My sister had a nerve-wracking habit of appearing in my room uninvited. The fact that I would have been drawn and quartered, probably literally, if I’d dared to consider the privacy of her room assailable had no bearing on the sanctity of my space. She was privileged; I was pathetic–from her point of view, anyway.
“Who are you talking to?” She’d roll her eyes, implying disbelief at my pitiable solitude. “…unless of course, you can see someone in here I can’t.” She’d perch on the arm of my reading chair, prepared for flight so I wouldn’t misunderstand and think she’d come to visit me.
“Myself,” I’d answer for the umpteenth time, just as we both knew I would. “I’m talking to myself.” She’d slide off the arm of the chair, heeding the call of more important worldly things that couldn’t be found in the bedroom of a dreamer.
“Well, just as long as you don’t start to hear someone answer…” She’d laugh, flouncing out of my room but leaving the door ajar; thus indicating the lack of anything of value inside. Little did she know.
“Someone always answers,” I’d say to her retreating back; but not loud enough to be heard. The dialogue with myself had already been interrupted by her predictable speech. There was nothing to learn from that pattern, but everything to be gained by a continuing dialectic with myself.
Was that the adjustment of a lonely child to life in a home ruled by unsympathetic adults and a jealous sibling? Perhaps; the first time I tried it out. But after that it was not just a default position; once I’d learned how successful conversations with oneself could be I initiated them often.
Even my usually infallible grandmother had her doubts. “How can you learn anything new that way?” she’d ask me; “you already know what you’re going to say.” But that’s where she was wrong, for once.
When a freshman writing course brought me around to a more esoteric discussion of internal dialogue, my favorite English professor suggested, “It’s really more of a monologue, isn’t it?” I shook my head ‘no’ emphatically. A bit presumptuous for a freshman English student; but, you see, I’d had a lot of experience talking to myself.
My argument ran along the same lines it had when my sister barged in on my thoughts and my grandmother expressed her doubts. Not only did I not know the answers to questions in my head, I also liked to find out what a third party might contribute to the subject, thus promoting a multi-channeled discussion rather than a one-way speech. I assume Mozart got into much the same free-for-all with his five or six competing and complementary themes in a given violin sonata. Why didn’t he keep it clean and simple like the Baroque masters before him? Because, all those competing voices in his head were more real and he was all for realism. That’s the way the human mind actually works. Nothing clean about it. Just try to meditate on one thought without letting all the others get in the way if you want to be convinced we’ve a lot going on in there.
I assume this is the reason I never quite know what the characters in my novels will do until they do it. Each one affects the others and anything can happen. I just go along for the ride. That’s been traditionally true for a lot of great writers (like Harold Pinter and Elizabeth Stroud) and also many you haven’t heard of yet (like me). It’s a creative outgrowth of a certain kind of mind, perhaps a bit like Mozart’s.
Now before you express outrage over the audacity of comparing myself to Mozart, understand that the other kind of private discourse is more reminiscent of Bach. Actually, I prefer Bach to Mozart, but that has very little to do with the structure of his musical themes and a lot to with sound and feelings. But it just goes to show that both methods of internal creativity are perfectly valid; just very different. You may not talk to yourself. That’s okay, but I do; and that’s also okay. My characters agree.
Now when I hear a reader ask me how I can write so much internal narrative without any external dialogue, I still have to shake myself to understand what they mean. Of course I’m writing dialogue, it’s just within the character him or herself. Who are you talking to when you’re alone in a room? I guess that depends on how well you know yourself and how much you’re willing to learn. Or maybe it doesn’t matter that the voices are unidentified. They’re threads of human thought and all worth following, whoever you’re talking to.