Internal Monologue

[Phoenix3495 16]

I've... never heard of a characters internal thought being used as something to react to. I feel like this makes zero sense and it really just confuses me. Because you can't totally tell what is going through their head by their body language. A person could look totally fine on outside yet feeling absolutely miserable on the inside. 

 

I love internal monologue. I call it 'internal babble' cause it's really just me babbling on for a thousand words about their thoughts and their memories or whatever else is going on at the moment. If there was a site I was looking at and they enforce thing kind of rule, I probably would click away because I don't think that alright. Well, if your character was a mind reader then maybe that's acceptable, but otherwise. It's not cool. Also, I would expect something like that to be written in the rules and not just something they made up and use against people. That's also not right. 

[Yona Carlin 44]

I don't provide anything I don't want other people to use. I consider tags more or less fair game. (Like, why are you writing 1,000 words of something you expect me/my character to have absolutely zero response to? If you want to write fanfiction, go write fanfiction.) But I don't actively respond to things unless they're overt or relevant. Or, unless I've found something interesting in that exposition I also want to comment on. Some of my favorite writing partners are people who view exposition as a nonlinear shared space.

[Jaxx 317]

I write some internal monologue in just about every post, excluding fight scenes. Part of that is because I'm always developing my characters in accordance with the world they're in and the relationships they have. For example, I recently dropped a character I've written for years into a completely new setting and I've ended up writing him a little differently than I have all this time. So I enjoy writing his thoughts and feelings because I'm exploring a new side to him that I haven't really experimented with before. Plus he's just really fun to write internal monologue for because of his experiences and the way he thinks. 

 

And part of the reason I write it is because it helps me feel like I'm writing a little more natural and realistic, so to speak. Just about everything you say is accompanied by plenty of mental activity. I just condense and streamline some of the more important or interesting or funny things to put into my post. Plus it makes it easier to track where my character's headspace and feelings are in a thread (and how those might change with what happens in the next posts) which is a handy concrete reference for people like me who like to see how characters grow. And it can create all kinds of drama and tension and emotion to give the other writer a peek behind the curtain, as it were. 

 

I don't mind some low-level metagaming if it's within the universe and the other character's powers. If your character can sense emotions and my character is feeling some pretty strong ones, then I don't mind my partner saying their character picked up on it. Let's say my character Jane didn't get her morning coffee, so she's hiding some serious annoyance behind her professional demeanour. Sure, you can say your telepath realised that she's kind of pissy despite her calm face and lack of expression. But I'd prefer you didn't write, "Bill could immediately tell that Jane was angry over spilling her coffee that morning, and felt as if the rest of her week would be ruined because of it, so she was going to take her feelings out on everyone else." 

[Divinity 24]

On 4/7/2019 at 7:48 AM, Spirit Caller said:

So; I've been on some boards that have a rule where anything you write in your character's internal monologue is fair game for the other character to react to under the justification of "it was in your body language." I have to admit that I wasn't a fan of that. 

 

How do you feel about internal monologue? I recently had a friend venting because the person they were playing with had a weird habit of rewriting her character's internal monologue from their character's perspective and then using it to make their character seem BETTER than my friends. So like, if she said "She felt so awkward about this whole situation, but she was trying to hide it to avoid looking foolish" the other person might say something like "She could see how awkward the woman felt about this situation but unlike her she wasn't trying to hide it; she was calm and collected." 

 

How does internal monologue interactions like that affect how you feel about the RP? Do you want no internalizing, a lot, a little? Do you think it should automatically be telegraphed? 

 

I personally love internal monologuing for some of my characters merely because they are more cerebral - however I absolutely feel that another character using it as a ( body language ) is wrong. If I have a vampire that has an internal monologue...what body language???

 

 

I do not feel that other than perhaps emotion - such as perhaps the character seems to be lost in throught etc, that the personal monologue is not the equivalent of spoken words in the story.