Go Deep!

Interiority, Part 2

I wrote last week about common traps we can fall into in writing characters’ internal lives—their thoughts and memories. Even once we’re nicely situated in a character’s mind, though, we often aren’t taking full advantage of what can be done there.

I tend to picture interiority in strata, with the deepest kinds of thought near the bottom. To help us out, here is a picture of what my kid and her friends call “gayke”:

Let’s break these down.

Reportage

Simple reportage is where we’re in a character’s head and point of view (we’ve probably been there for a while) and we’re just relaying what happened. So, for instance:

A mouse ran across the floor and scuttled under the armoire.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this, and you’re going to have a lot of sentences (maybe even the majority of your sentences) that just tell us what’s going on. Note that there’s still a hint of the character here, if only in the word choices. “Scuttle” and “armoire” are not words everyone would use. They aren’t, for instance, the words your average frat bro would use. So we’re maybe learning a little bit here about our point-of-view character, or at least our narrator. But we aren’t going terribly deep.

(A note that if we were in the first person throughout the story, we’d have no doubt that we were in one character’s point of view. And everything I say here applies to first-person stories as well. But in the third person, there’s a little more danger of readers losing track of whose head we’re in when we just report the events.)

Sensory input, without further commentary

Here we have more than just the relaying of events; we have sensory perceptions, well-rooted in point of view. So, for instance:

She tracked the mouse as it scuttled across the floor and under the armoire. The room filled with screams, and with the smell of burning toast. Below it all, she could feel the rumble of the passing train.

If you wrote this kind of paragraph in a high school writing class, your teacher would put a checkmark in the margin and write something like “Great sensory details!” And again, there’s nothing wrong with sentences like these. But we have miles to go before we sleep.

Internal physical reaction, without commentary

I don’t necessarily mean internal as in “under the skin,” but rather that we’re feeling the physical reaction from the inside, along with the character. Here we get into the body, as well as inside the mind—and so the reader is invited a little farther into that point of view. For instance:

She tracked the mouse as it scuttled under the armoire. Adrenaline flooded her legs. She wiped her sweaty palms on her khakis.

We can infer a lot about how the character is feeling right now, and that can be useful.

Let’s take a pause here.

Okay, here’s the problem:

This is where many writers stop. Ever since 1993 when a well-meaning uncle heard, at Thanksgiving dinner, that this person wanted to be a writer and said “Well, I’ll give you a little advice, then: Show, don’t tell,” the poor writer has assumed that all emotion must be conveyed on the sly. And perhaps the writer absorbed the same lessons from TV and movies, where all we really get (unless we’re blessed with a voiceover) is the events themselves and Jon Hamm’s face doing a reaction shot.

To stop at this level is to miss out on so much of what fiction can do, and the advantages that the page has over the screen. (And since it’s unlikely that Jon Hamm is going to come to my house to perform your book for me, you can use all the help you can get.)

We can resume now.

Reportage or sensory input with commentary and/or interpretation

We’re still witnessing the events through the narrator or POV character’s eyes, but now we get commentary on those events, as well. Like so:

A mouse scuttled across the floor and under the armoire. Georgia panicked, her hands turning to clay. She’d always hated mice. She tried not to scream, but instead started whimpering.

Here the narrator is coming right out and telling us about the character’s panic, their motivation and intention, and the context. The figurative language (“hands turning to clay”) is also a form of commentary—presumably coming from Georgia herself, even in the third person.

Internal monologue in reaction to events in scene

These would be the actual words the POV character would think, or a paraphrasing of their thoughts:

There, in the corner, oh my God, it was a mouse. She hated them, she hated them, their little wiry tales. She wondered if she could leap onto the table. They carry disease! Who wouldn’t be afraid? She tried not to scream, but instead started whimpering.

I’ve left that last line in there just to show that we can come in and out of the internal monologue; you don’t have to get stuck there for the whole story.

Memory / projection into the future / association / tangent

So far, all of our reactions have stayed pretty much in the room, in the present scene. But that’s not the way the mind really works. In real life, we’re sensing and reacting to the world around us, but we’re also thinking constantly of the past, the present, the future, and the random.

First, let’s go into the past:

Raised in a spotless household, she had only ever seen one other mouse on the loose indoors. Rats were something else—rats she’d seen on the subway tracks, fat and slow—but most of the mice Georgia had seen were on television and in her college biology lab. This mouse wasn’t cute, like those. It was somehow worse than a rat, being smaller and more helpless.

Now, into the future:

Georgia wondered what would happen if she plunged out of the window. Would it be worse to break her ankle, or to stay in the room with the mouse?

Now, into association:

They reminded her, always, of slick little gameshow hosts. Those beady eyes. If you looked close enough, you might see an oily combover.

Now, how about a nice tangent:

The ancient Japanese believed that mice were messengers from the gods. Georgia had read this somewhere, somewhere pretty reliable. What kind of message could a mouse possibly send, though? “Your house isn’t clean enough”? In this case, the gods seemed to want her to panic, to embarrass herself in front of the detectives.

Note that any of these could come through in the internal monologue (i.e., as the thing the character is thinking in that moment) or they could come through in the narration, unrelated to internal monologue, (e.g., “Georgia’s earliest memory of mice was…” when she doesn’t seem to be thinking it in scene).

Self-reflection, or narrative reflection, on psychology or emotion

We’re getting really deep now. We’re down toward the bottom layers of that gayke.

A character might be reflecting on this from their own point of view:

Perhaps it was because her father’s fury had taught her to fear sudden motion that she flinched at even the smallest and most helpless of scurrying creatures. She considered this, and tried to control her breath.

Or the narration might do this, perhaps on a level the character wouldn’t be privy to:

There were few people in the world more afraid of mice as Georgia was. There was a girl in Burma who would pass out at the mere thought of them. But Georgia, trained by her father’s fury to fear any sudden motion, was certainly in the top one percent.

Subconscious

The only thing deeper-down than the meta-thought above would be the subconscious, the psychological stuff the character doesn’t even understand about herself. Of course this could be done through pages of delicate hinting (the character is always dreaming about trains going into tunnels, for instance), but for the sake of expedience, here’s a blatant example in which the narration just tells us stuff:

Georgia would not admit to herself the real cause of her disgust: She, too, was a scampering, desperate thing. She, too, could be so easily trapped and pinned.

Or, let’s go with a much more profound example than I have energy to make up right now. Here’s Aleksandar Hemon in the essay collection The Book of My Lives:

The more we knew about [the war], the less we wanted to know. The structure of our lives relied on the routine continuation of what we stubbornly perceived as normalcy. Hence, convinced that we were merely trying to live a normal life, we embarked upon a passionate pursuit of hedonistic oblivion.

In this case, despite the fact that he’s writing about himself and what he was oblivious to at the time, he’s able to access the subconscious through the lens of retrospect.

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So what do we do with all this?

I’m not saying that the bottom layers of the cake are inherently better than the top layers of the cake. (It would be a heady kind of book that only gave us deep psychology and never told us that the mouse ran across the floor.) But the farther down we go in those layers, the better we know a character’s mind.

You want to make sure you’re getting to all those layers. And of course you aren’t committing to just doing one thing at a time. Here’s a mashup of all the above. And I’m not going in rainbow gayke order, particularly, but you’ll notice that I do start with the literal and physical and move into the psychological.

A mouse scuttled under the armoire. Georgia hated them, she hated them, their little wiry tales. She tried not to scream, but instead started whimpering, wiped her sweaty palms on her khakis. They carry disease! Who wouldn’t be afraid? Raised in a spotless household, she had only ever seen one other mouse on the loose indoors. Rats were something else—rats she’d seen on the subway tracks, fat and slow—but the mice Georgia had seen were mostly on television and in her college biology lab. Those, like this one, had reminded her of slick little gameshow hosts. Those beady eyes. If you looked close enough, you might see an oily combover. Perhaps it was because her father’s fury had taught her to fear sudden motion that she flinched at even the smallest and most helpless of scurrying creatures. She considered this, and tried to control her breath. But she would not admit to herself the real cause of her disgust: She, too, was a scampering, desperate thing. She, too, could be so easily trapped and pinned. She’d read somewhere that the ancient Japanese believed mice were messengers from the gods. In this case, the gods seemed to want her to panic, to embarrass herself in front of the detectives.

That would not be a final draft for me, but we’d be starting to get somewhere interesting.

And think how much would be lost if we just stayed up in that top layer of cake—if we thought we had no more options than this:

A mouse scurried across the floor. Georgia felt her pulse throbbing in her veins. There was a lump in her throat. She looked around the room helplessly. “I don’t like mice,” she said.

That’s all for now… I’ll do a Part 3 (hey, here it is!) soon, covering one more tricky issue (switching points of view midstream) and giving some examples of interiority done very well.

Meanwhile, after the paywall, I’m going to break down, in detail, one more example of deep interiority.

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Let’s look at this passage from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. This is a fantastic example of “stream of consciousness,” and we should take a moment here to note that “stream of consciousness” does not mean a) the act of writing down everything that