Writing Your Character's Inner Life: What is Interiority?
Have you ever experienced the sensation where your physical world falls away? You become so immersed in the story that you forget that you are separate from the point of view character? That's called a close narrative distance, where the reader and the protagonist become one as they experience the story together.
Narrative distance is one of the primary tools in your tool belt to shaping your reader's experience of the story. To close this gap between the reader and the story, the use of interiority is crucial in painting a clear picture of what's going on inside the character's head.
You have probably heard me say before that "show, don't tell" is the worst writing advice of all time. It's thrown around so much without proper explanation that it confuses most writers. If you are struggling to implement this in your own writing, the solution is interiority.
Here's my definition of interiority:
Interiority is your point of view character's thoughts, feelings, observations, analysis and opinions.
As your character experiences external events, they interpret them within the context of their own life or what they've experienced thus far. This produces their internal world on the page. Think of this like an input and output.
Input: External Plot Point
Output: Your character's understanding of the external plot point.
This is more than just what your character thinks about a given situation. It's the purposeful use of their perspective to shape the narrative. Two characters may have vastly different interpretations of an identical plot point. Interiority is built on the nuanced emotional experience and physical sensations experienced by your point of view character. It can make your protagonist likable, build trust with your readers, and immerse them in your story.
Portraying your Character's Inner Life
Shaping your protagonist's internal world is more than just putting their thoughts on the page. It's about shaping the internal landscape of their journey to add richness, depth and complexity to the narrative.
Interiority really boils down to two keywords: specific and meaningful. Let's talk about how each affects your reader's experience.
Specificity
Your interiority is only as impactful as it is specific to your protagonist. What is happening on the page is only relevant in how your protagonist interprets the information.
Vague interiority prevents the reader from connecting with your characters. The more specific you are in describing how your protagonist is interpreting the on the page events, the better your audience will understand who your characters are as people.
Meaningful
Your character's perspective provides key insights into what the events of the story mean. If your character doesn't derive meaning from the moment at hand, the reader will struggle to understand why it matters. Interiority gives your audience access to your character's innermost thoughts.
This is more than just what your character is thinking, but what your character is feeling and how they are processing the external events of the story. Interiority tells your reader why what happens on the page matters, to your characters and in the overall scope of the story.
Use Interiority to World-Build
Fantasy and science-fiction authors often struggle to build their fictional worlds without info dumping. Interiority is a useful tool to weave in important world-building information that otherwise would have to be conveyed via exposition. As your character experiences the external events of their world, they are using their knowledge to interpret external events. This includes cultural norms, details about a place, or when meeting new characters with significant political roles.
Particularly if your story has a steep learning curve (if your protagonist is of your world and the reader is not), your protagonist's internal observations of their surroundings can provide a useful tool to explain some of the intricate details of your setting and magic system.
Examples of Interiority:
Let's look at a few examples. For the purposes of this exercise, the interiority will be in bold.
The Bridge Kingdom by Danielle L. Jensen
"And just barely, Lara head his response: "Maridrina. will starve before it ever sees the benefit of this treaty."
The embers in Lara's fury burned hot on the heels of his words, memories of the gaunt children she'd seen on the streets of her kingdom filling her eyes. Straightening, she stormed up the path to her room, intent on finding that asshole of a king and plunging one of her knives into his wicked Ithicanian guts.
But that would accomplish nothing."
-The Bridge Kingdom by Danielle L. Jensen, page 40.
Why it matters: The protagonist overhears a conversation of the man she's been secretly sent to kill. The reader gains significant insight into Lara's character from this section. Her fierce loyalty to her kingdom is so strong that she's enraged by the words of a man whose opinion is insignificant to her. The reader understands that she has volatile emotions, but that these strong feelings are curbed by an overarching sense of duty. Even more so, the reader understands the why behind these powerful emotions--the image of starving children fueling Lara on her mission. Her nuanced experiences bring believability and vibrancy to her character on the page.
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
"Voices were fading into the edge of her hearing from the top of the landing that led to the stairs. Another Ninth instinct had Gideon flatten herself back into the bottom of the stairwell; done a million times before to avoid the Marshal of Drearburh, or Harrowhark, or one of the godawful great-aunts or members of the Locked Tomb cloister. Gideon had no idea whom she was avoiding, but she avoided them anyway because it was such an easy thing to do."
-Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir, page 97.
Why it matters: Here, the protagonist is avoiding being caught as she makes her way through a stairwell. This paragraph could have easily been reduced to just the first line, showing the reader what the point-of-view character was up to. But Muir takes it one step further by adding meaning to her sneaking. In her description of how comfortable Gideon feels hiding, she gives valuable insight into her character. Gideon is practiced in avoiding and when put in danger, her instincts tell her to conceal herself. As a reader, our understanding of her deepens with this knowledge. It becomes easier to imagine an upbringing that would teach Gideon to hide, opening her perspective up to be adopted by the reader.
The Stardust Thief by Chelsea Abdullah
"She politely broke up her conversation with the merchant, then followed the jinn and the smiling man from a distance. "You think the human's a hunter?" She withdrew the two faced coin and flipped it. It came down on the jinn side. No.
"Strange. I have only known jinn to follow humans into cities for revenge, "Qadir said. Loulie picked up her pace. Qadir hissed in her ear, "What are you doing?"
"Following them."
The two-faced coin had never lied to her, which meant the jinn had enthralled this man for other reasons. "Lead me to the jinn," She whispered. The enchanted arrow obeyed, pointing her toward the vanishing jinn."
- The Stardust Thief by Chelsea Abdullah, page 23-24.
Why it Matters: In this paragraph, the protagonist is following an unusual couple through the crowd. The input is the two-faced coin coming down on the jinn side. The output is the reader's understanding that this coin never lies, which is only made known through the protagonist's internal world. Magic is explained using the understanding of the character, who already knows this information but is applying it to the current moment. The protagonist interprets this information from her external world and turns it into an internal understanding that the jinn is up to something other than revenge due to the fact that her coin never lies. The reader has no reason not to believe this, so they adopt the same opinion as the protagonist.
Write Interiority that Hooks Readers
Interiority can be powerful beyond its ability to convey important story elements. Whether you're writing in first person or third person, your character's internal world is what makes us feel like we know them on a deeper level. Their observations and analysis of the world around them is what tells us who they are as a character.
As your character is experiencing the plot, the reader is living the story vicariously through them. They adopt the opinions, feelings, and analysis of your protagonist, unless there is a reason to avoid doing so (like an unreliable narrator, but that's another blog post).
When mastered, interiority is the most influential tool in directly shaping your reader's experience of the story.
That’s all for now! For more writing tips and tricks, feel free to reach out to me or learn more on my Instagram below:
