Mini Lesson: Internal Monologue and Reflective Narration

How to indicate thoughts: After Lea had left and Meghan had gone home, I was finally alone. I started to think about how much had changed in just a day. Lea hasn’t been the same since the incident. I thought to myself, She just needs some time to heal and recover. But even as I thought it, I knew that there was more to the story. Maybe if Meghan had just remembered the lemon zester… I couldn’t torture myself with “what if’s” anymore. I put in my head phones, and put it out of my mind. I couldn’t help anyone if I was too sleepy to function. How to indicate thoughts: When using internal monologue, it means your narrator is taking a minute to think about things. If this is your first time writing internal monologue, you can best convey this by using italics.

How to transition into internal monologue After Lea had left and Meghan had gone home, I was finally alone. I started to think about how much had changed in just a day. Lea hasn’t been the same since the incident. I thought to myself, She just needs some time to heal and recover. But even as I thought it, I knew that there was more to the story. Maybe if Meghan had just remembered the lemon zester… I couldn’t torture myself with “what if’s” anymore. I put in my head phones, and put it out of my mind. I couldn’t help anyone if I was too sleepy to function. How to transition into internal monologue Use leading words that show your character is thinking. This includes all forms of the word “think”, obviously, but you can switch it up by using words like “reflected” or “pondered” if you’re really feeling artsy.

Internal Monologue without Italics After Lea had left and Meghan had gone home, I was finally alone. I started to think about how much had changed in just a day. I thought about how much Lea had changed. Maybe time was the only thing Lea needed to heal…but even as I thought about it, I knew that there was more to the story. Of course, I had wondered how things might have turned out if Meghan hadn’t forgotten the zester. Or if she and Lea had never been invited on the show to begin with. In the end, though, I knew that those kinds of thoughts were useless. They wouldn’t change what had happened. I put in my head phones, and put it out of my mind. I couldn’t help anyone if I was too sleepy to function. Internal Monologue without Italics If you are more confident with this literary technique, you can simply build a reflective narrative voice. To do this, you need to ensure that your narrative voice reflects as well as observes.

Examples in Literature

Night: When Elie Wiesel and his family move from ghetto to ghetto before being transferred to Auschwitz Notice how Wiesel uses a combination of internal monologue in the past and present tense Sometimes when he wants to interrupt the thoughts of his past self with thoughts of his present self, he’ll use parenthesis

Night: When Elie Wiesel’s community is in denial about what deportation means, his narrative voice is a reflective one, but he also uses paragraph breaks to show what he thinks in the present tense: Here Wiesel reflects through his narration style (he is aware of the story even as he is telling it) Here, to interrupt his past tense story with a present tense thought, he uses a paragraph break instead