Keeping it inside

 One thing I’m discovering as I continue with my rewrite of my old novel is that there’s a lot of new internal dialogue coming up in the story.

Over the last couple of novels, since I’ve switched to writing at home, I’ve found a lot more of this bubbling up in my mind as I write, subtle insights into people’s characters and relationships.  And it occurs to me that this internal dialogue is serving several purposes.

First, it shows a character’s mindset.  I have an ex-military character in the book who is always scanning whatever environment he is in for potential threats.  He’s looking for links between acts of sabotage, which might or might not be there.  Some of his thoughts I want the reader to know, but not the other characters with him.  So that’s an obvious candidate for internal dialogue, where he can work out his suspicions and plans in private.

I’m also using internal dialogue to define characters.  I have several places where the viewpoint character thinks that another’s response to an issue is not what they expected.  That allows me to give an outsider’s view of that character.  Then, when I change viewpoint to get into that other character’s head, the reader gets a richer picture from both outside and inside.

Another way I’ve used internal dialogue is to show character growth and change.  Sometimes this is in reaction to a conversation with another character who sees events in different ways. This is the ‘maybe she’s got a point’ reaction, which can sometimes get us examining the basis for our beliefs.

I’ve used internal dialogue in the first chapter of the book to depicts a character waiting to meet someone new. This new person is going to be very prominent in his life, and the meeting is important.  I’m using first person for this viewpoint, so the character’s thoughts and reactions are more like a monologue than true internal speech.  From it we learn that he is very nervous, and that “the partnership has to work for me this time”, which raises an intriguing question at the end of the first paragraph.  What was it about his relationship with his previous pilot that didn’t work?  Whatever it was, we already know that it was traumatic for this character.

I also use his internal dialogue to describe his new pilot, comparing her altered appearance with the images he has of her real identity.  That allows me to describe the pilot to the reader without doing a straightforward information dump.  And when the character intercepts his new pilot’s telepathic command to a console, it allows me to get that piece of information over in his internal dialogue too.

So, description, emotion, hints at backstory, and comments on a character can all be done using internal dialogue.  Handled well, it’s a very useful took in the writer’s kit.