Hey, Do You Need Help With “Internals?”
Thinking about what your characters are thinking
It’s so often the simple things that trip us up as writers. We’re people prone to over-thinking, to over-worrying, to assuming that something can’t be as easy or straightforward without there being some kind of catch or trick.
Like writing dialogue can’t possibly just be writing things and using quotation marks, right? We have all these other forms of punctuation, so they’ve got be used, right?
Or writing a pitch can’t be as simple as writing an evocative sentence that frames some portion of the story’s stakes and plot and character but doesn’t have everything because it’s a pitch not a book report, can it?
The easy stuff can get hard when we get all up in our heads over it.
Like “internals.” Now while the term is gag-inducing and is far more popular in social media circles than in editorial ones (pros call them “thoughts”), writing internals is pretty straightforward once you strip it down to its core use.
From The Desk Of The Brain Of The Character
An internal is what a character is thinking. The old-fashioned term is “internal dialogue” which later became “inner dialogue” which is now “internal” because we can’t just leave well enough alone.
