Directly and Indirectly Reported Thoughts (inner monologue)

Adding some notes, and I don't want to just make a new blog entry for it.

I've now seen it called direct and indirect interior monologue, or just direct and indirect thought. No need to add the word 'reported'.

Some links I've found explaining it (some contradict each other, which always makes it more fun):

• Character Thoughts: Direct and Indirect Interior Monologues
• Literary Devices: How to Master Stream of Consciousness
• Interior Monologue: The Complete Guide

Wow, that last one is on NovelWritingHelp.com! I've definitely seen it before, but it entirely slipped my memory.

I have a feeling I'm going to be having a lot of thoughts on this in the next few days and writing them in comments down below. Hey, this is where I gather my ideas about this stuff so I can always find it later. And all y'all are welcome to partake as well.

Interesting idea I ran across—the quick way to tell which it is:

• Direct is in 1st person present tense
• Indirect is in 1st person past (assuming the story is written in past)

Examples:

Direct—Why doesn't he just come right out and say it?
Indirect—It was entirely beyond me why he wouldn't just spill the beans.
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Direct is when the reader has direct access to the thoughts as the character thinks them—that's why it's in present tense. Indirect is more like the character is telling you after the fact, or writing them down, so it's done in past tense.

Huckleberry Finn and True Grit are both written in indirect interior monologue, or I should say large parts of them are. Or are they entirely in indirect? I've just exposed an area of ignorance, must fill it in now. To think it through out loud (giving you direct access as I go), it's all in character voice, as if Huck is telling you the story. That includes all action, narration, and his own indirectly reported thoughts. So yeah, the only parts that are actually in indirect interior monologue are his thoughts. The rest is in 1st person character voice I suppose. Mmmmmm, yeah, sounds about right. (See next post)

No wait, on second thought, I believe everything in Huckleberry Finn and True Grit is in indirect interior monologue, since it's all either the character's own inner musings or something he's telling the reader or writing down in his speaking idiom. This is why when those characters relate the thoughts they had at the time of the story*, it sounds exactly like the rest of the story. And this is why the stories have such good cohesion and such a good voice throughout. EVERYTHING is being said in exactly the same voice, without sudden shifts into direct interior thought, which would feel and sound different. It's as if it's all being told in spoken word by a speaker with a strong dialect/accent and a lot of personality.

* As opposed to action, description, and narration. I think narration is his thoughts at the time of the telling. Need to think on that a bit though. It does sound right to me, either his thoughts or what he's saying to the listener/(reader) in the present, whereas the story is something that happened in the past. Man, there's more to this stuff than it seems!

Bingo!! This is something I've been seeking for a long time now—my Holy Grail! It's an excerpt from James Joyce's Ulysses:

Turning, he scanned the shore south, his feet sinking again slowly in new sockets. The cold domed room of the tower waits. Through the barbicans the shafts of light are moving ever, slowly ever as my feet are sinking, creeping duskward over the dial floor. Blue dusk, nightfall, deep blue night. In the darkness of the dome they wait, their pushedback chairs, my obelisk valise, around a board of abandoned platters. Who to clear it? He has the key. I will not sleep there when this night comes.
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See, he used the direct interior monologue exactly the way I did in my Beastseekers excerpt way up in the actual blog post above. I've searched long and hard looking for somebody who did that! And I knew it was do-able, but I also knew it was some pretty advanced stuff.

I'm starting to think I was mixing up two very different styles of writing—on the one hand a psuedo-Huck Finn boy's adventure story, and on the other a very avant-garde modernist experimental style like Joyce's. There are definitely people who read both, but I think they shift into a different mode for each and wouldn't want to see them combined, unless it's holistically—a merging of the 2 at a cellular level to create a new kind of animal. Lol, probably a sort of Brundlefly monstrosity that absorbed too much incompatible material and was DOA.

See, this is what I need to do—write all around about these ideas in order to sort them out. We write in order to think deeper into our ideas.

Analysis of the transition he used here:

Turning, he scanned the shore south, his feet sinking again slowly in new sockets. The cold domed room of the tower waits. Through the barbicans the shafts of light are moving ever...
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This is brilliant! See what he did, the clever bastard—it's in the second sentence that he transitions into present tense, but he reserved the verb till the very end, so the reader doesn't know what tense it's in until they get there. And then, once they get over the brief shock (he's subjected them to worse many times by now I'm sure—they're well inured) he just goes all the way into direct thought. It's a little stumble (as every step of the way has been and will continue to be) and then you're in.

So, his approach is to continually jostle, nudge and shove the reader so these little transitions aren't noticed. Not really the way I intend to treat my readers. But I do love that transition. In fact transitions are something I've only recently become aware of, and they seem to apply to many aspects of writing. The first time I recall discovering them is when I did an analysis of how the author of a witch story transitioned from one POV to another by floating up out of the character into a momentary external (objective) viewpoint before diving into the other one (across an extra inter-paragraph space, at least the first time, after which he didn't even give that much).

And that's a common thing as well—you ease in the first time using some transition and then once the readers are used to the idea you don't need the transitions anymore. Sometimes you might, it depends how jarring the switch is, that needs to be ascertained on a case by case basis.

Trying out some alternatives

Staying in indirect:
So I had a little stack of excitement on the table beside the bed and The Rook open in front of me, 4 pages in when the first patter of taps sounded against the window. I didn't put it down until the third flurry. Clearly someone wanted my attention, but it was not a good time to bother me.​

Transitioning into direct:
So I had a little stack of excitement on the table beside the bed and The Rook open in front of me, 4 pages in when the first patter of taps sounded against the window. I ignored the urgent noises, but they persisted. When the third flurry began I closed the book and glared daggers at the window. Whoever's out there, you better have a damn good reason—
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I'm not sure how good of a transition I glared daggers at the window is. Originally I shook my head and then glared daggers, but it seemed too long. I think I'll try a few more attempts at it.

Now I realize 'whoever's out there' is also part of the transition. It makes it absolutely clear he's thinking. To me it seems to work. Anybody care to confirm or deny? (If anybody is still reading this...)

That helps immensely, thank you! When you're so deep inside something like this it's hard to see it with an unbiased eye, you need an outside perspective to tell if your judgement is right or not.

Honestly though, I don't know if I could handle Ulysses in anything more than bite-sized chunks like the one above. So much meandering stream of consciousness!! I think it's something like a really good whiskey or something—in small doses it's amazing, but a little too much and it'll make you sick and might kill you.