(via Turning Off the TV in Your Mind - by Lincoln Michel)
When I talk with other creative writing professors, we all seem to agree that interiority is disappearing. Even in first-person POV stories, younger writers often skip describing their character’s hopes, dreams, fears, thoughts, memories, or reactions. This trend is hardly limited to young writers though. I was speaking to an editor yesterday who agreed interiority has largely vanished from commercial fiction, and I think you increasingly notice its absence even in works shelved as “literary fiction.” When interiority does appear on the page, it is often brief and redundant with the dialogue and action. All of this is a great shame. Interiority is perhaps the prime example of an advantage prose as a medium holds over other artforms.
Prose allows free and complete access to character’s minds in a way you can’t really get with film. Other than voiceovers, film is largely constrained to conveying character by action and dialogue. Even memory is typically rendered by action and dialogue via flashbacks. Prose can do all those things and far more. Stream-of-consciousness, free indirect speech, filtering details through POV, exploring a character’s thought process, etc. We can have it all in fiction. That’s no little thing. We all live our existences inside our minds. The interior world is at least as large as the exterior one.
