Interior Monologue for Dummies

Interior Monologue is a fancy term that describes a unique way of expressing someone's thoughts. It's like a little voice inside your head that talks to you, giving you ideas and opinions about things. Now, imagine you are sitting in a quiet room all by yourself, and this little voice starts to have a conversation with you. It's like you have a friend inside your mind who's constantly chattering away. This conversation can be about anything you want - your dreams, your fears, your plans for the day, or even the things you did yesterday.

But why is it called "interior monologue" and not just "thinking"? Well, that's because it's a specific way of expressing these thoughts. You know how when you write a story, you use quotation marks and dialogue tags to show what the characters are saying? Interior monologue is kind of like that, but instead of showing what a character says out loud, it shows what they are thinking inside their heads. It's like the writer is eavesdropping on the character's thoughts and writing them down for us to read.

Let's try to understand this better with an example. Imagine you are a character in a story, and you are feeling really angry at your friend for not inviting you to their birthday party. Instead of saying out loud, "I am so mad at you for not inviting me to your party!", you keep these thoughts to yourself. But the writer wants us, the readers, to know what you are thinking, so they use interior monologue to show us your thoughts. They might write something like, "I can't believe they didn't invite me! I thought we were friends. This makes me so angry!"

So, to sum it all up, interior monologue is like having a conversation with yourself in your mind, and it's a way for writers to show what their characters are thinking. It helps us understand the characters better and makes the story more interesting and relatable.