Indirect and direct interior monologue allow the reader access to those emotions in a deep or deeper way. Yes! You need to Show-Don’t-Tell, but if that’s all you use the results are more subtle and it’s easy for a reader to misread thoughts or misunderstand emotion. When something painful happens, do you want the reader to experience it fully with direct access to the character’s interior life? Or do you want to shield the reader a bit, and therefore, you’ll create some narrative distance with the indirect method?ĭo editors often tell you that your characters aren’t coming to life? It may be that you are using the Show-Don’t-Tell strategy too strictly and never present thoughts and emotions of your character. Rather, where do you want the reader to go deeper into the character’s thoughts and emotions? It’s not a question of which technique is appropriate. That is, both techniques are common and are often intermixed within a narrative. Should You Use Direct or Indirect Character Thoughts Direct interior monologue delves deeper into a character because the thoughts are presented directly. Indirect interior monologue reflects the character’s thoughts, but it still maintains a distance because it’s still narrated, even if it’s narrated by the character. The reader still understands that the character likes blue best, but the thoughts are more immediate and show the chain of thoughts. For a stream-of-consciousness, you might get this: This isn’t a stream-of-consciousness because this isn’t just impressions and ideas as they come to the character. These two methods of bringing a character’s thoughts to the reader have an important distinction: for direct thoughts, the character isn’t consciously narrating. And the language is still in the character’s voice. The “she thought” part is still correct, even though it’s an indirect thought. “She liked the blue dress best, she thought.” Indirect Interior Monologueĭirect thoughts become indirect thoughts when you do two things: change from present to past tense, and change from 1st person to 3rd person. Or you could avoid it altogether and simply relate what the character thought. These thoughts are in the character’s language and diction, not the narrator’s. Ive seen two main methods of writing a characters inner monologue. Sometimes, you can even leave off the “she thought” part and give it as if the reader is inside the character’s head. ![]() With a background as a Creative Director for high-end brands, Tanya knows luxury, but found that she was much more interested. “I like the blue dress best, she thought.” Tanya Zaben launched Interior Monologue in New York City as a website devoted to culling through the masses and picking out the absolute best of the best in handcrafted and artisan made goods. When a character is thinking about something you can give the reader direct access to those thoughts. Instead, you need to include thoughts at some point. If you purely do action, dialogue and description, you have few tools to let the reader know the character’s inner life. the ‘Crazy Jane’ poems).The infamous Show-Don’t-Tell mantra fails to take into account the importance of character thoughts. They, in turn, influenced the fiction of Edouard Dujardin, Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, as well as the verse monologues of T. Projections of interior musings, often deeply ambiguous, are to found in the poems of Tristan Corbière, Jules Laforgue, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Valéry. ![]() This seems to have been taken up by the French Symbolist poets and their associates. The English dramatic monologue, as used by Browning and Tennyson, purports to be spoken, but it is often the case that speech dissolves into reverie. The device is distinguished from the dramatic monologue by the fact that the thoughts are unspoken. To other critics, interior monologue is the larger category and stands for all methods of self-revelation, including for instance some kinds of dramatic monologue according to this view, stream of consciousness refers to an uninterrupted flow, in which logic, conventional syntax and even at times punctuation are abandoned. ![]() Some critics argue that Stream of consciousness includes all imitations of interiority according to this view, the interior monologue is one method among many. There is, however, some dispute as to which of the two is the larger term. This doesn’t mean that your monologue has to be short rather, it means you should spend time editing and identifying what is most important. Monologues aren’t something used to fill time in a scriptso as you write a monologue, keep it as short as possible. The phrase “Interior monologue’ originates in an essay on James Joyce by Valéry Larbaud and is often regarded as synonymous with ‘stream of consciousness’ Here are a few extra tips to get you started: 1. Interior monologue is an extended representation in prose or verse of a character’s unspoken thoughts, memories, and impressions, rendered as if directly ‘overheard’ by the reader without the intervention of a summarizing narrator, prompted by conscious experience or arising from the well of the subconscious.
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