Internal Dialogue (Busy Writer’s Guides Book 7)

Internal dialogue is the voice inside our heads that we can’t ignore, even when we want to. We second-guess ourselves, pass judgment on the world around us, and are at our most emotionally vulnerable. And the same needs to be true for our characters.

Internal dialogue is one of the most powerful tools in a fiction writer’s arsenal. It’s an advantage we have over TV and movie script writers and playwrights. It’s also one of the least understood and most often mismanaged elements of the writing craft.

In Internal Dialogue: A Busy Writer’s Guide, you’ll learn…

• the difference between internal dialogue and narration,
• best practices for formatting internal dialogue,
• ways to use internal dialogue to advance your story,
• how to balance internal dialogue with external action,
• clues to help you decide whether you’re overusing or underusing internal dialogue,
• tips for dealing with questions in your internal dialogue,
• and much more!

Each book in the Busy Writer’s Guide series is intended to give you enough theory so that you can understand why things work and why they don’t, but also enough examples to see how that theory looks in practice. In addition, they provide tips and exercises to help you take it to the pages of your own story, with an editor’s-eye view. Most importantly, they cut the fluff so that you have more time to write and to live your life.

Jami’s Review:

Many books for writers focus on big elements like plot and characters, but sometimes what makes those elements work or not are the techniques the author uses. And books with hands-on, detailed, break-it-down-to-the-nitty-gritty techniques are rare.

Even rarer are those books that do it well. This book is on that very short list. *smile*

I’ve read several of Marcy’s Busy Writer’s Guides books, and they’re all great for those detailed techniques. However, the topic of this book–internal dialogue–is more unusual and yet so essential.

The techniques for how to properly use internal dialogue are critical for developing character arcs and motivations. This is advanced stuff that helps a writer go from technically proficient to a fantastic storyteller.

This is a must-read book for writers ready for more than the basics! See more about this book and my thoughts in Marcy’s guest post.

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