I crawled out of the editing cave recently to ramble about interiority. Please blame any incoherence on my brain currently resembling overcooked spaghetti.

A wee while ago I read two fascinating articles on Substack.

The first was by Kern Carter, who interogated a few extremely successful books and posed the question – have we lost trust in readers? They were talking about a trend in modern books towards explicitly stating the themes of the book in often heavy-handed ways, rather than trusting the story (and the reader) do the work of building that theme more subtly.

The second article was by the ever thoughtful Lincoln Michel where he proposed that the move away from interiority in fiction, and towards ‘describing a video’ narrative style stems from our inundation with the visual medium for story telling – basically that we are approaching prose as if we are narrating a movie, and thus losing the very thing that makes prose unique (the ability to experience a narrator’s emotional landscape) by replacing it with a poor replica of the thing that makes visual media unique (scenic immediacy).

Both these articles are very worthwhile reads, and seem to be approaching overlapping questions from different angles – is the way we tell stories changing? And why might we be moving towards surface-level narration, where everything from scenery and action to emotions and themes is spelled out to the reader, and nuanced interiority is minimal to non-existent?

This question I think feeds into an internal conversation I’ve been having with myself for some time, about why my books get consistently called ‘quiet’ when they involve death, heartbreak, trauma and threat. To be clear, I don’t object to my books being labelled ‘quiet’ at all, if that’s how they feel to readers then that’s perfectly fine – some readers will enjoy that, some won’t, them’s the breaks etc. It just all feels interconnected to me – a move in fiction towards books that focus on external narration, where everything must be described as if through a camera. And where there isn’t the page time – or the trust in readers – for exploring nuance or emotional complexity or for layering subtext.

[Obvious caveat – these are sweeping generalisations, #notallbooks, and this isn’t even necessarily a criticism of craft. Readers clearly enjoy these books, so they are fulfilling their purpose perfectly well]

But what might be driving a movement away from interiority and subtlety, and towards ‘tv narration’ and thematic heavy handedness? I think there might be a couple of things at play.

TV brain

I find it hard to judge the truth of Michel’s proposed ‘tv brain’ because I personally watch very, very little tv/film (for health reasons, not some moral aesthetic). But it makes a lot of sense. If the vast majority of the storytelling we expose ourselves to relies exclusively on camera angles and dialogue to tell us what’s happening, then it follows that our sense of how storytelling works will be shaped by that. When I think of my favourite scenes in books, I tend to think of a moment of deep emotion for the narrator character – often in an externally quiet scene. Frodo and Sam before the eagles come, Elizabeth reading Darcy’s letter, Lady Macbeth sleepwalking and guilt-ridden. Where-as when I think of favourite moments in films, they are often about the visuals – the beacons being lit, the lake scene (!), the witches on the moor…

I think approaching scene descriptions in terms of camera angles can be really interesting, but only if that camera angle is connected to your character’s inner self. If you are just panning around in Michel’s cited ‘reaction shot’, or describing things because you, the writer, can picture them, then there’s little depth to that. Conversely how your character choses to describe a scene, whose reactions they pay attention to, what all those things make them feel? That’s interesting.

From how I read Michel’s piece, I got the impression he was talking of more plot-forward books, where the character lens is not being applied to the author’s ‘camera’ and is never turned on the character themselves. Which definitely fits with some of my reading in those genre-spaces, where the narrative, even in first person, feels rather … anonymous. I’ve heard several writers say their books come to them as movies playing in their minds that they then simply transcribe. Which sounds a fascinating process, to be honest, but also suggests that it would be very easy to forgo interiority entirely if for them, the characters are figures in front of a camera, not minds that they have to navigate through.

Academia brain

Now, like I say, I got the impression that Michel was talking about books that fit into more plot-forward genres. Where-as ‘academia brain’ is what I think might be happening in the case of the books Carter cites – which sit in more book club/literary spaces.

The thing with people who (learn to) write in academic settings – whether that’s an MA course, one of the big creative writing courses like the Faber Academy, or with people who are themselves academics – is that I think the academic structure breeds a certain defensiveness into your writing. (Confession: I have not attended any such course, but I have been an academic albeit in science, so I am at least nominally familiar with the kind of environment we’re talking about. I’ve also been part of several critique groups, some more formal than others, and I think the same theory applies to them although to a far lesser degree.)

Imagine it – you sit down to write a scene that carries some important thematic or emotional weight in your story, and you write it knowing that it’s getting critiqued next week in a room full of peers and superiors. You know these isolated segments of prose are going to be scrutinised and questioned, in depth, and that you might need to have responses to explain or justify what you’ve written.

Don’t get me wrong, critique can be a wonderful thing, and learning the craft of writing can’t really happen without it, in one form or another. So I’m absolutely not saying critique in itself is bad. But I do think that if you write with critique hanging over you, especially critique connected to grades and qualifications, then you are going to write defensively.

You are going to write to a set of rules that you can point at to justify your choices – whether that’s a clear plot structure, or adherence to staples like ‘show don’t tell’, or ‘every word must earn its place’. You are also, and I think this is the important bit, going to distance yourself emotionally from your writing. You have to, right? It’s going to get torn apart on Monday – you can’t pick yourself up from that week after week if you are bleeding onto the page.

So what you end up with are books written in what I call, perhaps unfairly, the ‘MA voice’. This is technically brilliant writing. It’s beautifully structured and crafted from the plot to the sentence level, observed with detail and thought. But it also makes absolutely sure its ‘message’ is clearly stated (so no-one misses it in critique). And through out all of this, it holds itself apart from both the characters and the readers – it often stays, to get technical, at the same Psychic Distance the entire time, regardless of whether the narrator is brewing tea or dying. It reads like a summer noon – everything is wonderfully, vividly lit and exactly where you’d expect it to be; but there are no shadows, no uncertainty, no depth.

I have read and adored many, many an ‘MA voice’ book, but equally often (and even during those beloved books) I have wanted to holler Psychic Distance, for the love of cheese at the author. Which I think is the same as hollering take some risks, or let me figure this out myself, or (in full Alan Rickman Sherrif of Nottingham voice) make it hurt more.

Popcorn brain

A third thing that might be happening is centred around what we call ‘Booktok Books’ – commercial, plot-driven books in very specific subgenres, that rely heavily in both marketing and writing on a series of popular tropes. I’m most familiar with the portion of the romantasy world that sits here, with its obsession for ‘touch him and die’, ‘only one bed’, ‘enemies to lovers’ and so on. But I know there are equivalencies within other super popular subgenres too. These books not only lean heavily into tropes, but also into character archetypes – the kickass female lead, the misfit outsider, the broody villain, the cinnamon roll, the chaotic disaster.

The popularity of these books (and much of commercial fiction) lies in the fact that they are ‘popcorn books’ – they are familar, easy, fun and moreish. You know exactly what you’re getting with these books and they ask very little of you other than your enjoyment. The worlds, the plot, the psychological arcs of these characters fit neatly into known patterns so the writer doesn’t need to spend time deepening them – they can instead crack on with the fun stuff – which in this subset of romantasy is essentially the tropes and the banter.

Again – no criticism. I love me a popcorn book sometimes, they’re a lot of fun, and many of them are doing what they set out to do extremely well. But these books need to keep plot happening, so they move through any emotionality with the speed of a bullet train. Here, look, some trauma. Excellent, let’s get back to the stabbing/kissing/both.

And thus, in a different market space and for different reasons to the above, you end up in a very similar place regarding emotional nuance and interiority – as in, there isn’t much of either.

So, goodbye interiority, huh?

Well, obviously, again, #notallbooks. But yes, I do feel like there’s a bit of a move away from allowing space to really inhabit a character’s mind. And as I’ve explored above, that’s crucially happening across the literary spectrum. You could argue that the very commercial fiction has never particularly cared to inhabit its characters, only to use them as vehicles for an exciting plot. I think that’s doing a disservice to commercial fiction, to be honest. But that this same shift to surface-level narration is also evident in more literary books suggests it’s a wider tide change.

Why though?

Is it, as is always pointed at, shrinking attention spans? Are we too distracted and busy to want to know a character’s thinking, so we just want to see what they do next and be neatly told why?

Is it writer self-defense? The defensiveness I suggest above could easily be creeping into influencing ever-more-online authors, ever-more-exposed to bad reviews, career vulnerability, and the pressure to appeal to the latest marketing trend.

Is it publisher conservatism? Books that move a little slower, or try something a bit unexpected, are probably harder to market than a book that fits exactly into the mould of dozens of other successful books. Books that don’t explicitly spell out their themes are probably harder to market than a book that thrusts its core theme at you with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

…I’m gonna go with d) all of the above please Alice.

BUT

Interiority is good! Strange and unexpected and subtle are good!

Look at Orbital – recent winner of the Booker Prize. It might not be everyone’s cup of tea but it was a very well crafted and pretty much entirely introspective, quiet story.

How about Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills Cycle books – none of them complying with modern conflict centred plot structures and yet all of them powerful and lovely, and laden with award recognition.

Noticeable perhaps that these books achieved, at least initially, greater award recognition than commercial success. But they and others like them prove that there is a readership out there for books that trust the reader to care about the characters’ minds, not just their bodies. And I think giving readers books that take the time to explore nuance and complexity is vital – always, but perhaps more than ever now, in an age where powerful factions would like to strip public debate of all nuance in order to make us easier to silence. Perhaps more than ever now, in an age where we as a society and as individuals are facing choices that have no simple answers. We need fiction that isn’t afraid to get into the weeds of our tangled minds. Fiction that refuses to skim over the surface of the dark things, refuses to provide neatly wrapped and reductive answers to hard questions.

Well, would you believe it this has ended up being longer than I planned. Yet again.

So to try to draw my own muddled conclusion from all this. I think it’s worth thinking about what we ask of the books we read, and what they ask of us. And I think it’s worth celebrating the books that take the time to play in the shadows.

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