The earlier blog post this month discussed how to get to know your characters better before you write and the importance of being as familiar with them as you are of good friends and family members. By using a strategy that works for you, maybe writing a biography of each character, outlining their characteristics, creating questions and answers for them to answer, or other methods that you are most comfortable with, your storytelling will benefit greatly from having well-developed characters. 
As you seek to create characters who are important and interesting to your readers and whom your audience wants to get to know better, you will also want to work to strengthen the interiority of those you are writing about.
Digging Deeper
Interiority is a combination of the subconscious and conscious point of view of character development, and it involves directly looking into a character’s head to understand why they do what they do and why they act in a certain way. Writers bring out their characters’ interiority by detailing the individuals’ inner thoughts. Only you, the writer, knows what is going on in your characters’ heads and what makes them tick. Divulging this inner makeup to your readers will help them understand each character’s motivations and perspectives with more clarity.
The important concept of interiority is nicely explained and analyzed in the fifth lesson in the Institute for Children’s Literature’s third lesson and accompanying assignment in the course Writing for Children and Teens. Although that course is about writing for kids and teens, interiority is a critical part of writing for every age—including adults.
In that lesson and assignment, writing students are asked to actually identify with their subject, both physically and psychologically, as a way to get into their mind. Students think about what it means to be that character—how do they feel at certain times throughout the day and in certain situations in general. They use language that seems natural to the subject as they write a 500-word internal sketch of their person (the writing activity centers around real people rather than fantasy subjects).
To write that sketch, the student imagines the character with a particular problem or conflict or within a situation for which they will need to react. Students write a stream-of-consciousness-type piece as a way to explore the subject’s inner thoughts and feelings. The ideas they write about can be randomly presented or can unfold in a natural order. The idea is for the student to almost become the person they have created so they can accurately portray how the character ticks within their story. This particular assignment is always interesting for instructors to review as the completed manuscript shows how well the student seems to understand this character they have created.
Interiority may be somewhat easier for writers to map out when they have a realistic human—adult or child—as their protagonist as they can draw on their own experiences and feelings to create an internal portrait. Characters that are written as super-human or fantasy-type beings may be a bit tougher to analyze, although the writer has free rein to do what they want and can invent that character’s way of thinking as they please, then stay true to their creation throughout whatever they are writing.
Consistent Characters
Naturally, the internal ideas you write down about your character won’t all be divulged within your writing, but just as you must remain consistent about your characters’ physical characteristics, so must you do that with their internal thoughts and ideas. If a character is one who is quick to make judgements at the beginning of a story, it is probable that unless readers learn of some growth or transformation, he or she won’t change as the story moves along.
Consider creating your own interiority study of each of the characters in your story. To do this, write down or just think about a few situations that may be appropriate to what you are writing. For example, someone starting a new job, breaking up with a significant other, quitting smoking, learning to drive, getting lost in the woods.
Next, write or think about an assumption about the situation as it pertains to the character. If fifteen-year-old Poppy is lost in the woods, based on her personality as we imagine her in our story, we can assume she is scared and almost immediately starts to cry.
Now, write down or think about some judgements about the character of Poppy, lost in the woods. These could be that she left her group because she does not get along with the others on the trip and did not want to stay with the group she was assigned to, so she wandered off. She was unhappy with the other three people.
Think of decisions your character must make. Will she only sit down and cry, or will she eventually walk further into the woods and potentially get even more lost, or maybe scream until someone hears her, or encounter someone or something – or will something else happen to her that she must make a decision about.
Think about what your characters hopes may be. In the short term, Poppy wants to be found but perhaps in the long term she wants to meld well with her peer group and not feel so out of place with everyone. 
Then, write down or think about the expectations you have for this character. What will ultimately happen to her in this story, based on her interiority—her way of thinking and mindset?
By scoping all this out beforehand, you will ideally know Poppy as well as you know your own sister, cousin, or best friend. Figure out a good strategy or format for you to assess what is going on in each of your characters’ minds and share this information as the story progresses
Strong attention to character development is important to creating multi-dimensional characters who are as real as anyone you know. Spend time hanging out with each of your characters to learn how they tick and work to bring out these subjects in your writing.
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