How to Get Inside Your Character’s Head

“If only I had a…” — what? A desire to work under any adversity, remembering that creative work for an artist in any field is as essential as food or sleep. Happiness, mental health itself, depends on your continuing to work. You need it like a diabetic needs insulin, and you have a right to it. 

— Natalie Goldberg

Every time you get an urge to do something damaging, write about a character doing it instead.

Externalise.

Emotional / philosophical / thought issue to work out?

Psychodrama and emotional alchemy: write it down as a story, give points-of-view to characters.

Let them battle out.

Character and Author

Consider authorial access to a character in your writing.

Omniscience: in relation to all characters. The author's unadorned voice, denied access to others.

Intermittent Omniscience: to all characters, shifts in and out, author, sometime to one by characters behaviour, knows the reader rather than the character.

Adoption of character point of view: one multiple (consider structural implications) Evoke the way the character thinks.

Stream of consciousness is a possibility.

Get into the feel/process of thinking, even subliminal thoughts and unremembered dreams.

Further in, but can lose dramatic interface between characters.

Even schizophrenia is a variation, becomes a kind of medieval morality play if not done carefully, playing good vs evil inside characters head, kind of like a dramatic break or soliloquy.

Who are you talking to?

Voice-over in a film is an admission of defeat.

Monologue. Voice over. Signposting and telegraphed dialogue. These techniques are cheating and go against dramatic conventions.

Artificial devices, where drama is not fiction, should work on their own terms instead of in a cinematic way.

Alienation Effect

The alienation effect is a literary attempt to evoke the voice of someone far removed — a different voice and sensibility (eg. of an insane person, animal, or child).

There are additional practical problems to rendering the voice of animals in fiction.

See Les Murray’s Translations From The Natural World for more on this.

The alienation effect is sometimes a work of translation.

Translation, at great distance from yourself, of this alien idiom, into your voice, because you can’t always keep up their idiom and vocabulary.

The alternative is to communicate what they know, in your words, to explore the data they acquire at their eye level.

You have access to what they can understand, their thoughts, their head, but translated into the writer’s narrative voice.

The implied author.

That’s one solution.

Any solution is a literary artifice, but can have its own power and poetry.

There’s always a meeting of minds (of the character and the writer) but it’s a question of where the emphasis lies, and interpreted by the reader.

Sometimes liminal characters, on the margins in one way or another, are beneath or beyond language.

The truly alien, the truly broken.

Those who can’t think or are beyond thought.

You have to translate from another world — the damaged brain, the feral animal, the extraterrestrial.

This has implications in authorial access to a character.

Write something that only the character could know.

Write it in their language.

Then try it in a different narrative voice, someone other than the character.

Some things can only be known through the body.

Tell a story that can only be told through the senses of an animal.

Talk to the lunatic on the bus.

Then write the conversation from their point of view.

This is the real work of fiction.

The one thing novels and short stories can do better than film is put the reader inside the heads of others.

James Garside is an independent journalist, author, and travel writer. Join Chapter 23 for the inside track on all their creative projects and insights about life, work, and travel.