Save It Till the End of the Scene

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Tuesday, April 24, 2007
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You're writing a scene. The dialogue is crackling, the action is intense, and for everything you say you're leaving plenty more unsaid. You're in the zone. In fact, you're punching above your weight, writing better than anyone should be allowed, and loving every second.

And then it happens: you go internal.

You never made a conscious decision. The scene just veered off. And now, between every line of dialogue and every action beat, there are a string of inner questions, a chunk of each character's psychology plopped on the page. Every point is belabored, every effect overdetermined, and suddenly all the story questions are exhausted, all the suspense dead and gone. Your wave crested the moment you opened up your characters' brains.

There is a place, of course, for internal musings, a place for heroes and heroines to ponder their conflicted motivations. Authors often come up with these motives during a scene, and so it seems natural to insert them there. Maybe it works -- I'm sure it does sometimes. But I happen to think that the inner life of characters is a resource best used sparingly. If you do want to probe a heroine's doubts, dont' do it in the middle of her conversations. Instead, save such ruminations for when they would naturally occur in life: after the talking is done, when she's trying to figure out what made her say those terrible things!

This strategy has two virtues. It keeps your scenes moving, and it also adds clarity to a character's emotional arc -- because, when inner thoughts are used like punctuation between lines of dialogue, these emotions seem to ping-pong back and forth. Obviously, there's a way to pull off most anything, and my advice stems from my own inability to make such things work. If you can do it, more power to you. Just make sure you really are pulling it off.