What the hell is interiority and how do you get it?

Are we telling instead of showing now, or what? I pit Ottessa Moshfegh against Colleen Hoover to find out.

In my continued journey through your summer publishing questions, I came across this gem¹:

Full text in footnotes

Jyotsna went on to ask if we are telling instead of showing now—or still showing instead of telling? Regarding interiority, what’s a writer to think?

Let’s start off with the definition of interiority: According to Vocabulary.com, “Interiority is a characteristic of being private, inward, or introspective. A writer can convey her characters' interiority by describing their innermost thoughts.”

Okay. But you all aren’t new to publishing. You know what happens when you describe your character’s innermost thoughts? You get accused of writing a “quiet” book, you get accused of lacking action, you are told you have no plot.

So let’s bag what “interiority” means for a second and investigate what (in my opinion) gatekeepers mean when they say your work needs more interiority in it. These are the harsher things that they might mean: