We like this run down over at Michael Noll’s blog on how to develop characters whose mental states are inaccessible to your protagonists/narrators:
Our tendency as writers is to focus on describing the emotions of the characters closest to us: our narrators or, in the case of third person POV, the character we’re following. We become a Henry James-in-training, trying to capture the minute shifts of perception and feeling that occur inside the characters’ heads. But what happens when we need to describe those shifts of emotion inside a character whose head is closed to us? How do you describe an internal thought process when all you have available is the character’s exterior appearance?
The post includes teaching examples from Nami Nun’s “Club Orchid,” which originally appeared in
