Juggle External Action and Interiority
Showing, Telling, Explaining
When it comes to internal stuff, I like to differentiate between showing, telling, and explaining. Telling is stuff that could be left implied through the external action. A lot of emotions can be shown instead of told. You likely don’t ever need to tell us that someone is angry, for instance. Instead, show it. That is, imply it through external stuff like character behavior and dialogue. Showing means that you allow readers to make judgments about the abstractions that underlie the external content. In showing, the impression is that the events are witnessed rather than reported. Not everything needs to be rendered in concrete, scenic detail, however. Non-essential parts of the story, flashes to the past, and fast-forwarded sections can be summarized or reported—told, that is. But there’s a third thing. Explaining is what you have to do when there’s no way we could possibly intuit the information or interiority or past being conveyed. George Saunders wrote a story called “Escape from Spiderhead,” in which a prisoner takes various futuristic pharmaceutical prototypes as a human guinea pig of sorts. We need and want the inside view of what the drugs feel like. Here’s an example:So sometimes, you’ll want to go ahead and explain the internal dimension outright. It’s okay. That’s not telling. That’s warranted explanation.What happened next was, Heather soon looked super-good. And I could tell she thought the same of me. It came on so sudden we were like laughing. How could we not have seen it, how cute the other one was? Luckily there was a couch in the Workroom. It felt like our drip had, in addition to whatever they were testing, some ED556 in it, which lowers your shame level to like nil. Because soon, there on the couch, off we went. It was super-hot between us. And not merely in a horndog way. Hot, yes, but also just right. Like if you'd dreamed of a certain girl all your life and all of a sudden there she was, in your same Workroom.
Other Tricks
There are two other tricks to narrating interiority I want to discuss: 1) Close psychic distance (sometimes called Deep POV) 2) Infused subjectivity Close psychic distance simply means that the distance between the narrator and the character approaches zero.Right there in the middle, we get that question, “Had Sheila already gotten there?” Note there’s no thought tag, no “he wondered” or other indicator that the narrator is “speaking.” The narration goes straight to character interiority. In other words, the narration is (pretty much) character thought. That’s close psychic distance. Infused subjectivity is when the narrator seems to be describing external things, but slips in a word or two that shows we’re getting that view of the external world filtered via a character.Billy noiselessly took the lid off the cookie jar and looked inside. It was empty. Had Sheila already gotten there? It didn’t matter. Now, it would be easy to profess his innocence.
That word “stupid” clues us into the subjective perspective behind this otherwise external description. Sneak in a subjective word (conveying a character’s perspective on things) and that’s infused subjectivity. So, four tenets to keep in mind, then: 1) External behavior and dialogue can—and should—convey interiority. 2) But sometimes you need to explain interiority. 3) You can use close psychic distance to give the effect of showing interiority. 4) You can infuse external stuff with subjectivity to give us a sense of a character’s viewpoint.Then Shiela pulled the cookie from the front pocket of her hoody and smiled that stupid smile.