Internal monologue is tough to master. Many of us talk to ourselves or have internal conversations as we mull choices, so it’s natural to write our characters the same way. Rely on this too often, though, and it becomes dull, if not cloying. We risk explaining everything to the reader.
In a new post, Mary Carroll Moore offers advice for working with internal monologues. There are a lot of methods for using it. Some writers use dialogue tags to indicate the character is talking to themselves, while others use italics. Writers using close POV blend the internal commentary with their narrative descriptions. But Moore says how you handle internal monologue isn’t as important as how often you use it.
It’s easy to overuse. “Mostly that happens when the writer is unsure whether her point has come across via action and dialogue,” Moore says. “She wants to drive home the meaning by having the character map it out for us internally. Bad move, because readers are super smart and most IM is completely superfluous, in my opinion–or worse, weighs down the pace unnecessarily.”
If you’ve used a lot of internal monologue in your early draft, consider its use carefully as you revise. Ask yourself why you’ve inserted it. Did you need a placeholder to flag yourself that something needs to be fixed in a later draft? Or do you not trust your reader to understand your meaning?
