Is inner monologue a bad way to show character traits?
Is directly showing a characters inner thoughts and conversations with themselves too telly or cheesy?
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Nope. Best selling authors do it all the time. Its encouraged as long as it adds to the story instead of being a distraction; which is the general rule to putting in anything.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33013. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Inner monologue is used quite frequently, and it can reveal character traits that may not be revealed any other way: True feelings.
Such as, if Jack is telling the truth about never cheating on Jill, if the photograph of him doing so had to be faked.
The same with secret desires, dislikes, hatreds, plotting, faking friendship or even faking love or sexual attraction for nefarious purpose. Jack may have faked his love for Jill to get laid. Or alternatively, Jill may have faked her enthusiasm for Jack's clumsy and laughably stupid seduction of her, to become trusted enough by him to rob him blind.
You should not abuse inner thoughts, readers trust they are the real thing. Just like in real life, actions and dialogue can be misleading lies. Inner dialogue should be the true thoughts; I think it would be a violation of the "reader contract" to find out they were lied to by some previous passage portrayed as an inner thought or feeling.
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It's not inherently bad
It is a trap where too many things as resolved through inner monologue when it might make the story more dynamic. I suffer from that big time where the character thinks and thinks and thinks about stuff but does not do anything about it. My personal take is that it is not bad, but whenever you can have the character DO something that would prove the dialogue, it helps.
Keep it short whenever possible. Show, don't tell. And thinking about stuff has a bad tendency to have you tell, rather than show.
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Not necessarily, but the propensity to indulge in internal monologue is itself a character trait. Fundamentally, the way we assess the character of someone in fiction is the same a how we assess their character in life: by their actions. Sometimes it makes sense to shortcut the process of establishing character by telling us directly some aspect of the character's character, but even that is best done by telling us how the typically act (as opposed to dramatizing a whole scene).
So, if you show a character's internal monologue, readers will interpret that first and foremost as a piece of behavior and will judge first and foremost that indulging in internal monologue is a character trait of the person.
Will the content of that internal monologue also reveal aspects of their character? Sure. But you have to treat that in context of the broader effect of showing all that internal monologue. If you use it to reveal a character who is not contemplative by nature, the dissonance will be obvious and will undermine what you are trying to achieve.
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