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I had a call with an author this week about her manuscript we’ve been working on together.

This woman is an accomplished academic and researcher, as well as writer. Her story is beautifully plotted and told, rich with detail and verisimilitude that vividly brings to life the world she’s created. The characters are well drawn, with compelling backstory and clearly developed identities.

But she’s been struggling with one aspect of revision: As good as so much of the story is, it feels as if the reader is still held at a bit of a remove, like when someone is scratching that itch on your back you can’t reach and they’re close but not quite on it.

I’ve had any number of discussions like this with authors—and probably the comment I give most often in a writer’s manuscript is some variation of, “Let the reader in a little bit more…” (So much so that author Ann Garvin sent me this mug after one of her books we worked on together.)

It’s not because I’m obsessed with why people do what they do (but I am!). It’s that insufficient access to characters’ inner life is very often at the root of stories that aren’t grabbing a reader as powerfully as they could.

Understanding what’s going on inside a character is how readers vicariously experience their journey. It’s the difference between somebody recounting something that happened to them and living it along with them firsthand: No matter how engaging and exciting a story might be, if we’re blind to a character’s experience of it then it’s just stuff happening on a page, not the immersive, affecting experience for a reader that good story can be.

But fully exploring and allowing readers to experience the events of the story along with the character can be some of the hardest work of writing. Our art form asks the author to go to every difficult, complicated, uncomfortable place humans can experience, to put themselves in the shoes of their characters who are often (in the most potent stories) experiencing the most challenging events of their lives.

Most of us expend a lot of effort not to experience those complicated emotions. The entire therapy profession is pretty much based on how hard most of us work to avoid feeling things that are uncomfortable or unpleasant or confusing.

Storytellers often want to explore these high-stakes moments with our characters—but from a safe narrative remove. Often without even realizing it, our self-protective devices kick in and we shield ourselves from our characters’ rawest and most naked of emotions. In some ways that’s human nature, and it’s certainly often learned behavior from our own psychic injuries.

That’s part of what makes writing hard, part of what creates the challenge of creating immersive and profoundly affecting stories that make readers feel as if we’re living them along with the characters.

As the old saw goes, all writers have to do is open a vein and bleed.

Read more: “How to Let Readers into Your Characters’ Inner Life”

Accessing Emotion and Inner Life

This is what the author I spoke with was wrestling with. Who wants to endure a self-inflicted wound if we don’t have to? As another author friend of mine says, “I don’t like to feel those things.”

Well, yeah. Who does?

These uncomfortable emotions are often no fun to confront. It’s much more appealing to stand at a distance and report on what’s happening to our characters. It’s easier, just as we often do in our own lives, to focus on what the character is doing, rather than what they’re feeling and experiencing.

But therein lies the gold, and the reader’s doorway into the character and the story.

When I was an actor this immersive approach was lumped into the category of Method acting, and here’s an oversimplified version of how it works: If you’re playing a scene where a character has experienced, let’s say, the death of a loved one, you access a time when you experienced the same kinds of emotions. Maybe that’s the loss of a relative, a friend. Maybe it’s when your pet died. Maybe it was the worst breakup and heartbreak you ever endured.

The point is, whether or not you have experienced the exact situation of a character, because you’re human it’s almost certain that you have experienced very similar emotions in different circumstances. So the trick in Method acting is to reaccess that experience and how it made you feel, and react authentically and truthfully from that place.

It’s pretty masochistic, to be honest, and while it can result in deeply authentic emotion and reaction, there’s always the risk of the actor getting lost in their own baggage and the scene getting away from them or becoming about their exquisite pain, rather than about what’s actually happening in the story.

That’s the challenge of inner life in written story, too: You have to give readers access to how the events of the story are impacting and affecting your characters, without letting those reactions become what the scene or story is about. The action is the action, what moves the story forward. Getting lost in inner life stalls out your momentum and can risk feeling like wallowing or navel-gazing. 

Writing swaths of external emotional behavior—sobbing, wailing, explosive rage, etc.—feels superficial, performative, and often leaves readers unaffected. Think about how readily you pick up on a fake smile or laughter, phony tears. If emotion is not authentic it doesn’t affect us—but real emotion pricks our empathy, directly engages and connects us to another person’s experience.

The manifestation of emotion does not affect readers. The experience of it does. Your job is not to show the emotional response, but to let readers understand what’s causing emotion in the character.

The manifestation of emotion does not affect readers. The experience of it does.

Your job is not to show the emotional response, but to let readers understand what’s causing emotion in the character. And for that you have to let us feel it right along with them.

And for that you have to put yourself in the character’s shoes.

You have to find a way not necessarily to experience these emotions yourself, but to viscerally, granularly, profoundly imagine what it would be like to experience it. For that you do draw on your own experiences and inner life, but not to relive it necessarily—rather to access it, that rich storehouse inside each of us of every emotion your characters might experience, because you yourself are a conscious, feeling human being in the world.

It is like therapy, but with the insulating later of imagination and an avatar. Your character gets to be your emotional beard.

Using Your Own Inner Life to Deepen Your Characters’

From that perspective, writing inner life is enormously freeing. All these feelings live inside you already, even if you’ve safely boxed them up–and as any therapist worth their salt will tell you, those deeply buried difficult emotions eventually have to come out and be dealt with or they’re going to cause problems later. Doing that in the safe environment of your stories is one great way to bleed off that pressure and deal with some of your own complex, challenging emotions.

In some ways it’s the same thing readers often come to story for: to deeply experience the profundity of human experience, those vast, larger-than-life emotions that let us feel fully alive while safely insulated from the actual losses, pains, challenges, etc., that yield them. It’s living vicariously through the characters: A great story should affect and change not just the reader, but the author.

In the case of the author I was speaking with, she’s created a deeply affecting and complex story of unimaginable loss and the pain that results—and then the staggering occurrence of discovering that not all was lost, an impossible second chance.

What is it like to endure unthinkable suffering and then find a way through it, only to be faced with all that you painstakingly, agonizingly learned to leave behind? Most of us will never experience anything like what this author’s characters endure—and she herself has not.

But how, I asked her, can she put herself into that situation enough to imagine what it would be like if she did? And then to play “what if,” that most wondrous of creative games, and use her own infinite emotional spectrum and reservoir to imagine how her characters might feel, react, respond in their situations?

Read more: “The Best Character Tool You May Not Be Using”

Even if your approximation of the same emotions your character might experience doesn’t hit the levels you might expect from the amped-up situations required for story, how can you draw from them and then, using your artistry and imagination, turn the volume up to 11?

When have you experienced a painful loss—even something as relatively innocuous as losing your phone or wallet, or having your computer crash and take all your files with it—and how can you draw from those emotions to extrapolate your character’s? The disorientation of it; the keen, ever-present regret and ache of wishing to go back in time and undo what happened; the constant awareness that what was relied on, even taken for granted, is absent; the distress of trying to fill that gaping hole, to replace what you’ve lost, knowing you never truly can—that so much is simply gone forever?

And then how can you extrapolate those feelings to the situations in your stories? In this author’s case, where what was lost impossibly returns, what if many years later, after all that difficulty, your phone or wallet or files are retrieved? It should be a happy occurrence…yet you’ve processed so much of the discomfort of the loss already. You’ve begun to move through it. You’ve replaced what you could, and perhaps the pain of what you couldn’t has receded and become manageable.

In some ways, maybe the loss even resulted in something good: unexpected growth or evolution or opportunity.

You’ve learned to live without that item that once seemed so crucial—and you’ve likely changed quite a bit since then too. You can’t really go back to who you were before you experienced that loss.

This example may seem trivial, even ridiculous—but you might be surprised how even your experiences that may feel vastly out of scale with your characters’ can yield a depth and immediacy of inner life that might be absent without it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about inner life lately as I develop a brand-new course on the subject: “Mastering Character Inner Life,” a deep dive into what exactly inner life is, and how to use it to give your characters and stories much more immediacy, intimacy, and depth. (With Jane Friedman, July 9, $25 with recording available to registrants.)

Okay, authors, let me hear from you. Inner life might indeed be one of my favorite tools of powerful characterization and deeply engaging story—what’s your attitude about it, both in your own stories and in other people’s? What questions or challenges do you have in putting it on the page without overwhelming or stalling out your story?

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