Consider a newspaper photograph of a mother holding a baby. The woman’s face is bright with joy, her eyes glisten, her arms hold the child tight to her bosom. You see a happy woman cradling her newborn. You don’t know until you read the caption that the baby was kidnapped just hours after its birth and this is the first time her mother has held her. Now the joy hits you straight in the heart, because you know WHY the mother is happy.
What does this have to do with writing a book? If all you do is SHOW your characters’ reactions, emotions, and decisions, without TELLING the reasons and motivations, your readers won’t care about your story. In fact, you won’t have a romance. You might have an action-adventure story, or a thriller, although even those incorporate a certain amount of telling in order to get the story across. But romances depend on involving your reader in the emotional journey of the hero and heroine.
You know this, of course. You already employ many techniques to involve the reader and create empathy with your characters. Instead of writing he was mad, you SHOW his anger through his actions or dialogue. But I have a question for you: who cares that the hero clenches his fist, or the vein on his forehead pulses, or that he speaks to the heroine in a quiet, but lethal tone IF we don’t know WHY?
One way to reveal a character’s motivation is through introspection: by TELLING the character's thoughts.
You already do some telling in your story. For instance, in dialogue: he said, with regret. That small word, regret, discloses a lot not readily available from the dialogue.
Longer passages of introspection draw the reader in closer to the character. The character, in other words, confides in the the reader. The hiatus from action may be for only a few sentences during a scene:
For a long time Dominic struggled for the self-control he had learned at such cost in the past. He had been very certain he had nothing new to learn about pain. He had been wrong. (Untamed, by Elizabeth Lowell)
Judicious use of introspection not only reveals characterization, it also affects pacing and heightens drama. You know to open a story as close to the end as possible—drop the reader into the action. Readers are extraordinarily trusting. They will jump into a story feet first, land in the midst of a crisis, surrounded by characters they don’t know and ride it out. They’ll do all this because they trust the author to eventually explain what's going on and who wants what.
Thus, immediately following the scene, the reader wants to understand the significance of the drama. You can now lay in large chunks of introspection—let the reader into the mind of one of the protagonists. As a result, you enlist the reader’s empathy with that protagonist and the reader becomes a willing cohort of this protagonist’s drive to a goal. The subsequent scenes between the hero and the heroine carry more weight—a depth of understanding—because the reader is in on a secret.
Why wasn’t he dead? she wondered as she forced herself to close the door at her back. Why hadn’t he had the decency to succumb to any of the varied and gruesome tragedies she’d imagine for him?
And what in God’s name was she going to do with this terrible yearning she felt just looking at him again? (Honest Illusions, Nora Roberts)
Most often, long passages of introspection occur in the sequel to a scene where you want to show growth of the character:
She stood in her shaded backyard and cried at last for the loss of Richard, of her father, of David Mecher, of children and warmth and companionship. And for the first time ever she rued those years she had sacrificed to her father.
And her breakdown before Jesse made her something which she had never seemed to him before:vulnerable.
And his having caused it made him something she could hardly have suspected him capable of being: contrite. (Hummingbird, LaVryle Spencer)
One of the most dramatic uses of introspection is when the character’s thoughts contradict what they say. This technique is especially effective in creating sexual tension:
She kept remembering Dominic’s exquisite restraint with the peregrine, and the warmth that had made his gray eyes smoky when he had whispered to her of his sword lying within her sheath.
Caught between John’s curse and the Glendruid hope, the possibility of warmth in Dominic called irresistibly to Meg. She wanted him to seek that same warmth in her, to come to her without the calculation and cold self-control of a tactician planning a battle.
“Your guests have been seen to,” Meg said.
She spoke formally, reporting to her new lord about the state of his keep as she had once reported to John. (Untamed, Elizabeth Lowell)
It could even be argued that telling is the most important part of the story. If your characters don’t pause to consider what they’ve been through—how it affects them and their quest—then they are merely meandering from scene to scene, reacting to and overcoming obstacles. This is called episodic writing and the reader won’t tolerate it for long.
In the final analysis, what we want from a romance is to experience another’s dreams and fears as our own. Take the reader by the hand, make her a friend, tell her secrets, let her face the beast within. She’ll always come back for more.
They don’t call us storytellers, for nothing.
Laura Baker newest release, Legend, is available from St. Martins Press. Ms. Baker is a founding member of LERA and a member of the the Heart of Denver Romance Writers. She is a frequent, and appreciated contributor to the newsletter.