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How do you handle your interior monologue’s mechanics so that it reads smoothly and professionally? As with dialogue mechanics, the sterling value is unobtrusiveness. And there is one actual rule: Never, ever use quotes with your interior monologue. It isn’t merely poor style; it is, by today’s standards, ungrammatical. Thoughts are thoughts, not spoken. Also, it’s rarely a good idea to have your characters mumble to themselves or speak under their breath. It’s almost always going to come off as a contrivance. Other than these two caveats, how you handle your interior monologue depends almost entirely on your narrative distance. Everybody thinks in his or her own words, so your characters’ interior monologue is, like their dialogue, always in their voice. To the extent that your narrative is in a different voice, you need to set the interior monologue off, to indicate that it’s separate. When the distinction is sharp, you could use thinker attributions—phrases such as “he thought” or “she wondered.” Like speaker attributions, these mechanical tags usually serve to let your readers know who is thinking what. But whenever you’re writing from a single point of view—as you will be ninety percent of the time—you can simply jettison thinker attributions. Your readers will know who’s doing the thinking. Had he meant to kill her? Not likely, he thought. Had he meant to kill her? Not likely. Another technique for setting off interior monologue sharply is to write it in the first person (often in italics) when your narrative is in the third, a technique that is most effective when the passage of interior monologue is a self-conscious, internal thought—interior dialogue, in effect. He had just pulled his mail out of the box and was unlocking the door when he heard the metallic snap. He glanced back in time to see the Jag starting to roll slowly down the driveway. He broke into a sprint. The car was moving more quickly than it seemed to be, but he managed to catch up to it and grab the back bumper. Great, what do I do now? Effective as this technique can be in letting readers into your characters’ heads, be careful not to use it too often. Also, unless you are deliberately writing with narrative distance, there is no reason to cast your interior monologue in the first person. It’s far easier simply to cast it in third person, dispensing with any thinker attributions along the way. Had I meant to kill her? he thought. Had he meant to kill her? Where you have a longer passage of interior monologue and are still writing with some narrative distance, it sometimes helps to set it off in its own paragraph, especially when the passage signals a change of mood: Monroe settled into one of the plastic chairs outside the examining room and flipped through a magazine. Who was he kidding, he knew he couldn’t read anything in the state he was in. Still, better to look at the pictures in the ads than to stare at the other patients. Or worse yet, to think about what was going to happen. One of the signs that you are writing from an intimate point of view is that the line between your descriptions and your interior monologue begins to blur. Readers move effortlessly from seeing the world through your character’s eyes to seeing the world through your character’s mind and back again. Consider the following passage, from one of our workshop submissions: He flipped the book over and stared at the quote. “A masterpiece of clarity and insight by a leading clinician and theoretician.” The words were from Jerome Carver, Jr., MD. Pond hurled the book at the wall. Jerry Carver was Pond’s best friend, the one who’d run off with Alice after Pond was released from prison. Just when he’d needed them most. The attribution should have read, Jerome Carver, Jr., Traitor. The first two paragraphs of this passage are clearly description, but with the third, the distinction becomes a bit less obvious. The paragraph starts out with what looks like backstory, yet by the time the paragraph is finished, it’s clear we’re being let into Pond’s mind. The interior monologue is third person, past tense, and the language is such as Pond would have used if he had been speaking out loud. The transition is so smooth the seams don’t show.
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