Mary Rosenblum, your web editor, has published three SF novels, four mysteries as Mary Freeman, and more than 50 short stories in multiple genres, as well as nonfiction! She also teaches writing, and has for many years.

 

 

Dialogue Inside and Out

by

Mary Rosenblum

While dialogue is a powerful tool for feeding information to the reader, sometimes it is not enough. When your mother asks you where you were after school, and you were out smoking cigarettes with your buddies behind the Jones barn, you are not likely to admit that out loud. "I was working on my science project with Denny Brown," you say innocently. Sometimes, in our fiction, our characters need to lie. But most of the time, we don’t want them to lie to the readers!

 Window to The Soul

Internal point of view, either direct thought or paraphrased thought, is a powerful tool for revealing character. As our POV character acts and reacts on the stage, his thoughts reveal what he really feels about what is going on. While our stoic hero may help the victims of an auto accident efficiently, inside, he may be struggling with flashbacks about his little brother’s death in the car he was driving, when, drunk, he hit a tree. While you can reveal his guilt through dialogue with another character, you can do so with fewer words and less ‘set up’ by simply including us in his internal reaction.

"Don’t move him." Derek stopped the man with a palm to his chest. "We need to cover him up, treat him for shock." He strode over to the red Toyota that had pulled over, grabbed the wool coat he’d noticed on the passenger seat. Would Petey have lived, if someone had been there to help? Derek crossed the gravel shoulder in two long strides, laid the thick coat gently over the boy’s limp body. How old? Ten, maybe? Petey’s age. "You’re gonna be okay." He dropped to his knees as the boy’s eyelids fluttered, brushing the blood-sticky wisps of hair back from his face. "I promise he whispered." Oh, God, this time, let it be true.

By letting us in on Derek’s thoughts, we get a strong sense of his emotions regarding the death of Petey. If we simply saw him helping the injured boy, but with no insights into his thoughts, we wouldn’t be able to perceive what lies beneath his calm and capable action. He would have to tell someone. And right now, in the midst of this accident, he’s unlikely to unburden his soul. So we will have to wait until later, until he chooses to talk to someone about the accident and his feelings….if his character would even do that. Some characters are very unwilling to talk about their feelings. If we don't violate their character, turning them into plot puppets, then we will have to live with their silence! But if we can peek inside their skulls to witness their feelings, then we can share them, and understand what drives these ‘silent types’. Internal POV is truly a window into our characters’ souls.

 

Realistic Dialogue

Internal POV also adds depth and dimension to dialogue, helping to transform it from something that sounds thin and phony to real words exchanged by real characters. Think about your last conversation. Not only did you hear the words the other person spoke, but you were also aware of their body language, and in addition, you carried on your own internal responses that perhaps weren’t tactful enough to say out loud.

See: He Said, She Said, Creating Realistic Dialogue: http://www.longridgewritersgroup.com/rx/wc06/he_said_she_said.shtml

 

Direct Versus Paraphrased Thought

So how exactly do we do this internal thought thing. Do we use quotation marks? After all, we’re quoting the character’s mental speech.

Well, yes we are, but no, no quotation marks are ever used to indicate thought. Some publishers and authors use italic to indicate a direct thought, although my own opinion is that italic always turns a voice into a shout. You simply punctuate your character’s thoughts the same way you punctuate normal prose, and use a tag such as ‘she thought’ to let us know that this is thought, rather than speech. However…think about how you think. Most of us think in sentence fragments, single words, and images. Rarely do we think in long grammatically correct sentences. So when we do something like this: Robert frowned. Let’s see, Jimmy really doesn’t do very well with new people, so maybe we’ll just go fishing next weekend instead of going to my high school reunion, although it would be nice to see the old crowd. I wonder what Hubert is doing. I bet he’s a banker or something like that.. It is going to sound very stilted and phony to most readers. We don’t really believe that Robert is thinking like this. In general, it is a good idea to limit direct thought to short fragments. Robert frowned. Fishing? Maybe. That is the kind of fragmentary thought that to Robert means maybe we’ll go fishing next weekend. But we need to let the reader know all the rest…that he wants to go to the reunion and thinks Hubert is a banker. So now what? How do we do that if we’re not supposed to TELL the reader things?

This is when you paraphrase thought in third person POV. You use the past tense, you don’t write it as if it is a quote, but you use the character’s voice – his word choices and the rhythm of his speech. So even though this is not a direct thought we read it as thought, but it no longer sounds stilted and unreal. Take our above example: Robert frowned. Let’s see. Jimmy really didn’t do very well with new people, so maybe they would just go fishing next weekend, instead of going to his high school reunion. Too bad. It would be nice to see the old crowd. Robert wondered briefly what Hubert was doing. Bet he was a banker.

In the above example, my ‘Let’s see’ is direct thought. But then, I drop back into the past tense and use Robert’s voice to tell us what we need to know. So it reads like a direct thought even though it isn’t, and our own author’s voice never intrudes. ‘Robert wondered’ simply reminds the reader that we are still in Robert’s thoughts. But these are paraphrased thoughts, I, the author am actually telling you what Robert is thinking, but I’m disguising my ‘telling’ by using Robert’s voice.

Putting It All Together

By mixing action, dialogue, and thought, you present the reader with a very complete scene, which allows us to gain more insight into the character of your POV.

Candi stalked into the kitchen and slammed open the cupboard. Trust Roberta to mess everything up. She glared at the jumble of ramen noodles and canned tomato sauce on the shelf. That woman had no brain. The phone shrilled and she snatched it up. "Hello?" Anne. Of course. Candi winced and held the receiver away from her ear. "I know, I know. I was there, remember?"

Our only direct thought here is ‘Anne’ and ‘Of course.’ Everything else is paraphrased in Candi’s words. Without that internal monologue of Candi’s musing about Roberta, we wouldn’t understand her anger unless you had showed us the scene that caused it. This thought allows you to skip that scene and simply give us the consequences as Candi slams about the kitchen thinking about it.

So don’t be afraid to show us your characters’ thoughts. It’s a great way to give us insights into their real feelings and their motivations. It’s a great way to give us information that we need. And it will make your dialogue more realistic.