What External and Internal Actually Mean
The external event is what happens in the physical world of the scene. Someone arrives. A piece of information lands. A confrontation begins or ends. Something is lost or found or said out loud. It’s the stuff that would appear in a screenplay, because it’s observable. A camera could record it.
The internal shift is what changes inside a character because of the external event. Not just their reaction—their understanding. The thing they believe now that they didn’t believe before. The door that opened. The one that closed.
- Why it worksA scene with only the external event gives readers information. A scene with the internal shift gives them experience. In Normal People by Sally Rooney, the external events are often small—a conversation, a look across a room, a text that doesn’t come. What makes those scenes devastating is the internal shift that follows. Connell or Marianne understands something differently by the end of the scene. Their world has changed shape, even if the observable facts barely moved.
In We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver, the external events of Eva’s narration are often mundane. What makes the book unbearable is what she understands, or refuses to understand, or understands too late. The internal shift is the whole novel. - How to do itBefore writing a scene, ask two questions. What happens? And: who is different by the end, and how? If you can only answer the first question, you have a scene with events but no arc. The internal shift doesn’t have to be dramatic. It doesn’t have to be conscious. But it has to be there.
Do
Let the internal shift live in behavior rather than declaration. A character who understood something doesn’t have to say so. They reach for something they didn’t reach for before. They go quiet when they used to talk. They make a decision they’d have refused at the start of the scene.
Avoid
Writing scenes where characters end up exactly where they started emotionally. Plot can advance without a character changing, but it tends to feel like reading a summary of events rather than living inside a story.
From My Work
In Salt & Bone: Reckoning, Jack sits in the hallway with Ashlee while Mina and Brendon are asleep inside. Neither of them looks at the other. This is the external event: two people sitting on a floor, saying very little.
What’s happening internally is the whole scene. Ashlee accuses Jack of going “full stone statue.” She says he hates sitting still. He says he’s not scared, too fast, too sharp, and she calls it immediately.
“You think you’re the only one who gets to freak out about this?”
“No. I think you hate not being the one with answers.”
By the end of the scene, Jack has admitted something he’s been refusing to admit for chapters. Not out loud. Not fully. But the internal shift has happened. He’s different. The wall cracked. Readers feel it because the external event—two people on a floor—gave the internal shift somewhere to live.
The Scene That’s All Event
Action scenes are the most common offender. Something happens, then something else happens, then something else. The plot advances. People survive or don’t. And the reader comes out the other side and feels nothing except caught up.
The problem isn’t the action. The problem is that nobody in the scene grew or broke or understood something differently. The event happened to characters instead of inside them.
- Why it worksAction that’s tethered to internal shift produces the sequences readers remember. In No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, the violence isn’t memorable because it’s brutal. It’s memorable because of what it does to Sheriff Bell. Each external event pushes him further toward the conclusion he’s already circling. In Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, the revelations land with such force because Camille’s internal world keeps shifting to accommodate new information she can barely hold.
- How to do itAfter any significant external event in a draft, ask what changed inside the character who experienced it. Then write that change into the scene. Not as a summary of what they felt—as behavior. As something they do or don’t do. As one sentence that carries the weight of what just shifted.
Do
Give the character one specific response to the external event that couldn’t belong to anyone else. The specific response is the internal shift visible on the surface.
Avoid
Scenes where the character’s primary response to an external event is to move toward the next event. Momentum is not the same as meaning.
From My Work
In Salt & Bone: Reckoning, after Brendon shuts down following news about Mina, Jack gets him to bed and closes the door. The external event is over. What follows is three short paragraphs of Jack walking down a hallway:
Each step felt heavier than the last.
Like my body was moving but my mind hadn’t caught up.
Like something was waiting in there I didn’t deserve to want.
Three sentences. No event. But the internal shift is doing everything. Jack doesn’t know how to want comfort after watching someone he loves fall apart. That’s the second thing the scene needed, and it arrives after the external event closes.
The Scene That’s All Feeling
The opposite problem is a scene where the internal world is rich and the external world barely exists. A character sits and thinks for three pages. The prose is gorgeous. The insight is real. And nothing happens, so nothing can change.
Internal scenes without external anchors tend to feel unmoored. The reader is inside a character’s head with no ground beneath their feet. Introspection needs something to push against.
- Why it worksEven the most interior scenes in great fiction have an external anchor. In Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Clarissa’s internal world is the whole book, but it’s always set against something external: the preparations for the party, the car backfiring, a person she passes on the street. The external detail gives the internal reflection somewhere to land. In The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Esther’s interiority is relentless, but Plath keeps grounding it in external events that are small and specific and real.
- How to do itIf you find a scene that’s all internal, look for the external anchor that belongs there. It doesn’t have to be dramatic. A character who is grieving can be making coffee. A character who is terrified can be folding laundry. The mundane external activity gives the internal experience something to press against.
Do
Use the external anchor as a contrast to the internal world. A character who feels everything falling apart, doing something ordinary, is more unsettling than a character who feels everything falling apart in the abstract.
Avoid
Extended passages of pure interiority without any external grounding. Even internal monologue lands harder when there’s a physical world around it.
From My Work
In Salt & Bone: Reckoning, Lisa walks Wing 3A alone. The external event is her observational rounds—nothing dramatic. Subject 046’s hand twitches. Subject 043 is crying. Subject 051 is testing his restraints.
Her internal world runs underneath it the whole time. She deletes the footage of Subject 043. She files a note that says “non-reactive residual motor response” about a hand she knows is doing something else. The external event keeps happening—she keeps walking, keeps logging, keeps moving. The internal shift is that by the end of the corridor, she knows something she’s trying not to know. The external grounds the internal, and the internal gives the external its weight.
Final Thoughts
Every scene is a transaction. The reader spends time and attention. What they get back should be both information and experience—something that happened, and someone who is changed by it.
Most writers write the first half by instinct. The second half is the part that takes deliberate attention in revision. Go back through your scenes and ask what changed inside someone. If the answer is nothing, the scene isn’t finished yet.
Extras
- Read about Salt & Bone
- Read about The Death of Me
- Sign up for the newsletter to get weekly tips
- Normal People by Sally Rooney
- We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
- No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
- Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
- Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath