In a post on Writers in the Storm, Tiffany Yates Martin offers advice for bringing your readers into your character’s inner life. “Regardless of what POV you’re writing in, allowing readers to understand what’s going on inside your character is what makes a story immediate, direct, and vivid to us,” she says. “If we don’t know how they react to things and how they process them, your characters might as well be game pieces we simply watch progress along the board.”
That means understanding your character’s perspective, their ideas, morals, and how they interpret events. But how can you do this without having your hero describing her thoughts every other page? Yates Martin says you need to give your reader a direct experience. “In story, we want to not only see characters’ pain—and joy and fear and excitement and anger and everything else—we want to feel it with them,” Yates Martin says. “We read not to hear someone’s story related to us secondhand, but to live it right along with them.” That doesn’t mean lots of internal dialogue, however. “It simply means giving readers not just a front-row seat to the character’s journey, but a backstage pass,” she adds.
Some bad habits to avoid include:
- Misusing silence. Avoid the “they sat in silence” time killer. While your characters might not be speaking aloud, they are processing information and emotions. Give your readers the juicy details.
- Labeling emotion. “If you want readers to deeply invest in your characters and their story, then you have to not just tell them what the character is feeling, but rather let us feel it with him directly,” Yates Martin writes. “It means giving us that all-access pass to the same experience the character is having, instead of just reporting on it.” She suggests portraying the intimate, gut reaction of a character to stimulus, rather than the intellectual conclusion about what they experience. If you can imagine what your character is feeling and can convey that accurately, your reader will feel it as well.
- Letting physical or physiological description substitute for insight. It’s easy to use clichéd physical descriptions to stand in for emotion. You don’t want to tell the emotion, but writing “his stomach tightened” is an easy out for portraying fear or stress with sensory language. “These visceral reactions are useful—they actually can be a tool for letting readers understand the effect of an emotion rather than labeling it,” Yates Martin says. “But used without some insight into why the character is reacting that way, they can leave readers in the dark about what’s going on inside them.” If your character is crying, we need to know why. It’s not enough to say she’s sad. Tell us what she’s lost or what she is afraid of. “We need some glimpse into what the character is making of what happened, how they’re processing it, what they think that is creating what they feel,” Yates Martin adds. “We want to know what impact this occurrence has, how it shifts their reality, moves them along their arc to the next action they will take.”
