Bumbling day. Not enough sleep for several nights and I just can't get my head round something which hasn't stumped me before.

I'm writing a story at the moment in which much of what happens is internal. The exterior action is perfunctory, the wars go on inside the heads of two characters who meet at the end, but I just can't work out how to pace it. If I cut the internal monologues to the bones the story becomes peremptory. If I flesh it out I start shuffling in my seat, thinking readers won't tolerate the lack of overt plot.

I know interior monologue pieces can work (Doris Lessing, Virginia Wolf) but can't quite see how. What is it that keeps the vitality, that picks up the pace in quiet work? I'm a sucker for good prose style and that will keep me reading for ages when not a lot is happening, or if I feel fully connected to a character, I can happily hang around snooping inside her head as a reader, but am not sure many readers feel like this.

Is a reflective story automatically less likely to succeed? Does anyone here write quiet pieces with an awareness of what shifts them on? Instinct tells me to write through the reflective problems in the characters heads then go back through and add a more overt exterior plotline to hook the thought processes into, but I'm concerned this might skew the focus.

Talking for myself - quiet work that either puts its finger on something I have thought or felt but maybe haven't verbalised or thought of a way of describing before OR that offers insights into some other kind of world and other kinds of people that I don't know so much about can both be as riveting to me as a fast plot-based story. Brokeback Mountain, which I read recently, was riveting yet it was spare on the internal dialogue/thought process. And yet it made you hanker after knowing more and gave you hints through moments. She is very good at giving you enough to make you want to know and understand more and yet not too much. I think this story particularly skilful in that the main character is pretty quiet and not a man of many words.

But the fascination is partly the tension and the very different representation of a relationship that in some contexts - today - we take for granted. And the full immersion into that difficult hostile world and the realisation of the trap that people must have and do still sometimes feel themselves to be in.

But I think that I DO get impatient with stories that some like a big fuss about nothing or about futility and dullness. Or those sorts of themes. ALthough I know they do it for some people. But with quiet writing I like to feel that the writer has managed to reveal something very True. And that feeling of "yes" that you didn't know or realise until you read it...Which is like a revelation.

I'm burbling and not at all sure that's helpful really.

I wonder if it's a matter of building tension and suspense just as rigorously, even if the canvas is only the inside of someone's head. So you need to track the movement of thought and the emotions which go with it, so that we feel the build-up to a moment of change, and the fallout from that, even if it's all in their heads. And maybe, also, you need to keep track not only of those individual build-up-climax-fallout arcs, but make sure that the main, whole-story has one too, so that with each of those individual shifts we're wondering steadily more when the Big One's going to happen. Which is presumably when they meet...

And perhaps breaking up the slabs of thinking with things that actually happen - external action - which also fulfils all the usual criteria of being there for good and enough reasons, would help. As Rosy says, it doesn't always take much, once the reader's tuned in, to get us feeling there's a whole lot more to it than you're telling.

Thank you both.

Emma what you say is along the lines I was aiming for.

Snowbell - you've really helped me think - thanks for that.

The characters are not humdrum, I hope. One has recently arrived in the UK from a civil war and the other is psychotic. (Wot a laugh.) They meet and find something specific and bizarre in common that helps them both feels less displaced and that's about all that happens. They move from not belonging, from feeling the world at large is alien and hostile, to having the comfort, recognition and understanding of each other. It's a tiny shift and if I screw it up, nothing at all will have happened. I really want to find a way to chart that tiny shift. it excites me in other work and I just haven't got the skill yet, but both your comments have helped clarify what not to do, which is a good start.

Thanks

S

How does the shift manifest itself? Does it have any physical or behavioural aspects? Also, thinking back to the period before the shift, do these manifestations have any kind of 'opposite'?

Good questions, Saturday. I like the idea of opposites. Thanks.

When I've a moment I'm going to get down some quiet short fiction writers - Munro, Carver, some of Murakami - work where nothing much appears to be happening on the surface but its all swilling away merrily below - and try and pinpoint what they do.

Also, what about Barbara Pym or Penelope Lively or Anne Tyler? All quiet and internal. There is even a novel by Penelope Lively called 'City of the mind' (atmittedly the mc is an architect) which is more about coming to terms with events than the events themselves - a fascinating subject I always think.

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Oops, just realised, you are talking about short fiction. Sorry.