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Chapter 7: Conveying Characters’ Thoughts in Style
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Enjoying the Flexibility
of Free Indirect Style
Many writers use free indirect style instinctively, even if they don’t know the
technical term. Free indirect style is when the author/narrator merges her
voice with the character’s voice and takes on the character’s way of expressing
thoughts and feelings. It’s an incredibly versatile approach and enables
you as an author to get really close to your characters, even when you aren’t
writing in the first person. Also, very usefully, you don’t need to keep writing
‘she thought’ or ‘she felt’, because the fact that the character is thinking is
quite clear.
The problem with constantly writing ‘he thought’, ‘she felt’, ‘he wondered’
and so on is that it makes the reader aware that there is an author telling
them these things. Free indirect style allows the reader to directly enter the
character’s consciousness.
Here are some examples to show you how free indirect style works.
In the following extract, Henry James explores the point of view of a young
girl who doesn’t fully understand what’s going on around her. He uses free
indirect style to let us know what Maisie is feeling. The word ‘embarrassingly’
is Maisie’s comment (not the author’s); Maisie is the embarrassed person:
Mrs Waites was as safe as Clara Matilda, who was in heaven and yet,
embarrassingly, also in Kensal Green where they had been together to
see her little addled grave.
—Henry James (What Maisie Knew, Penguin, 1978, first published 1897)
In the next quote, James Joyce uses free indirect style to give us a real sense
of Lily’s point of view. Of course Lily isn’t literally run off her feet, but she
would no doubt say she was if she were speaking:
Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.
—James Joyce (‘The Dead’, in Dubliners, Everyman’s Library, 1991,
first published 1914)
Here, Dennis Lehane uses free indirect style to help us to get to know the
character. It’s not the author but the character Sean who is thinking what’s
cool or not:
Kids at the Looey and Dooey got to wear street clothes, which was cool,
but they usually wore the same ones three out of five days, which wasn’t.
—Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, Bantam, 2001)