Ope here,

Excuse me. Pardon. You got a second?

You know what I’ve been thinkin’ a lot about lately? Lately, I’ve been thinkin’ a lot about internal dialogue. I’ve been asking myself, Hey, Ope, what in the heck is going on inside people’s heads? Maybe I’m crazy, but all day long I look around and see person after person so blatantly unaware of anyone else around them that I want to run up and shake ’em, make sure they’ve got a pulse. Anyway, I gave up trying to understand. I moved on. Maybe I was just too in my own head, you know? That happens. Sometimes you’ve just got to take a step back. You know what I say: use it! Write about it. Turn it into magic. And it got me thinking:

One of the most effective ways of crafting compelling characters is by ensuring their internalized worlds are true to real life. It’s obvious to us as readers when characters have been denied an adequate internal world. It feels stilted and two-dimensional, not at all true to life. In real life, everything is happening from every direction at once and it’s all poorly planned and gracelessly executed and deadly serious and tragically selfish and flickeringly impermanent.

At any given moment, each of us is experiencing an internal dialogue—whether the events are being narrated by Cousin Eddie or Morgan Freeman. Even that person you saw in the grocery store who appeared to live as if with blinders on, seeing what they came for and nothing else. Especially them. They’re probably in a lot of pain and didn’t mean to snarl at you. The world just keeps snarling at them. It’s learned behavior. Let’s teach each other a new way.