Leveraging Internal Dialogue in Writing

Lately, the books I’ve picked up to read all have a common theme: They have a narrator or character who allows us deep inside his or her mind.

I’ve been drawn to this writing style because it’s one of the few environments in which we, as readers, get to hear another person’s inner dialogue, thoughts, worries, and authentic assessments of the world around him or her.

• Movies/TV give us visual cues, but we don’t get much context as to what characters think as they move through different situations.

• Podcasts are usually shorter-form and topic-based, so the format doesn’t often lend itself to this type of insight-sharing.

Books, however, have pages upon pages in which a writer can pull back the curtain of their characters’ minds (and, more accurately, their own minds. After all, their lives and experiences are often the source material.)

Here are some examples of what I mean:

“Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car. Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.” -Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“There is something about looking into someone else’s mirror, something that always gives me more information than I need. In the past three years I have tried to turn lemons into lemonade by reciting old Tumblr affirmations into these mirrors, but it hasn’t helped.” -Raven Leilani, Luster

“Epiphanies aren’t lightning bolts. They are a hummed note, a prayer mumbled constantly, brought to the surface given the right conditions. It’s as if I am always hearing three ways, first shallowly, collecting, then one level deeper as I’m processing, and finally, I am hearing with my body, which is when I’m hearing myself. That’s one way, for me, information combines with experience and becomes knowledge. I wish there were a shortcut.” -Stephanie Danler, Stray

You’ll notice a few commonalities here.

1. This is private inner monologue put onto the page and laid bare. We all have rich interior lives, but we keep them to ourselves. Our inner thoughts, feelings, judgments, etc. are kept private. Why? Often they’re too honest. They’d hurt feelings, make us look petty, or feel too vulnerable to put “out there.” So we keep them locked up and stick to the socially-acceptable rules of engagement.

When writers put this on the page, though, we get to see that other people do think/feel/experience similar things (and it can be cold comfort.) It makes us feel more connected, more seen, and more understood as human beings when we know other people deal with some of the same things or think similar thoughts.

2. Female writers seem to do this particularly well. I haven’t quite nailed down why that is, and it very well could just be that my personal preferences lean toward female authors. It could also be that men aren’t as often raised to be emotion-centric in how they think and communicate the way women are. An exception to this that comes to mind, however, is J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield character in The Catcher in the Rye:

“I was trying to feel some kind of good-bye. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t you feel even worse.”

It’s a bit of that inner thought-style writing, but it’s still pretty surface-level, you know?

Often these reflections are almost philosophical, in that the writer is ‘thinking about thinking.’ By taking a step back and observing their thoughts and feelings once removed, the author builds a sense of empathy with the reader. It’s a way of saying: “Here’s what happened, and here’s how I thought about and processed it.” Doing so also encourages the reader to do the same in his/her own life, and can improve emotional intelligence (which is a nice plus.)

So what can we take from this, and how can we work it into our writing?

There are a few takeaways that I think writers should consider as they keep honing their craft.

Reading is great practice for writing.

The more you consume and internalize, the better prepared you are to wield words in similar, but unique ways. Stephen King puts it nicely:

“Good writing teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth-telling. A novel like The Grapes of Wrath may fill a new writer with feelings of despair and good old-fashioned jealousy – “I’ll never be able to write anything that good, not if I live to be a thousand” – but such feelings can also serve as a spur, goading the writer to work harder and aim higher. Being swept away by a combination of great story and great writing – of being flattened, in fact – is part of every writer’s necessary formation. You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.”

Honest, reflective introspection adds depth to your writing.

It doesn’t matter what format you’re writing: A novel, a blog post, whatever it is…adding your authentic inner dialogue to your writing is effective storytelling 101. Don’t be afraid to be transparent and share the good, the bad, and the ugly with your readers. They’ll like you more for it.