Give your characters some thought

Writing fiction is hard. Any serious writer would probably agree with that statement. Even when you’re writing a short story, you still have to consider setting, plot, character development, voice, tense, narrative structure…and the list goes on. And each of those items have many subsets – like a tree branching out. As many of you know, keeping track of all this can get really complicated really fast.

However, for today I’m just going to focus on a small part of character development: your character’s thoughts. Surely your character thinks, right? Often what a character says and does is only part of the story (no pun intended). For example, on the outside, a character can appear confident and strong because of what they say and the actions they take. But on the inside, they can be in complete turmoil.

Showing your character’s thoughts can be tricky. At the very best, your character’s "inner life" will be just as interesting as his/her "outer life". At the very worst, your character’s thoughts will be boring and turn the reader off to your entire story. Here’s a tip I learned about many years ago. It works well, just don’t overdo it:

Add action to thought
This is a very straightforward way to show what a character is thinking. Take the following example:

This guy is a pig, Emily thought.

Not the most exciting sentence. And let’s forget for a moment that calling a guy a pig is a huge cliche`. This is the type of sentence that a reader will probably skim over and not give much thought to. Yes, it tells you what the character is thinking, but it doesn’t give the reader a sense of urgency. Now look at this next sentence:

This guy is a pig, Emily thought, and she turned around and walked off without saying a word.

Still not stellar prose (it’s hard to think of examples like these), but it’s a little more interesting than the first example. Furthermore, it gives the reader something to imagine. Without the action, how do you imagine Emily thinking?

This method works well in just about every situation a character is thrown into. In my early fiction, many of my characters found themselves drinking or smoking as they would sit in a chair and think. Which brings me to my next point: it works the best when the action is somehow related to the thought. Smoking and drinking are fine actions for a character, but if said character is trying to diffuse a bomb, having a smoke or martini might not be the best fit with their thought process.

Beware of overuse
Tips and tricks are great for writers because they help make our job a little easier. But tips and tricks can often be abused, to the point of overuse and they lose their effectiveness. If every paragraph of your story uses the thought + action formula, your fiction is going to get really dry really fast.

There are other ways to show your character’s inner thoughts. But I think this post has gone on long enough. Maybe, if you’re lucky, I will write another post about this topic. Who knows, it might even become a series. But I make no promises (my standard disclaimer).

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Read More: Writing Tips