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Writing at the Next Level: Getting Inside Your Character's Head

Walrus-related graffiti.Once you’ve mastered the basics of getting words on a page and moving characters around through situations, there’s some things that (in my experience) the majority of writers need to focus on. Examples are narrative grammar, paragraphing strategies, trimming excess from sentences, and getting inside a character’s head. Here, I’m going to discuss the last of those.

A lot of this is taken from correspondence with my student Hasnain. He’d asked about story structures, particularly Freitag’s Triangle, and we’d discussed where the triangle occurs in Junot Diaz’s story, Fiesta 1980. In looking at his most recent story, I’d said I thought he needed to get inside his main character’s head more.

Hasnain asked: You mentioned today that going into the narrator’s head is a good thing since it helps the reader seat more firmly with the narrator. However, here’s where I am a bit confused. I read somewhere that what people think and feel should be shown in a sensory way through their actions and interactions with others. If I go into the narrator’s head, wouldn’t I be telling? In my story, this would be if the narrator thinks about how he wants to put Sal’s love to the test.

My reply:

Let’s go back to Fiesta. Here’s some places where I think we’re particularly inside the narrator’s head and seeing his thoughts.

  • We were all dressed by then, which was a smart move on our part. If Papi had walked in and caught us lounging around in our underwear, he would have kicked our asses something serious.
  • Rafa gave me the look and I gave it back to him; we both knew Papi had been with that Puerto Rican woman he was seeing and wanted to wash off the evidence quick.
  • Not that me or Rafa loved baseball; we just liked playing with the local kids, thrashing them at anything they were doing. By the sounds of the shouting, we both knew the game was close, either of us could have made a difference.
  • But even that little bit of recognition made me feel better.
  • This was how all our trips began, the words that followed me every time I left the house.


Another possible way to do this is by showing the thoughts on the page as words that echo what’s going through the narrator’s mind. Here I’m going to refer you to a piece of mine that appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, The Worm Within, and hope you’ll forgive me for using my own stuff, but it’s easier to go to it for examples than hunt around for other stories.

Here’s a few passages where I’ve used that technique (note that it’s also an unreliable narrator – being inside the head of an unreliable narrator is a tricky strategy but awesome when effective):

  • Nude, I revel in my flesh, dancing in the hallway to feel the body’s sway and bend. Curved shadows slide like knives over the crossworded tiles on the floor, perfect black and white squares. If there were a mirror I could see myself.
  • I don’t know where he lives in my body. Surely what feels like him winding, wormlike, many-footed and long-antennaed through the hallways of my lungs, the chambers of my heart, the slick sluiceway of my intestines “” surely the sensation is him using his telekinetic palps to engage my nervous system. I think he must be curled, encysted, an ovoid somewhere between my shoulder blades, a lump below my left rib, a third ovary glimmering deep in my belly.
  • I walk in the park. Where did all these robots come from? What do they want? They look like the people that built them, and they walk along the sidewalk, scuffed and marred by their heavy footsteps. They pretend. That’s the only thing that saves me, the only thing that lets me walk among them pretending to be something that is pretending to be me.

Present tense works very well for this, I’ve found. Here, as another example, is an extended passage from the novel I’m grappling with:

The blade slices so close to my eyeball that my upper eyelashes brush against it. I pull back from that silver line hanging sideways in the air, roll on my heels on the gritty tiles.
The crowd is silent, watching from the vast stands. Not that many of them here, for a challenge match, particularly one no one thinks Crysa can win. But the fact that the Duke is here, watching, brings many.
Snap my left fist forward. Almost catch her.
Almost drive the side of the little round shield into her ribs as I push towards her. But she goes left, dodges with an exhalation that hangs in the frosty air between us.
Bitch is quick and fast as that Champion in the Southern Isles.
Built like her too.
Not as experienced, though. Spring’s always represented by someone young. Fresh.
She’s off balance from the step. Weight on that heel.
Make as though to kick forward into the other. Sweep a foot backward, into her calf. Make her falter.

You can even go so far as to mark thoughts as thoughts, usually by italicizing them.

Here’s a couple of passages from Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch, where we hear Finch’s thoughts:

  • Am I dead? he thought sometimes, walking down that green carpet he remembered from a different city, a different time. Am I a ghost?
  • Six in the afternoon. Time to leave. He packed Heretic’s list in a satchel and holstered his miserable gun. Watched Blakely and Gustat put on spore gas masks “just in case.” Just in case of what? Just in case there’s one fungus in the whole damn city you haven’t been exposed to yet?

Stephen King is a master of this. Here’s a lovely, complicated bit of it in Salem’s Lot. It’s a three part structure: A) a description of what he’s thinking about, followed by b) bits of the Catholic prayer for the dead repeating itself in his head and then c) a reference to the words of a profane ritual conducted earlier in the book. They’re designated with tokens of punctuation, such as italics and parentheses. 123, 123, 123, and so on, deliberate as any dance step:

The Catholic prayer for the dead began to run through his mind, the way things like that will for no good reason. He had heard Callahan saying it while he was eating his dinner down by the brook. That, and the father’s helpless screaming.
Let us pray for our brother to our Lord Jesus Christ, who said…
(O my father, favor me now.)

He paused and looked blankly down into the grave. It was deep, very deep. The shadows of coming night had already pooled into it, like something viscid and alive. It was still deep. He would never be able to fill it by dark. Never.
I am the resurrection and the life. The man who believes in me will live even though he die…
(Lord of flies, favor me now.)

Yes, the eyes were open. That’s why he felt watched. Carl hadn’t used enough gum on them and they had flown up just like window shades and the Glick kid was staring at him. Something ought to be done about it.
…and every living person who puts his faith in me will never suffer eternal death…
(Now I bring you spoiled meat and reeking flesh.)

What do you think? How many of these devices have you used?

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."

~K. Richardson

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Writing and the Human Condition

Not particularly informative illustration
Someday I hope to have my students greet me with tiny classroom dioramas too. Perhaps not as many dinosaurs as Connie merits.
Gads, that sounds like a pompous start to pontification. But I wanted to talk about something that I often say in class. It’s something Connie Willis told my Clarion West class, and which I repeat, but don’t explain as thoroughly as I should, because it’s so clear in my head.

But words are imprecise things, and so I’m a-gonna do what we used to call “unpacking” back in grad school and even provide some useful examples.

What did Connie say? She said, “Good fiction teaches us what it means to be human.” As good f&sf writers, I would argue that we might change “human” to “self-aware being,” but that is picking nits.

So what does that mean? It means we’re all faced with this common problem: life. And we want to know what we’re supposed to do, and what we can get away with, and what to do about all that hardcoded primate behavior that keeps popping up from time to time, and stuff like that. Sometimes the message features a universal human, sometimes it is a human shaped by particular circumstances, such as race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, etc. It’s why we like to read fiction. It’s why we like gossip. We want to know what other human beings do.

And here’s why this is important: Sometimes thinking about what a story is trying to say is a good way to complete, rewrite, or sharpen it. Doing this at one of those stages can move a story from good to excellent. Do I start a story knowing the message? Hell no. It emerges (hopefully). Sometimes I have to coax it out of its hiding place in the prose. Sometimes I have to go in with a club.


But what are some examples of messages? This is my blog and so I am going to be lazy and pull examples from my own work. Here’s some easy ones:

  • Worm Within – Sometimes people go crazy and can’t trust their own perceptions.
  • Whose Face This Is, I Do Not Know – Sometimes we take our cues to appear a certain way from other people and it’s not usually a survival trait.
  • Bus Ride to Mars – What’s this dying thing all about and will stories carry us through?
  • Lost in Drowsy Dreams – Jealousy leads to sad moments.
  • The Immortality Game – Daydreaming and wishing about the past is a futile and sometimes narcissistic activity.
  • Love Resurrected – You don’t always get what you want in love and sometimes if you do, you will regret it.
  • Clockwork Fairies – Differing viewpoints of the world can present difficulties in love
  • Ms. Liberty Gets A Haircut – Feminism is complicated.
  • And the current piece I’m finishing up – Addiction will twist your life in strange ways.

Can you do this with every story? Maybe. There’s some of mine that I’d have a hard time doing this with, but I don’t know whether the problem is my own blinders, a lack on the part of the story, or just something that happens sometime.

Thoughts? How easy is it for you to figure out what your stories want to say? And when you find that out, what do you do with it?

(And shouts out to my peep Ann Leckie, who also edits the fine online fiction magazine Giganotasaurus, on the book deal!! Go Ann, you rock!!)

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

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March Recent Efforts

It’s March, and you can now get IF THIS GOES ON, the anthology of near future political science fiction that I edited. There are some amazing stories in it, and I’m so proud of how the book turned out. Please check it out, and if you enjoy it, spread the word with a review or mention!

The project was initially the idea of publisher Colin Coyle; it was a pleasure working with him along with an awesome team of slush readers. The book was a mix of solicited stories along with ones that came in through the slush pile, so there’s a nice mix of more established and newer voices.

Some of the authors are friends as well, including E. Lily Yu, who I first met working with Fantasy Magazine and whose lovely “Green Glass: A Love Story” leads off the collection in a way that is beautiful and disturbing. The stories are sad and funny, often biting. Sometimes the worlds they project are just a heartbeat away; other times they are surreal glimmers that show us the distortions in our own existence and interactions with the world.

All of them are political — some more subtle than others, certainly — but this project declares itself from page one to be about politics in this country and the world at large.

In related news, I’ve also curated another Storybundle for Women’s History month, the second Feminist Futures one. You can find it here: I’m very happy with this, which ended up being nicely diverse, plus let me put forth K.C. Ball’s collection, SNAPSHOTS FROM A BLACK HOLE AND OTHER STORIES. K.C. was a friend and I edited the collection. She also edited the flash magazine TEN FLASH, which published my flash piece, “Lost in Drowsy Dreams.”

Grab the bundle now – it’s only good for a few weeks, and it has some really terrific reads in it!

Several new classes have been added to the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers schedule, including this weekend’s live online class Mapping the Labyrinth: Plotting Your Novel So Things Happen. I’ve co-taught with Kay several times, and she is a savvy and elegant woman. I’m anticipating learning things from the class myself.

Other upcoming classes being taught for the first time are The Fashion of Worldbuilding: Clothes, Technology, and Taboos with Mary Robinette Kowal and Catherine Lundoff’s In Flagrante Delicto: Writing Effective Sex Scenes and So You Want to Put Together An Anthology?. You can find the full list of live online writing classes here; look for several more getting added this month.

In 2020, Meerkat Press launches Meerkat Shorts, a novelette and novella line, and my “Carpe Glitter” will be part of the initial line-up, along with “Into Bones Like Oil” by Kaaron Warren and “Wild Horse” by Kyle Richardson. “Carpe Glitter” is the story of a woman sorting through the masses of stuff accumulated by her grandmother, a retired stage magician, who runs across something very strange indeed.

Chez Rambo has moved! And one feature of the new place is a much quieter space for podcasting, where there’s not a fire engine whirling by or a recycling truck picking up an apartment building’s worth of trash or similar Very Noisy Events happening every half hour. Here’s two recent additions to the Youtube channel: How to Send Out Stories and How to Evaluate Markets. Got something you want explored in a future video? Drop me a line in the comments here.

I’ve confirmed I’ll be at the Bard’s Tower at Emerald City Comic Con this month. I’ll post a schedule of when I’ll be at the booth, but my plan is to spend most of my time there, since it’s so much fun hanging out with those awesome folks. If you’re going to be there, please stop by and say hi!

On March 14, I’m part of the People Eat and Give fundraising event for the excellent nonprofit the Bureau of Fearless Ideas, a nonprofit writing and communications program that provides after school tutoring, workshops, and other efforts to “prepare young people, ages 6 to 18, for a successful future by developing strong writing skills, championing diverse communication styles, and motivating young people to share their stories.” I’m part of the skit the kids have written and are putting on; we’ve got our first rehearsal this weekend!

There’s an event for Unfettered III: Tales by Masters of Fantasy, which has my story, “Merchants Have Maxims,” in it on Tuesday, March 19, at 7 PM. I’ll be there signing along with several of the other authors as well as its editor Shawn Speakman.

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