⚡Day 7. The voice in your head.
Following your interior monologue.
This week, we’re focusing on exercises that will help us turn real people into lively, complicated, compelling characters on the page. Previous prompts focused on character sketches and using conversation.
Today, we’re narrowing our focus from dialogue to monologue. It may be true that not everyone has an interior monologue in their lived experience, but the interior monologue can be an effective narrative voice on the page, as in “Quick, Write Something” by Brittany Hailer and “Happy Birthday” by Nicholas Dighiera.
PROMPT #7
Take your moment on the stage.
What does your interior monologue sound like? Does it speak in first person (I) or second (you), or is it maybe a first-person plural (we)? Is it loud or quiet, breathless or deliberate? Does it sound exactly the way you do when you talk, or does it have its own rhythm and pace and vocabulary? What does it talk about, and what kind of story does it tell?
You might start by trying to transcribe your current interior monologue (if you have one). Is there a specific experience that continues to drive the voice in your head? A story or moment that it returns to again and again? How can you move with its flow while also layering in some shape or productive direction that will help it make sense to someone else? Your real internal monologue is continual, but on the page, it will need to have some kind of beginning and end.
Write for 15-20 minutes, but steer clear of the void.
Share: Your first 100 words.
"Retired, huh. So what do you do all day?"
"I, well . . . (Well what do you think I do you pompous little twit. Just because I'm 76 doesn't mean I never did anything and lack skills. I have tons of skills. Didn't I put myself through law school with the help of a lifetime of loans? Didn't I raise my darling child until she was old enough to escape? Didn't I get married, divorced and finally find the love of my life who cooks all the time and I clean up when I can? And trips. Don't even get me started on the trips. Arriverderci pal because I'm going to Scotland as soon as I save up some money, which probably won't happen in the next four years and by that time I'll be 80 but so what, who says you can't ride the rails when your 80, just ask Arlo or his father Woody for godssake, and those are just a few of my dreams, I'm loaded with dreams, I have so many dreams they wake up my nightmares and) . . . every day I get up and make coffee."
Here we go again, Sunday morning at the F train stop. Desperate souls draped over the benches, bottles and dirty clothes strewn on the floor. Better keep my eyes open, don’t look at your phone. Be subtle but keep the peripheral vision…
15 minutes til the train, are you kidding me? Not worth walking to Broadway Lafayette to maybe get an earlier express train. Oh well. Gonna text my client, they’ll understand. OK, oh well.
A tall man cursing and yelling and angry coming my way. OK just stand near this family over here and keep my energy small, invisible, I will be ok, I will be ok. Feel my feet on the ground, breathe…. Feel my feet connected to the earth…. OK good, hope he stays at the end of the platform. Still yelling so though, jeez. Wonder what his story is. Sad. Scary.
Hearing a melody for a section of a song I’m working on, got to get that down before it disappears. If I just come over here next to one of the columns I can hum it quietly into my phone, here we go. Nobody cares anyway and I don’t care if they think I’m crazy. Let me do that again, that was too quiet.
Still watching that guy at the end of the platform, he’s coming back my way now again, he’s so angry, damn. Seeing an image I had during my Reiki session with my cats. Sweet Natalia, feeling her paw on me and suddenly feeling a shield of protection because of her energy. What a good girl.
Oh good that breeze means the train is coming. “Stand Clear of the Closing Doors Please!”