Inner and Outer Mode for Fiction Writing

Both techniques, if used correctly, can provoke feelings from your readers

In a previous essay, I wrote about why fiction writers (and writers in general) should focus on provoking an emotional response from their readers.

Allowing your readers to experience your fiction will make your work stick in their minds. If you are like me, you want your writing to have an effect on people. It’s why you write, right?

But how do you do it?

There are three primary techniques Donald Maass outlines in his book, The Emotional Craft of Fiction:

1. Inner Mode
2. Outer Mode
3. Other mode

Each approach, when used correctly, can elicit a response from your readers.

But, in particular, I want to focus on the Inner Mode (Telling) and Outer Mode (Showing).

Inner Mode AKA Telling

Inner mode is when you report what characters are feeling so effectively that readers feel something too. AKA, the dreaded telling so many people deem as the bane of fiction writing.

I’ve written about before how show don’t tell isn’t simple advice because telling is as much a writing technique as showing. When done correctly, telling can elicit an emotional response in your reader.

The truth lies in the unexpected.

Telling is best used when the feeling you are describing is fresh and unexpected, but true and real. Human beings are complex. People laugh when they are scared and cry when they are happy.

The emotions on the surface aren’t the same as underneath.

Our feelings can be communal and dynamic. They can change from one moment to the next. Inner mode works when you can surprise the reader but remain relatable.

So when you are telling, it is integral to imply the secondary emotions that lie beneath the surface.

Be obvious, and your readers won’t feel shit. The effective way of telling is by reaching past the surface of water.

Here are some exercises that Donald Maass details in his book (page 22) to master the Inner Mode AKA telling:

• Select any moment in your story when your protagonist feels something strongly. Identify the feeling. Next, ask your protagonist, “What else are you feeling at this moment?” Write that down, too. Then ask, “Okay, what else are you feeling now?” Write that down.
• Now begin to work with that third, lower-layer emotion. Examine it in four ways.
  • 1) Objectify it be creating an analogy: What does it feel like to have this feeling?
  • 2) Make a moral judgment about it: is it good or bad to feel this? Why?
  • 3) Create an alternative : What would a better person feel instead?
  • 4) Justify this feeling: It’s the only possible thing to feel at this moment and here is why.
• Look around the scene, too. What is your protagonist seeing that others don’t? Add one detail that only your protagonist would see, and see it in his own unique way.
• Write a new passage for this moment in the story, one in which your character feels deeply (and in detail) this third-level emotion.

Outer Mode AKA Showing

Showing works best when you are trying to be artful, not artsy.

Outer moments are depicted through action. Action is driven by need. Therefore, showing should be about depicting need, which gets the reader’s mind churning about what certain actions mean.

The point is to get your readers to feel something via their response to the subtext.

Showing works particularly well when wanting to show how dark, tormented, suffering, or insane a character is. Because when you simply tell the reader a character is any of these things, it becomes intolerable. You want readers to process their own emotional response to the highly painful emotions of your character. You have to pull back to be effective.

Effective showing is subtext. The portrayal of a feeling not being told. “The unspoken emotion truth,” as Maass says.

Showing makes the reader wonder.

Here are exercises (page 16) Donald Maass provides to master effective showing:

• Select a moment in your story when your protagonist is moved, unsettled, or disturbed. This might occur when he’s facing a difficult choice, needing something badly, suffering a setback or surprise, having a self-realization, learning something shocking, or feeling in any way overwhelmed. Write down all the emotions inherent in this moment, both obvious and hidden.
• Next, considering what he is feeling, write down how your protagonist can act out. What is the biggest thing your protagonist can do? What would be explosive, out of bounds, or offensive? What would be symbolic? What can your protagonist say that would cut right to the heart of the matter or unite others in understanding? Go sideways, underneath, or ahead. How can your protagonist show us a feeling that we don’t expect to see?
• Add a detail of the setting that only your protagonist would notice, or that everyone notices but your protagonist sees in a unique way.
• Finally, go back and delete all the emotions you wrote down at the beginning of this exercise. Let actions and spoken words do the work. Do they feel too big, dangerous, or over-the-top? Use them anyway. Others will tell you if you’ve gone too far, but more likely, you haven’t gone far enough.

Again, show don’t tell isn’t as simple as advice as people make it out to be. The Inner and Outer Mode both play a part in provoking an emotional response from your reader.

Do yourself a favor and buy Donald Maass’s The Emotional Craft of Fiction to get the full picture.