advanced techniques

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.