In a new post, Janice Hardy offers advice on creating natural-sounding inner dialogue in close third person POV. “In first person this is easy, because you’re already so close to their perspective the thoughts roll naturally into the story,” she says. “With third person it can be more challenging, because there’s an extra layer between the character and the reader.”
In close third, the reader experiences the story through the protagonist’s eyes and is close in their thoughts. The language you choose is the protagonist’s. What you describe is what your main character sees and feels. The wording is close to what the character would say aloud and you don’t need “he thought” dialogue tags. Hardy offers five tips for pulling this off:
- Keep it in the character’s voice. Use the character’s words, opinions, and emotions.
- Stay in the same tense as the rest of your narrative. Don’t switch to present tense if your story is written in past.
- Don’t worry about perfect grammar. “People don’t think in full sentences,” Hardy writes. “They drop words, use slang, use sentence fragments, break off in mid-thought. Be true to the character and how they’d think. If they’re crass, let them be crass.”
- Mix the physical and the mental. Don’t write long paragraphs of action without internal thoughts or vice versa. People think and do at the same time, Hardy notes. Mix it up.
- Remember stimulus/response. Reactions are usually good times for internalization. “If something happens to cause your character to react, consider what they’d think, say, and do, not just one of those,” Hardy says. “Pick the aspects that will best show the character and the story.”
