I painted myself into a corner right out of the gate in developing the Silas Lopez series. The protagonist of The Washashore and The Holdfast is about as laconic as they come—thoughtful, observant, but a man who speaks reluctantly, says only what’s needed and almost never explains himself out loud. And I chose to build the series in third-person close POV, anchored entirely inside Silas’s experience. In other words, I designed a series around a narrator who doesn't like to talk.
To tell a story in third close POV, the main tools you can use are dialogue, setting descriptions and narrative observations. But with a character like Silas, that’s not enough. Getting out of that corner meant reaching for a tool I didn't yet know how to use: interiority.
The concept is easier to feel than to define. Have you ever finished a novel knowing a character intimately, even though that character hardly said anything? Quiet, guarded, emotionally reserved—and yet by the last page you understood not just what they did, but why. That experience is interiority at work: letting readers peek inside a character's mind. It's closely tied to point of view. In first-person novels ("I"), readers naturally expect direct access to the narrator's thoughts. But interiority matters just as much—and, I've found, gets trickier—in third-person close, where the story is written as "he" or "she" while staying tightly anchored to one person's experience. You're not watching the character from across the room. You're noticing what he notices, making the assumptions he makes, remembering what he remembers.
I'm not going to claim I do this well. I can only say I had no choice but to try to learn it, and that the learning was—still is—the hardest part of writing these books. My first instinct was to stay too far outside Silas, describing only what anyone in the room could observe. In the drafts that followed, I overcorrected and simply announced what he was feeling. Neither works. Interiority isn't a running commentary on emotions. It's letting readers occasionally experience how one particular mind filters reality—what it notices, what conclusions it jumps to, what worries and baggage it carries. The narration never borrows Silas's manner of speaking (voice mimicry like that is sometimes referred to as free indirect style or free indirect discourse) because that much additional Silas-speak would be too much on top of all the dialogue. Instead the approach I used is more like perception filtering; the narration is shaped by his perspective and takes on his way of seeing.
With a narrator like Silas, none of this could stay subtle background craft. Whatever interiority I could manage had to do a tremendous amount of heavy lifting, because if I'd leaned exclusively on dialogue and external action to flesh out who he was—particularly his fears, which are never externally visible—readers would be left standing outside a locked door. It was the only bridge I had between the quiet man everyone else in the story sees and the inner life readers need to experience if they're going to understand him and care about him. The jam I designed myself into became a real education in technique: as the drafts stacked up I noticed that the quieter Silas became on the page, the harder I had to work at letting readers hear the conversation happening inside his head.
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