INNER WORLDS, OUTER DRIVE

 

Authors of genre fiction - adventure yarns, thrillers, fantasy epics, whodunnits etc - have a horrible tendency to neglect the inner. Why bother with all that deep & meaningful stuff (they say) if the point of the book is a rollicking plot & plenty of action?

Big mistake. NO author can neglect the interior, because the interior is why readers read fiction at all. We don't just want to see Bond saving the world, we want to feel what it's like to be Bond saving the world. If you don't achieve that sense of interiority you haven't even got off the starting line. The reader won't care about your story, because they can't care about your character.

For some authors this Quick Guide will be irrelevant. For others it'll a lifesaver.

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Why have an inner world?

You need inner worlds because of the very first rule of fiction: the reader has to care about the protagonist. We don't care about robots. We don't care about people with the mental life of a can of beans. We need feelings. We need thoughts. We need sensations. We need things that individuate this human being from a billion others.

Obviously genre fiction is different from literary fiction. In the latter, the writer may probe into all kinds of things: how the protagonist feels about his father's memory loss, how he feels about the sound of a church bell, what he thinks about an unusual grammatical construction.

In genre fiction, none of this is likely to do much for the reader. But we do want to know how the gun feels in Bond's hand. We do want to know what he thinks about the beach babe with the harpoon. We do want to know his feelings as he storms into that mountain hideout. Inner worlds matter. No novel will succeed without them.

 

OK, so how do I build one?

Take any random 2-3 pages of your text. Check it to see if you have

• Any mention of that character's thoughts. (Don't count thoughts which pretty much any bystander would have had eg: "The man was covered with tattooes, weighed in at about 220lbs, and had a long curling scar running down the side of his face. X thought he looked like a nasty customer.") Count only those thoughts that are clearly specific to yoru central character.

• Any mention of that character's feelings. Again, things like 'he felt hungry' are fine, but they don't really distinguish that character from the rest of the human race. You're looking for stuff that individuates your protagonist's inner world from the rest.

• Any mention of that character's physical sensations. Here you're looking for sentences that tell us about how a character feels inside his body, what smells he comes across, what sounds he hears & how they impact him, etc. Again, disregard the obvious, and look for things unique to your character.

How did you score? If you basically didn't score any interior world mentions, then you have a major problem. You must go back through your whole book and make sure that you bring your character's inner world to life. You will not succeed otherwise. Do note though that before you do this, you need to make sure you have a firm grip of your protagonist's character. Our Ultimate Character Builder is the secret of success there.

If you have some inner world mentions, but not many (say just 1-2 per page) then you have probably undercooked your inner world. Review your novel carefully for this issue, with a view to building this aspect of your novel.

If you have multiple inner world mentions on every page, then well done you.

Can you give me an example of getting it right?

A foolish question. This is the Writers' Workshop. The chunk below is taken from a novel recently published by a WW editor. The novel is a classic adventure yarn with no pretensions to being anything more. But just look how continual is the reference to thoughts and feelings here (highlighted red on the right and picked up in the left hand margin.

If your MS does not read like this, then isn't it about time it did?

Implied emotion Feeling Feeling         Implied feeling Thought Feeling Implied feeling         Feeling   Implied thought   Feeling   Thought   Thought Thought/feeling   Thought

‘Oh for God’s sake!’     Willard Thornton, a dazzlingly good-looking actor of twenty something, felt sick.     It wasn’t the plane, a neat little Gallaudet, that upset him, but the take-off site. The Gallaudet had been precariously winched up onto the roof of the Corin Tower, twenty-five storeys above ground. The tar roof was flat, a hundred feet square. A low parapet had run round the outside, but had been removed for filming. The place where the blocks had been wrenched away showed up white against the tar. A camera crew stood sullenly, underdressed for the wind that flicked across from the mountains. The cameraman jabbed a finger at the sky.    ‘We oughta to go. We’re losing light. But what do I care? It’s your picture, buddy.’     Willard scowled again. The cameraman was right. This was his movie. He was actor, writer, director, producer, financier – and right now there was a decision to be made. He thought of the stunt he was about to pull and felt sick.    ‘OK, OK,’ he commented, ‘Only Jesus Christ!’    ‘Jesus Christ is about right, darling,’ said Daphne O’Hara, taking a cigarette from the cameraman’s mouth and smoking it down to the butt. O’Hara (or Brunhilde Schulz, to give her the name she was born with) was dressed in a silver evening gown, with enough paste diamonds to bury a duchess. The wind was wrapping her dress hard against her legs and her carefully set hair was beginning to unravel.    ‘The light,’ said the cameraman.    ‘Forget the light. It’s my hair, sweetheart.’    ‘Oh for God’s sake! Let’s do it.’     Willard felt angry and out of control. The cast and crew were on their thirteenth week of filming their feature, Heaven’s Beloved. They already had enough film in the can to make a six hour movie. But Willard was a realist. He’d seen the rushes. And they were bad. Badly done, badly shot, and dull. Deadly dull. The script had been hastily revised. Stunts had been shoved in in a desperate effort to lift the story. Willard had grown to loathe any mention of the budget.     And now this. The Gallaudet stood in one corner of the roof, with the wind on its nose. They’d selected the plane for its low take-off speed, but even so, Willard guessed, they wouldn’t be fully airborne by the time they reached the edge. Would he have enough lift and forward speed to keep his tail clear as he left the roof? He didn’t know. If the tail caught, would it hook him downwards, or just give him a fright? He didn’t know, but felt sick thinking about it. In the past, he’d preferred to hand the tough stunts over to professional stuntmen, but his last two stuntmen had quit on him after rows over money. In any case, it was only flying wasn’t it?

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