Interiority

Interiority is the rendering of a character's inner life on the page — not only their thoughts, but their thinking about those thoughts, as they sort and judge their own impressions of what is happening.

The distinction worth holding on to: interiority is not a transcript of internal speech. It is the character thinking about those thoughts — dissecting an impression, arguing with it, arriving somewhere. A line of reported thought tells us what they concluded. Interiority shows the work, and the work is the character.

It also has a running order. The Fantasy Fiction Formula sets out the components as: 1. feeling and emotion, 2. then thought, 3. then action, 4. then dialogue — and the sequence matters, because it is the order a real reaction occurs in. Reversed, the prose reads as explanation catching up with behaviour; kept in order, the motivation and the reluctance are established before the character moves, and the action lands as inevitable. A useful transition into a longer interior passage runs the same way: what just happened in the scene, the physical reaction, the emotional reaction, and only then the thinking.

The discipline is restraint. Action and dialogue still come first: use interiority only where those two cannot carry the moment and the reader could not infer it alone. Never write interiority that states what the reader has already worked out, or what they would enjoy working out — readers like working.