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Interiority is looking directly inside the character's head and inside their heart. And from it, we understand their emotions, their motivations, their decision-making process, their psychological states, which can be very different from the actions they portray on the page. Hey writer, welcome to the Write It Scared Podcast. I'm Stacy, your host. The podcast is on a break for the summer while I recharge and get ready for season four. But I didn't want to leave you hanging. Over the next couple months, I will be pulling some favorite solo episodes from the vault, episodes on craft, mindset, and just the messy reality of writing our books. Also, as a reminder, the Courage Files will remain open for submissions all summer long.

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The Courage Files is a new segment launching on the podcast in season four where listeners share moments of writing courage, big or small.

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Maybe you finally figured out how to make a tricky scene work, or you finished your draft, or you shared your work. Maybe you returned to writing after a long time away, or you simply kept going when it would have been easier to quit. Whatever your moment looks like, I want to hear about it.

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And with your permission, share it on the podcast next season to help inspire other writers. Because remember, we're in this together. Every submission received this summer will be entered for a chance to win a free editorial assessment and book coaching session with me.

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And I'll announce the winner when season four kicks off this fall. To submit, go to writeitscared.co forward slash courage hyphen files, or you can find the link in the show notes. And if you're diving into planning or drafting a new novel this summer, grab my free novel quick start guide. It's called First Draft Confidence, and it's designed to help you build a strong foundation for your story so that you can move into your first draft with more clarity, more confidence, and a whole lot less flailing. You can find the novel quick start guide at write itscared.co forward slash novel planning guide, or you can also find the link for that in the show notes.

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All right, so let's get into today's episode and I'll see you back for real in season four.

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Hi, writer. Welcome back to another episode of the Ride It Scared Podcast. I'm your host, Stacy, and today is a solo show. This is episode number 15, and we are going to talk some craft and dig into another micro element of fiction. So back in episode number 11, we talked about voice, and previous to that, in episode five, we covered the macro elements of story, which include the author's intention, character, conflict, plot, setting, point of view choice, narrative design. So if you're interested in that, go back and take a listen. I'll put links in the show notes. But today we're going to turn our attention to interiority. We're going to talk about what interiority is, how to write it, when to use it, how much to use, and when you might want to leave it out. We'll also talk about some of the common mistakes that I see writers struggle with when crafting interiority, and hopefully we're going to belay some fears that many of us writers face around showing versus telling and how much to give away in characters' thoughts. Then I'll give you some examples, and then finally, I will give you a reading and writing exercise to help you craft stronger interiority in your fiction. So what is interiority? To me, this is the playground of fiction. This is where we have a chance to go deep inside of our characters, their minds and hearts, and figure out what's really driving them. Interiority is the inside life of your point of view character. It's their thoughts, their reflections and feelings, things that are not voiced in their dialogue or implied with actions or gestures. So interiority is looking directly inside the character's head and inside their heart. And from it, we understand their emotions, their motivations, their decision-making process, their psychological states, which can be very different from the actions they portray on the page. And to me, that is so fun, that juxtaposition of the character doing one thing, but they're thinking something completely different. Interiority allows the reader to understand the character's perspective and empathize with their experiences. So a big part of interiority is the character's inner monologue, which is the character's thoughts. But that is not the whole thing. Interiority is also about showing emotion by expressing the character's physical feelings, the way the situation is creating a physical manifestation in their body. Interiority is ultimately a stylistic choice. So how much or how little you put on the page or you notice when you read another's author's work is going to vary by book and author. And we'll get into when and how much interiority to use in a minute. But the bottom line is you want to use enough to deliver the moment's meaning clearly to the reader. So don't sacrifice words if it means letting go of vital context. Okay, so I'm going to give you several examples of interiority, and then we're going to pick them apart and see how each example affects the moment and informs our experience as readers and contributes to the show-don't tell rule that we often get hammered into our heads. So I'll point out the interiority as we go along. And all of these examples are things that I have written. And I apologize for my lack of oral narration skills. I'm definitely not going to be hired for your audiobook. Uh, but hopefully you're still gonna have some really good takeaways. First, let's start with an example of a passage that has no interiority. So here we go. I want you to imagine that there's a couple driving on the highway. Here's the here's the dialogue. Let's stop to eat, John said as he shifted gears. I don't know, Shelby replied as she forced a smile. We have time, John countered. So now in this example, the emotion is completely absent. There is no interiority. We have no idea what's going on. We don't even know who the point of view character is. So from that, let's take another look at an example of what's considered weak interiority. This is interiority that just repeats what's already been on the page. It doesn't lend to a deeper understanding of the characters in any way that makes us as the reader feel something, and it's very telling. Let's stop to eat, John said as he shifted gears. I don't know, Shelby replied as she forced a smile. Here's the interiority. She wasn't really hungry. Her stomach still felt uncomfortably full from the big meal they'd had last night. We have time, John countered. Here's interiority from Shelby. True, they did. They weren't doing Atlanta for another couple of hours, so why not? She could just have some coffee. John wouldn't care. So there's interiority here, but it's boring and it's telling. And we still don't know what the hell's going on, right? Can you, as the reader, feel anything from these sentences? Can you make any connections or infer motivation or any deeper meaning here? No. No, you can't. I didn't give you anything else to go on. And also, you don't have to work. You don't have to think about it. I mean, this lady Shelby's just talking about how her stomach feels full and how they had a big meal. And I mean, we don't have any idea like what their relationship is like or why they're talking about this. And you don't have to infer anything because I explained it all to you. I told you how they feel, I told you what they were thinking about, or at least Shelby. At least you can tell who the point of view character is here. So, but basically I author explained you, right? I locked you out of the experience and limited your participation. Okay, now let's try this again with another example, but this time we're going to use interiority to let the reader inside the character's heart and mind. Let's stop to eat, John said as he shifted gears. I don't know, Shelby replied as she forced a smile. And here's her interiority. Five months in this joke of a marriage had taught her one thing about the fat bastard in the driver's seat. The only thing John consistently thought of was his big old gut. Certainly not her, and thank God for that. Or how in less than two hours they'd be at a funeral. And they'd finally put that son of a bitch good for nothing father in law of hers in the ground. After that, the money would come easy, and she could practically taste the freedom it would buy her. We have time, John countered. Here's interiority from Shelby. Yeah, time. You think you've got all the time in the world, don't you, Johnny Boy? News flash buddy, you don't, because you're going in the ground next. So what did you notice? What did you learn about Shelby, the POV character? What emotions did you detect? Here, we're meant to feel irritation, we're meant to feel disdain and disgust and pick up on motives of deceit and revenge, greed, even murder. Notice that Shelby's interiority was mostly around her reflections and thoughts about how the moment was affecting her. But it also gave us an indication of her desires, hopes, expectations, which created a sense of anticipation within us, the reader, for what's going to happen to Shelby in the future. As a bonus, Shelby's interiority also gave her husband John some characterization. So it's important to note that I did not tell you how Shelby feels. I didn't tell you that she felt disdain. I didn't say that her stomach twisted in disgust as she thought of John's big old gut, or that she was angry with her father-in-law and glad he was dead. If I did my job well, I didn't have to. You, as the reader, were able to make those connections for yourself, and hopefully you enjoyed doing so. This is trusting your reader and trusting yourself as a writer, and both take time and practice to learn to do. Okay, so let's try this again. We'll go at it from a different angle and shoot for different emotions. Let's stop to eat, John said as he shifted gears. I don't know, Shelby replied as she forced a smile, hoping it was enough to make her husband relax. He was always thinking of her, worried for her. She desperately wanted to be okay, to have an appetite again, to not vomit the supplement shakes, to run a goddamn brush through the wiry hair she used to complain about and no longer had. But the truth was none of those things was going to happen, not with the chemical cocktails regularly pumped into her bloodstream despite her prognosis. Palliative care. What a bullshit word. Why didn't they just call it what it really meant? A distraction while they waited for you to waste away. We have time, John countered. And and here's more interiority, and we have a little physical reaction here. An ache formed in her chest. Oh, John, baby. Time was the one thing they didn't have, and he knew it too. Okay, so what did you notice with this passage? What did you learn about Shelby, the point of view character, and her husband John? What emotions did you detect? In this particular example, we were meant to feel ache and loss, anger, sadness, longing, love, and a fear of the future. We were also meant to pick up on the motives of two people trying to comfort themselves and each other against a very hard truth that Shelby's gonna die of cancer. Now that's a long way from that first example where we thought there was just two people who were simply talking about getting something to eat while they were on the road, right? So as you can see, interiority provides us with the context we need to understand the situation, and it illuminates the inside life of our characters. And you don't have to tell the reader blatantly what the character is feeling. You can still convey the emotions you want to communicate effectively by choosing how to do so based on their thoughts and why. So when do you use interiority and how much is too much? And I'm not gonna lie, I laid it on pretty thick in those examples just to give you a really good indication of what I was driving at. But really how much to use, it's a challenging question. There's no hard and fast answer here. It depends on your character, their inner workings, the situations, and what you want the reader to feel and also your style. But one of the problems that I see many writers struggle with is that they leave out interiority altogether. Now, part of this is just the writer's curse of knowledge, meaning that you, as the writer, come to your story with a bias. You understand what's motivating your character and how they feel. And because of that, it's really easy to forget to put it on the page in a way that allows the reader to experience it. More often, writers are worried about telling versus showing when they include interiority. If they allow the reader to know what the character thinks and feels, and this is not the case. Not if it's done well, but if it's done in a way that lets the reader participate and make inferences. That is the key. So the solution, err on the side of caution and overdo the interiority for your character because you can always pull it out later if it's overkill. So every time something happens in the story that your character should react to, make them make them react on the page. Show the reader how it affects them by putting words to their thoughts, feelings, and reflections. Show us that they experience physical manifestations in their body. Doing so is going to provide your reader with the context they need to understand how the moment is affecting the character and make sense of what they want and what they will do next. Now, there are absolutely times when interiority is not necessary. And I love the example in Donald Moss's book, The Emotional Craft of Fiction, where he uses a scene from Matthew Quick's novel, The Silver Linings Playbook, to demonstrate when interiority isn't needed and why. So I'm going to share this scene with you in summary form, but the scene's told in the first person point of view by the main character who is Pat Peoples. Pat struggles with bipolar disorder, and in this scene, he is in a lobby waiting to see his new psychiatrist when a song plays on the loudspeaker. And that song triggers Pat into a very emotionally painful and violent outburst. But the author, Quick, only shows what the reader can visualize. We only see the action and some dialogue. Pat's kicking over the table, he's turning over chairs, he's screaming, and then later we have his mother soothing him and rubbing his back before Pat's ushered into the psychiatrist's office. There is not an ounce of interiority from Pat on the page in that passage. Why not? A couple of reasons. Number one, the reader didn't need it to experience how hard this was for Pat and how he felt. We got it. And the second is that Pat's inner life is so volatile, so erratic, that it might be chaos to describe. It's probably too chaotic even for the reader to make sense of. So the author chose to show the action instead. Nothing is lost due to the lack of interiority. Remember what I said earlier. Use enough to deliver the moment's meeting. Don't sacrifice words if it means letting go of vital context. We had the context in this situation, so it didn't add anything to go into Pat's thought. Okay, if you've not read The Emotional Craft on Fiction by Donald Moss, I highly, highly recommend it. So why interiority gives us so much mileage and makes novels unique? To me, interiority is the true playground of fiction. This is where we can have fun with juxtaposition and watch our protagonists misdirect other characters for their own gain. It allows us to deeply understand who our characters are and what they don't want anyone else to see. And this fact alone drives the beauty and uniqueness of narrative fiction. You can't get inside a character's head in a movie like you can in a novel. But here's a word of caution. I love interiority, and many writers, especially those who are particularly empathetic, love it too. We love to get into all the feels. And this means we also risk navel gazing. This is where your character is going to spend copious amounts of time in their head, and nothing else really happens. So remember, interiority has to play by the same rules as all the other elements of fiction. It needs to advance the plot or inform the reader of a new or deeper understanding of the character and their situation. But above all, it has to move the story forward. So here are some exercises that you can use to spot interiority in a work of fiction that you're reading and analyze how the author put it together. So pull out your pins and highlighters, find, you know, a couple passages from a novel that you love, note a point of view choice, and each time the narrator pulls back the curtain and lets you step directly into the character's mind and body. So then you want to ask, why did the author do that? Why is now the time to let you peek behind the curtain? How did it allow you to understand the situation? Did it provide the context to understand the moment? Did it show you how the character was affected? Does it inform what might happen next? Did it give you a deeper understanding of the character and did it help drive the narrative forward? Did the author tell you explicitly how the character felt, or did they show you instead and allow you to infer? Did they allow you to participate? How did you experience the scene as the reader? And what emotions did you register from a character? Did you experience any feelings different from what the character was experiencing? So the next step is to try to apply this to your own writing. So type up a passage or two from the text that you've selected, highlight all the interiority and name the emotions you noticed, then delete all the parts you highlighted. Read through it. How does it feel? Can you make sense of it? What did you lose by removing the interiority? Now do your own thing. Add in your version of interiority, play with it, change the situation, the context entirely, see what happens and have fun. So that was a lot. Let's break it down and do some takeaways. So for recap, interiority is where you're going to show the character's thoughts and emotions and reflections on the page to help inform the meaning of the moment and the context of the situation so that the reader can better understand the character and empathize with their experience and also anticipate what that character desires and what they want to happen next. Using interiority is not telling. It can be, but if done well, it is actually a piece of showing that will deepen your reader's understanding and create a more layered and contextual experience for them. One of the most common mistakes writers make is leaving out interiority altogether. So make sure to include it, overdo it, because you can always pull it back later. And how much you choose to use in the end is your choice, a stylistic choice that depends on the character you're writing. When you include interiority, make sure to do so in a way that deepens the reader's understanding of the character's experience and that it helps to move the narrative forward. So now, go practice, go play, go have fun. Remember, no words are wasted, even the practice ones, because honestly, it's all practice. Writing is a craft that we will never perfect. That's the beauty in it. There is always more to learn and different ways to do things. So the more you write, the more you will learn and the more you will want to. Thank you for tuning in today. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me in my email, Stacy at writitscared.co. And I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to the Ride It Scared podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, please make sure to hit the follow button so you never miss an episode. And please leave a review. Reviews help other writers like you find the voices and messages they need to hear to continue to write their stories. Let's lift each other up. Remember, you can be scared and still be unstoppable. I'll see you next week.