As powerful as interiority is in expressing character, action and dialogue are still first! If you can express part of the scene through these two do it. Only use interiority when those won't suffice and the reader won't be able to infer it on his own. Remember - readers like working!
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📖 Notes & analysis
Interiority tells readers what to feel; action and dialogue let them earn it, and earned feelings land harder because the reader did the work of inference. That's the psychology behind "readers like working" — participation builds investment. Say a character just lost a job. Instead of writing "she felt humiliated and afraid," show her overtighten the cap on her pen, decline the elevator to avoid small talk, then answer her phone with a voice pitched too bright. The reader assembles humiliation and fear themselves, and it sticks better than the label would have.
The caution: don't swing so far into showing that scenes become cryptic puzzles. Some emotional truths are layered or contradictory enough that action alone reads as vague or cold. A single clarifying interior line, used sparingly, can anchor meaning without doing all the reader's thinking for them.
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