Dialogue: The Voice Inside Our Characters’ Heads.
P.S. I’m also running a webinar on techniques to make our dialogue shone on Wednesday, August 12. Find out more here!
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THANK YOU, Marcy! Alrighty, then. For being the AWESOME guests you guys are, all comments today count double in my contest.
WE love hearing from you!
To prove it and show my love, for the month of AUGUST, everyone who leaves a comment I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice. What do you win? The unvarnished truth from yours truly. I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages of your novel, or your query letter, or your synopsis (5 pages or less).
I hope y’all sign up for Marcy’s class and, heck, why not make a DAY of it?
Remember! Due to popular demand I am running my Your Story in a Sentence class this Saturday (after Marcy) and participants have their log lines shredded and rebuilt and made agent-ready. Log-lines are crucial because if we don’t know what our book is about? How are we going to finish it? Revise it? Pitch it? Sell it?
