Is there any better feeling than reading a book that completely transports you into another person's mind? As you read the closing pages, you feel like you are losing a friend, a lover, or even a part of yourself, an identity that will always be a tiny part of you.

Personally, I am a little bit Jane Eyre, a little bit Elizabeth Bennet and a little bit Holden Caulfield, with a smattering of Stephen Daedalus.

There isn't a movie that's been made that can come close to it. That's why the film is always a poor replica of the book.

The most common mistake writers make because of films

One of the things that makes the novel irreplaceable, rather than interchangeable with film, is this quality of stepping into a character's head.

And yet, because a lot of writing advice out there originates with teachers of screenwriting, many, many writers are scared to include the one thing that could help them achieve this effect in their writing.

And the well-worn dictum 'show don't tell' seems to imply we should write our scenes as if ranging the scene with a camera lens, capturing all the visual elements. Even the word 'scene' is a visual metaphor.

This is such a shame and holds so many writers back from engaging and immersing their readers in their stories, from truly letting them into what is happening. 

Because one of the secrets to a compelling novel is interiority. 

I suspect you want to write the kind of book where readers fall in love with and identify with your characters -where they passionately advocate for them at their book club or feel inspired by their qualities, heartbroken by their difficulties.

If that’s you, look again at how you handle and convey interiority.

Because interiority is what novels do better than film and always will. Interiority makes us feel that we know these characters so intimately that when the book is over, we feel like we've lost a friend.

What is interiority?

When I talk about interiority, I mean the thoughts, associations, intentions, and desires of a point-of-view character put on the page through reported thoughts, memories, and flashbacks. Interiority witnesses characters making meanings of situations by relating them to what they know, what they'd expected, and what they'd hoped.

To obey the advice to "show, don't tell", many writers lean heavily on describing interiority's physical manifestation: crying, sighing, clenching a fist. While these have a place, they are often more opaque than you realise. Body language without interiority can leave readers feeling like they're on the outside looking in, begging to be let in. 

Since the invention of the novel, techniques to convey interiority have become increasingly sophisticated.

Jane Austen is known for innovating with free indirect discourse, where she used the omniscient voice but freely inhabited a particular character to show what they were thinking and how they were interpreting a scene. A century later, the modernists deployed and invented the stream of consciousness, which captures the chaotic ways we think.

Some academics have suggested that in this way, the novel has changed how we think about our identities, how we understand ourselves as individuals, and how we conceive of reality.

Use of interiority is a stylistic choice

I must acknowledge that writers publishing today are on a spectrum between the exterior mode of Hemingway's literary progeny and the extreme interiority of Virginia Woolf's. 

So, it is partly a stylistic choice whether to use interiority in your fiction. However, too many writers use this as a get-out clause so that they don't have to engage with strong emotions or let their readers into difficult, uncomfortable feelings (or because they themselves don't really know what the character is thinking or feeling).

One of the most transformative things you can do as a writer is to think about whether you are really letting the reader into the strong, deep emotions and meanings in a text. And if not, could interiority be the missing tool to help you make your story more compelling?

In commercial women's fiction, readers expect third or first-person narratives with a high degree of interiority but partnered with narrative signposts, clarity and focus that keep it from veering into the form-defying experimentation of postmodernist literary fiction.

And with the rise of domestic suspense and psychological thrillers, writers using interiority have a natural home in the crime genre, which you might think of as more plot-driven. 

The Interiority Iceberg

Here’s a visual aid and metaphor. Think of the boundary between the exterior and interior modes like an iceberg.

Above the surface, we have the exterior mode.

Right at the top -we have explicit, reliable summary with little subtext. These be facts. Like “Oswald was 10 years old.” This is the most objective material or narration.

Underneath them, we have the skilful use of exteriority to show without telling -to make us aware of all that is beneath the subject through subtext and affective description -without ever using interiority.

Beneath the surface, we have simple interiority which reliably reports and names conscious thoughts and emotions, intentions, interpretations and explanations.

Slightly deeper, we have bodily sensations that imply emotions -though I would caution that these are often not as legible as you might imagine, and can easily slip into cliche.

Going deeper, we have the realm of similes and metaphors, symbols -where a character compares how they feel to something else creating a vivid and idiosyncratic picture.

And deeper still, we begin to use sensory observations and thoughts that are full of subtext -that imply the emotions and deeper worldview without making them explicit. We are beginning to evoke through interiority (rather than merely reporting emotions, we elicit them in the reader).

At this level, the reader may know the character better than they know themselves; through subtext and patterning, they betray emotions they may not be conscious of.

Has this made you wonder how you’re handling interiority? Would you like help dialling in on this aspect of your craft? I work with new novelists as they work on their first novel -their apprentice piece. If that sounds inviting, you can find out more on my services page.

Interiority in Practice; 

Brooklyn by Colm Toíbín

This passage from Brooklyn by Colm Toíbín exemplifies literary/upmarket fiction that leans into interiority, what it is like to be in someone else's head, thinking their thoughts, feeling their emotions.

She got up and used the bathroom very quietly; she thought that she would have breakfast in one of the diners on Fulton Street, as she had seen people do on her way to work. Once she was dressed and ready, she tiptoed out of the house. She did not want to meet any of the others. It was only half past seven. She would, she thought, sit somewhere for an hour, having a coffee and a sandwich, and then go to work early.

Did you notice that the interiority begins quite superficially, by informing us of a simple intention to leave the house quietly?

We know that this point of view character longs to be inconspicuous.

Did you notice that the author uses telling to summarize that intention? "She did not want to meet any of the others."

In this first paragraph, I can imagine this being easily converted to a screenplay. The visual clues of her moving around quietly could help us understand her intention. There is a hint of triumph in her clever escape from the house. She has evaded the others.

But then, the emotion turns.

"As she walked, she began to dread the day.

 We are told (yes, told) of her growing dread. We wonder why, since we have only been told this, not shown why, but we also sense that this is a character trying to outrun her unhappiness, and that rarely works. And yet, the dread has not been evoked in us, we have just been informed of it. 

It functions as a little mystery, and dread is a foreboding emotion -so it provides a little narrative thrust -pulling us onwards.

Later, as she sat at the counter of a diner looking at a menu, snatches of another dream that she had only half remembered when she woke came to her. She was flying, as though in a balloon, over the calm sea on a calm day. Below, she could see the cliffs at Cush Gap and the soft sand at Ballyconnigar. The wind was propelling her towards Blackwater, then the Ballagh, then Monageer, then Vinegar Hill and Enniscorthy.

We understand her dread, her unhappiness, we feel it through the yearning dramatized in the memory of a dream.

The dream is of flying, in a gentle, yet swift, way. This is not a frightening flight, but a welcome, calm one. And it is taking her swiftly home, via the landmarks she knows so well by name (unlike the landmarks of this new country and city). Here, we have gone into the life of her mind. Deep interiority.

She was lost so much in the memory of this dream that the waiter behind the counter asked her if she was alright.    

The goal she started the day with, to sink into anonymity, is thwarted when her tumultuous inner life makes it impossible to blend in. Actions are freighted with meaning through interiority. 

'I'm fine,' she said.   
'You look sad,' he replied.   
She shook her hair and tried to smile and ordered a coffee and a sandwich.   
'Cheer up,' he said in a louder voice.
'Come on, cheer up. It'll never happen. Give us a smile.'    A few of the other customers at the counter looked at her.

In dialogue that shows she wants to deny her unhappiness, at least to others, she says she is fine and tries to smile to prove it (note she didn't smile, she "tried" to smile; this is not a description that remains external, the intent, the thought, the interiority is also conveyed).

The waiter testifies that she looks sad and he becomes more demanding, "louder", lazily trotting out a phrase that most women will have had directed at them at some point, "Come on cheer up. It'll never happen". (As a woman whose resting face is miserable, I sympathize. You are not even allowed to appear thoughtful without it drawing attention and demands to perform, to make other people, especially men, feel comfortable.)

She knew that she would not be able to hold back the tears. She did not wait for her order to arrive but ran out of the diner before anyone could say anything else to her.   
During the day she felt that Miss Fortini was looking at her more than usual and this made her acutely conscious of how she appeared when she was not dealing directly with a customer.

We know what the waiter's attention means to this woman because of interiority. This attention is precisely what she was trying to avoid: the need to perform an emotion she cannot feel. We know already she has tried to do so. She simply can't. She wanted to go unnoticed, to be anonymous. Instead, this man is demanding she perform the act she left the house so early to avoid, drawing the attention of a few other customers who "looked at her" in a way that is then echoed by Miss Fortini at work, who "was looking at her more than usual" and "staring at her".

She tried to look towards the door and the front windows and the street, she tried to seem busy, but she found that she could, if she did not stop herself, move easily into a sort of trance, thinking over and over the same things, about everything she had lost, and wondering how she would face going back to the evening meal with the others and the long night alone in a room that had nothing to do with her.

Her homesickness is captured in the rumination that she can't suppress, its self-sustaining momentum conveyed in the run-on sentence. The description of her room as one that "had nothing to do with her" captures the essence of her cognitive dissonance; she is physically here, but that does not make sense because this place has nothing to do with her; she is an imposter trying to assimilate. This place is not her; she has no connection to it, so the wind carries her home in her dreams.

Then she would find Miss Fortini staring at her across the shop floor and she would try once again to seem cheerful and helpful to customers as though it were a normal day at work.
Now the emotions that only we have been privy to, threaten to spill over into the awareness of the other characters in her world.  And we are not simply told that she started to cry, we are told she is worried she will start to cry. We are not looking at a woman crying, we are in the head of a woman trying not to cry.

She was trying to be anonymous, small, and inconspicuous, but that dream where she was carried home would not allow it. Instead, her troubled inner life intrudes on her actions, makes her conspicuous, stops her from being able to "seem cheerful, and helpful" to "seem busy", to seem "as though it were a normal day at work".

The truth is, it is a normal day at work, except for her unhappiness, except for this interiority that we have been shown.

I recognise this feeling of homesickness from living in Ottawa as a post-doc. This passage brings that emotion back, even while I have almost forgotten I was ever homesick while I was there, preferring to remember it as one long, uninterrupted adventure. 

A powerful performance of the use of interiority in fiction.

Next Steps

Has this made you wonder how you’re handling interiority? Would you like help dialling in on this aspect of your craft? I work with new novelists as they work on their first novel -their apprentice piece. If that sounds inviting, you can find out more on my services page.