small thoughts on interiority

mostly other people's collected thoughts

I recently got a very kind, detailed rejection on a short story. The editor took the time to unpack some of what wasn’t working for him — essentially, he wanted to see and feel more along with the character, from inside her experience. The story lacked interiority.

“Interiority” isn’t a term I heard in any of the craft or fiction classes I took in school, but my beginning of a hobbled-together definition is this:

Interiority is an invitation into an understanding of the world as experienced by a specific and innately finite character

I say “understanding of the world,” because interiority isn’t just about navel gazing and thinking about the self. I say “specific” because otherwise we veer dangerously towards head-hopping. I say “innately finite” because I’ve been thinking a great deal about how much of fiction-writing is identifying what the story isn’t. The interior experience of the world is innately finite because we cannot experience the dense totality of the world — and we don’t have to, to understand a specific character. Finitude is a necessary element of meaning-making.

Mary Gaitskill’s recent, rather inflammatory essay “The Hidden Life of Stories” gets far too wrapped up in trying to make people angry, and she doesn’t mention interiority at all — but I think that part of what she’s saying is about that invitation into the experience of a character. She writes:

I am thinking of something I saw on the subway in the early 80s, maybe 1982.  I was sitting at the end of the last car on an express train and saw three or four African-American boys (in my memory they were 11-13 years old, maybe younger), grouped around the back window, staring out of it with pure absorption.  Curious, I stood to look over their shoulders and saw what they were so raptly taking in: the piercing combination of speed and density as the train gathered momentum and  hammered through the massive concrete and metal tunnels, our view herking and jerking with the cars, snatching bits of burning light in metal casement, underground signage, the track flashing and going dark as we clangored through stations, past dozens of waiting humans, personalities firing off  bodily messages that our eyes saw before our minds could read them.  It was beautiful and the boys were radiant with it, this wordless amazement of things. 

The interiority in the passage above is not that of the boys — it is Gaitskill’s own: her choice of noticings in that subway car, the way she builds the collage of images — it invites us into her own experience of that moment. She is hungry for meaning, desirous of some semblance of connection and overarching beauty; there’s a loneliness to her act of watching. And it comes not from navel gazing or even “showing” — she takes no action aside from standing up; there is no dialogue.

…it is a real-life example of…how the deep nature of stories can be revealed through descriptive imagery of small things irrelevant to the obvious narrative—unexpectedly poignant things we notice intensely or just out the corner of our eye, glimpsed patterns outside the spectrum of our daily lives.

John Thorton Williams calls this “indirection of image.” The experience of the image reflects the interior experience of the character. We bypass the obvious physical cues and instead enter into the felt perception of the world — you can parse those moments into metaphors or thematic statements, perhaps, but in doing so they lose some of their power.

Interiority must also surprise us.

“Unexpectedly poignant,” Gaitskill says. “Outside the spectrum of our daily lives.” Shaelin Bishop talks in several of their videos about the value and necessity of contradiction and its cousin, juxtaposition. Strong interiority skips over the expected and gives us the canted feeling, the unexpected observation. A woman walking home alone in the dark in a strange city — we know already she will be alert, she will hold her keys in her fist, her heart is (forgive me) pounding against her lungs — and as she walks she becomes angry, because in the sidewalk cutouts where there should be trees, there are only stumps, and she can imagine the punishing sun of the day on the grey sidewalks, and the heat on the pads of dogs whose only choices of greenery are few and far between. Her alertness, her fear, transfigured by her specific experience of the world — turned into anger. Perhaps she is also angry that she has to be alert in the first place — but that would be expected.

Unlearning

In my own writing, I see the ways that “show, don’t tell” and movies/TV have, in some ways, masked the value and necessity of interiority. I hesitate when I feel the writing curve towards narrative explanation or reflective passages. “I have to put it in action,” I say to myself, over and over. But what if I don’t?

“Show, don’t tell” (the ways it’s often taught or repeated) leaves no room for breath and expansion — interiority. That lesson (action and dialogue are the best/only ways to communicate character) is amplified by movies/TV, where there no interiority is possible (they use sound, imagery, costume, lighting, music, etc).

This clear, actionable essay by Rebecca Makkai lays out wonderfully concrete ways to let “go of the collective clichés we hadn’t even known we were holding” as we write the internal experience of our characters.

I think even beyond that — beyond the specific phrases of interiority — what I want to build up better in myself is a kind of gently curious attention to my characters. I think that it’s in this curiosity that their specific, innately finite interior worlds become visible.

A few favorite moments of interiority:

Emma Cline, The Girls:

I stared at the bike, splayed and useless: the frame was “Campus Green,” a color that had conjured, in the store, a hale college boy walking you home from an evening class. A prissy fantasy, a stupid bike, and I let the string of disappointments grow until they looped into a dirge of mediocrity. Connie was probably with May Lopes. Peter and Pamela buying houseplants for an Oregon apartment and soaking lentils for supper. What did I have? The tears dripped off my chin into the dirt, pleasing proof of my suffering. This absence in me that I could curl around like an animal.

Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club:

I was surprised at myself, how humiliated I felt. I had been outsmarted by Waverly once again, and now betrayed by my own mother. I was smiling so hard my lower lip was twitching from the strain. I tried to pick something else to concentrate on, and I remember picking up my plate, and then Mr. Chong’s, as if I were clearing the table, and seeing so sharply through my tears the chips on the edges of these old plates, wondering why my mother didn’t use the new set I had bought her five years ago.

Jesamyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing:

“I’m tired of this shit,” I say. I don’t know why I say it. Maybe because I’m tired of driving, tired of the road stretching before me endlessly. Michael always at the opposite end of it, no matter how far I go, how far I drive. Maybe because part of me wanted her to leap for me, to smear orange vomit over the front of my shirt as her little tan body sought mine, always sought mine, our hearts separated by the thin cages of our ribs, exhaling and inhaling, our blood in sync. Maybe because I want her to burrow in to me for succor instead of her brother. Maybe because Jojo doesn’t even look at me, all his attention on the body in his arms, the little person he’s trying to soothe, and my attention is everywhere. Even now, my devotion: inconstant.

Lily Brooks-Dalton, Good Morning, Midnight:

He’d scarcely used an oven since he was a boy, when he’d kept his mother company, but the pleasures of measuring and mixing and greasing the pan came rushing back to him. His mother had often begun ambitious projects in the kitchen and usually failed to finish them, leaving the chaos and the raw ingredients for Augie to deal with…He’d forgotten he was good at finishing these projects, but more than that, he’d forgotten he enjoyed it. It was an unfamiliar feeling. He struggled to remember the last time he’d actually enjoyed something.

Feel free to leave your own favorite moments of interiority in the comments below!