From SOAP notes to SOUL: a (doctor) writer's guide to interiority

After twenty-plus years of clinical practice, I've become fluent in SOAP. Not the kind that gets you clean (though I use that regularly too, before and after every patient visit). I'm talking progress notes: the Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan format that structures every medical chart note. You know, those terse summaries you glimpse through your patient portal and think, "Wait, that's all they wrote about my entire visit?"

Bullet points. No frills. Just the facts, ma'am.

Turns out, that style tagged along when I started writing fiction. My prose read like something a doctor might have written—if said doctor were still documenting medical conditions. Spare. Clinical. Packed with plenty of supporting data but little emotion.

In other words: no interiority.

For those of you who aren't writers, interiority is what your characters are thinking and feeling. It's that inside peek into their psyche. How they react to the dead body in the parlor, not just that they found it.

Here's the tricky bit: you can't just tell readers "She was angry." That'll get your book chucked across the room faster than you can say "What's next in my TBR pile?" You have to show them. Through clenched fists, clipped words, or maybe your character's internal voice noting how her mother-in-law's smirk makes her want to nominate the woman as the next victim.

My first draft? Pure plot. Murder, clues, red herrings, my amateur sleuth Phoebe following leads. Interiority? Yeah, not so much.

My beta readers spotted it right away.

I pushed back. "It's a mystery! It's about solving the murder, right?"

Nope. That's like a sports commentator droning: "X scored. Then Y scored. Then X scored again." No drama. No tension. No...well, you get it.

Now I'm going back through, layering in what Phoebe's actually feeling as she she stumbles over yet another corpse. And honestly? It's making her come alive on the page, not just in my imagination.

What's your take on interiority?