As a writer, you need to be expressive enough to impact your audience with your work, a 30-second monologue, maybe? An interesting character is the main key to that concern. As you write a character in your story, a plain and boring presence wouldn’t be as pleasing nor efficient in building a relationship with the readers. Think of ways a character will do such feats when introduced to the audience. 

To create an interesting story, you must possess a unique and creative way of how the characters will express their thoughts and share them with readers. One thing for this to happen is to let them have their soliloquies. Imagine a character that communicates well with the readers. That’s how you break the fourth wall as a writer. 

Today’s fiction is now engaging and all for breaking the fourth wall. For example, characters have a glimpse into their inner life and can be delivered through internal dialogue. Another would be characters that are aware that they’re part of the story on a book and talking with the readers in a sense that they have an understanding bond with each other.

What Should Be Added? 

Adding internal dialogues with your characters also adds important context to their spoken dialogues or conflicts, revealing more information about the character. Sometimes having these internal dialogues are the inner thoughts or POV that the characters feel, whether it is too much pain, hidden power, or embarrassment that can be too much to be revealed to the public.

Writing an internal dialogue may differ from writing a normal written, spoken dialogue. As a writer, you must remember that you should not use quotation marks and only stick with dialogue tags. The best way to present your internal dialogue is to write in italics to indicate them as internal voices. The use of the italic font adds a hidden description between the character’s self-thought and the main story’s scene.

Third-Person Narration

To be an effective writer who has the ability to write an internal dialogue, these three internal dialogue examples for a third-person point-of-view are important.

1.) Italicized, with tag: Shinpachi kept screaming about how the Tenshouin Naraku infiltrated their village. Gintoki sighed. This is not Edo period, four-eyes, he thought. This is the Meiji Era, post-Edo period.

2.) Italicized, without tag: Shinpachi kept screaming about how the Tenshouin Naraku infiltrated their village. Gintoki sighed. This is not the Edo period, four-eyes. This is the Meiji Era, post-Edo period.

3.) Not Italicized, with tag: Shinpachi kept screaming about how the Tenshouin Naraku infiltrated their village. Gintoki sighed. This is not the Edo period, four-eyes, he thought. This is the Meiji Era, post-Edo period.

Maybe you’ll get confused in the process, but there are things you need to remember when writing a direct internal dialogue versus an indirect internal dialogue. Remember that internal dialogues that are written in the present tense are called direct internal dialogues. In contrast, if the internal dialogues are written in the past tense, they are indirect internal dialogues. It is the most common rule in writing, to write immediate thoughts by using italics.

First-Person Narration

You’ll notice that some of the best-selling fiction books today are written by a first-person narration. For better knowledge of how a first-person narration works, please check these examples:

1.) Italicized, with tag: Stu kept asking how he ended up marrying a girl she doesn’t know in Vegas. I sighed. I really don’t know too what happened that night, I thought. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

2.) Italicized, without tag: Stu kept asking how he ended up marrying a girl she doesn’t know in Vegas. I sighed. I really don’t know too what happened that night. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

3.) Not Italicized, with tag: Stu kept asking how he ended up marrying a girl she doesn’t know in Vegas. I sighed. I really don’t know too what happened that night, I thought. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

4.) Italicized, without tag: Stu kept asking how he ended up marrying a girl she doesn’t know in Vegas. I sighed. I really don’t know too what happened that night. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

To Do Things

Writing an internal dialogue isn’t that hard. You can do many things to exercise your mind from thinking good ideas and gimmicks. Think about being so natural when writing, like you are just telling a story about yourself and you’re just narrating it to someone. As you write a long and tiring book, you often ask yourself, “I wonder what my next line could be.” The best way to solve this is through the things listed below.

Try doing other things like: 

• Mind games
• Puzzles
• Watching movies
• Wander to the woods
• Dance
• Listen to music
• Play cards
• Adapt and learn new things
• Do some 30-second monologue with oneself

Final Takeaway

There are many things you can do to exercise your mind. You must help yourself to overcome a challenge in life. Being a writer is not an easy job. It will take just more than mere efforts to create an effective book for the public. But being successfully knowledgeable and ready for writing is the best way to have and create an internal dialogue and a masterpiece.

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