5 Ways to Write Character Thoughts Worth More Than a Penny

One of the key benefits of written fiction is also one of the most difficult techniques to master: the characters’ inner narrative. The inner narrative of the characters—their thoughts put on paper—is the essence of fiction. Mastery of that essence equals mastery, in large part, of the art form of fiction itself.

No wonder it’s hard!

And no wonder it’s important.

So how can you create powerful character thoughts? And how can you frame those thoughts on the page to make them as effective as possible? Let’s take a look at fiveimportant guidelines for writing powerful character thoughts.

1. Let Your Characters Think

Authors sometimes approach inner narrative tentatively (or not at all) out of  fear readers will be bored and will want to return to the action as quickly as possible. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Interesting internal narrative, when appropriately balanced with action and dialogue, is the life’s blood of any story. Readers don’t just want to see what’s happening to your characters; they want to know what they think about what is happening to them.

2. Show Personality Through Word Choice

Your character’s narrative voice is his literary fingerprint. How much different does Stephanie Plum’s voice sound from Mattie Ross’s? Authors should be so in tune with the nuances of their characters’ personality that the characters’ voices on the page offers sound inherently unique. Novelist Jewell Parker Rhodes (in an interview with The Writer, March 2011) made the point that

[I] can’t write the story until I get the voice of the main character in my head.

3. Show Personality Through the Characters’s Worldview

Telling readers about your setting is one thing; using it as a unique tool to further characterize your narrators by allowing them to show readers the setting as they see it makes all the difference. In my short story “The Memory Lights,” I used the narrator’s frenzied mindset to try to give the 19th-century London setting a sinister edge:

Up ahead, the flame of a streetlight hung in the midst of the London fog like some kind of giant spirit. She hated the lights at night; they were too much like eyes watching her. Always watching. She broke out of the crooked skipping pace in which she had been running and shot a glance around the street for something to throw at the light.

4. Illustrate Character Arc Through Character Thoughts

Instead of just showing your character’s eventual transformation over the course of the story, give your readers a backstage pass, so they can experience the character arc from the inside out. Internal narrative is a key tool in helping readers understand motive and growth. Can you imagine Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s classic Crime and Punishment without the protagonist’s hysterical justifications for his crime of murder?

5. Choose the Best Way to Punctuate Thoughts

Authors can indicate “direct thoughts” (those told in present tense and first person) by:

• Italicizing them: Steve stopped. I don’t know what to do.
• Putting them in quotes: Steve stopped. “I don’t know what to do.”
• Prefacing them with an em dash: Steve stopped. —I don’t know what to do.
• Changing the tense: Steve stopped. I don’t know what to do.

However you do it, direct thoughts always run the risk of pulling readers out of the narrative.

Technically, in a deep POV, the entire story is the character’s thoughts. As a result, the most seamless way to share a character’s direct thoughts is to simply incorporate them into the narrative itself.

Instead of writing, “Jack shot the bad guy, then stopped and thought, I can’t believe I just did that,” write, “Jack shot the bad guy, then stopped. Had he really just done that?”

Or in our previous example about Steve, you could simply write: Steve stopped. He didn’t know what to do.

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Mastering your characters’ thoughts—both by making certain they have thoughts worthy of sharing and by discovering the most powerful way to convey those thoughts—makes all the difference in the tone, scope, and immersive quality of your story. If readers are willing to give more than a penny for your characters’ thoughts, you know you’ve created a story that rings true from beginning to end.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! How are you making your character’s thoughts unique and interesting? Tell me in the comments!