Hello class! It’s a new school year, and with it comes a new edition of Tips from the MFA Pit, actual advice to actual MFA students. This edition is on Deep POV versus Internal Dialogue, and all advice is from my brain alone, and NOT the official voice of anything outside my head. So please feel free to add a large grain of salt!

Let’s look at Deep POV before we get to Internal Dialogue. Both are intensely personal. You’re literally putting yourself into the character’s shoes. When you write within a character’s POV, you can only see what they see, and all the other character’s actions are just what that character can hear or observe. Deep POV goes beyond that. It’s what they feel, how they react, their gut feelings of pain, pleasure, anger, calm. It’s also how they react cognitively, psychologically and physically to another person, a situation, what’s said, observed, etc. For example:

Lauren opened the front door, the hills rolling out before her. Her fingers tightened around the knob and her pulse raced, tears flooding her eyes as Tom’s car rounded the last curve. Her heart burst with joy. He’s here.

If you’ll notice, no one outside Lauren herself could feel her pulse racing or burst with joy. They could observe her fingers tightening or tears flooding her eyes, but what she feels internally – or the reasons for it – is hers alone. Then we come to the last sentence – He’s here. That’s Internal Dialogue. It’s things that could be said orally, but are kept inside the character’s head.  It’s the difference between feeling – Joey knew there was no way he could talk his way out of this – and saying to yourself – I’m sunk.

A best practice, at least the way I see it and no way is this a rule, is to use Deep POV more and keep Internal Dialogue to a minimum. Using Internal Dialogue too much is like “telling” not “showing.” When you’re in a character’s POV, you want to know how they are feeling inside, or what would be the point of being in their head? Usually it’s best to keep the internal dialogue short so it has more of an impact, and most publishers place it in italics to separate it from the Deep POV. It is ALWAYS limited to the character whose POV you’re in, and it is always in first person.

Words of wisdom indeed! Till next time — keep writing because ===> WRITERS WRITE!