WRITING CRAFT: HOW TO BE INSIDE A CHARACTER WITHOUT LOSING THE NARRATOR

She arrived at the party late. The room was too crowded and too warm, and everyone was doing that thing where they leaned in very close to talk over the music. Across the room, he was laughing at something, which was typical. He hadn’t even noticed she’d arrived. She stood there with her coat still on and decided she wouldn’t stay long.

Who is speaking in that passage? A narrator, technically. But “everyone was doing that thing” is her phrasing, slightly dismissive, already passing judgment. “Which was typical” is her evaluation delivered inside the narrator’s sentence without attribution. “She stood there with her coat still on and decided she wouldn’t stay long”: whose point of view is this? The narrator’s, reporting her decision? Or her own determination, with the frame of “she decided” dissolved entirely? Both. The narrator and character are speaking simultaneously.

Free indirect discourse is a mode of narration in which a character’s thoughts, feelings, or perceptions are rendered in the third person, in the character’s own idiom, without quotation marks or attribution.

In this post, you’ll learn the three modes of representing interiority side by side so you can see exactly what the technique changes, four examples from Austen to Mantel showing FID doing entirely different kinds of work, the distinction between FID and stream of consciousness that most discussions of the technique skip, and a method for putting it to use in your own writing.

Deep Writing is a working library, organised into six stages that give every kind of storyteller something useful.

1 Giving yourself permission to start.

2 Finding an idea worth pursuing.

3 Drafting it.

4 Sharpening your craft through writing.

5 Applying it to your own creative work.

6 Revising it into something finished.

FULL CURRICULUM

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