Why Your Characters Think Too Much on the Page

Characters who think too much on the page stop your story cold.

A protagonist considers her options, weighs the risks, remembers something from her childhood, and three paragraphs later she still hasn’t opened the door. The reader stopped waiting somewhere around paragraph two.

Internal monologue is a trust problem. The writer doesn’t trust the scene to carry the meaning, so the character explains it. She notices the empty chair at the kitchen table, then spends three sentences on how Mom always sat there, how the chair represents absence, how absence has defined her whole adult life. The chair didn’t need all that. The reader already understood when she noticed it.

The fix: let the character begin the thought, then interrupt it with action. She sees the empty chair and sets a plate there anyway. The reader fills in everything the character would have thought; the reader’s version is always more powerful because it’s personal.

Here’s your exercise. Open your current draft and find any paragraph where your protagonist thinks for more than three sentences straight. Read the first sentence of the thought and the action that follows it. Delete everything in between. If the scene still works, that’s your revision. If it doesn’t, put back only the single sentence you truly can’t live without.

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