To begin the New Year at Numéro Cinq, here’s a terrific addition to our growing collection of literary craft essays from Erin Stagg. In “The Mind’s Eye—Character Thought in Fiction,” Erin gives a terse, clear explanation of some of the basic techniques of character thought using a gorgeous Lorrie Moore short story as her example quarry.
Erin Stagg is a freshly-minted graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Program. She grew up in Taos, New Mexico, studied Spanish at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and now lives in New Zealand where she teaches skiing in the winter and works in retail in the summer. She was awarded the 2002 Wellesley College Johanna Mankiewicz Davis Prize for Prose Fiction. Her short fiction has also appeared in The Battered Suitcase.
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The Mind’s Eye – Character Thought in Fiction
By Erin Stagg
Character thought is text in the story that tells the reader what is going on inside the character’s mind. When I started looking for it in other writers’ work I suddenly realized that good writers are constantly weaving their characters’ consciousness into their stories. They write it into their stories using the techniques of narrative inscription, direct indication, free indirect discourse and imaginative reconstruction, all of which we will look at in depth. We will also look at how character thought functions in fiction as backfill, motive and thematic interpretation.
I was astounded at the sheer volume and density of character thought as well as a bit embarrassed that I had never really noticed it before. It’s everywhere. Flannery O’Connor begins “A Good Man is Hard to Find” inside her main character’s mind, telling the reader what that character wants: “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind.” (O’Connor, 9) Jane Austen’s Emma is constantly thinking her way through what happens in the novel Emma and reflecting upon it:
Her own conduct, as well as her own heart, was before her in the same few minutes. She saw it all with a clearness which had never blessed her before. How improperly had she been acting by Harriet! How inconsiderate, how indelicate, how irrational, how unfeeling had been her conduct! What blindness, what madness, had led her on! It struck her with dreadful force, and she was ready to give it every bad name in the world.
James Joyce uses it in “The Dead.” Here is a section from the final scene. The character thought is in bold.
The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live. (Joyce, 160)
Good writers insert character thought into every story and novel – characters think their way through stories. And it’s important here to realize, because I know some of you are thinking that character thought is telling and we should not tell, that character thought is not telling at all. In his essay “Notes on Novel Structure” Doug Glover writes, “Thought is action.” (75) Thinking is something characters do. Not only that, but it drives a story forward by giving every action and reaction a motive. Writers use it to give their characters a past, an imagination and the ability to interpret what is happening to them. In other words good writers use character thought to flesh out the bare bones of the plot and fill their characters with the semblance of life.