Overthinking in fiction

Where to position reflective scenes

Feb 09, 2026

In a low moment a few months ago, I took the ill-advised step of looking at reviews of my most recent novel Out of the Woods on Goodreads, something most writers agree is step no writer should take. One woman, let’s call her Carol*, commented that she did not finish the novel because, words to the effect of, “literally nothing happens”. Whilst I would dispute Carol’s* frank assessment of my novel: in the first few pages of my novel, a woman arrives in the Hague and encounters a war criminal, I also kind of understood what she meant. Most of what happens in Out of the Woods is not so much about what happens, but about how my protagonist encounters a trial of a man for war crimes. The trial is foregrounded, but the key to the novel is how it transforms the narrator.

Anyway, thanks to Carol*, I was reminded about the importances of giving thought to the position of reflective scenes in novels. A novel is, in fact, made of scenes, rather than long reflective passages in which nothing happens. Sure, reflections and interiority are an important component of writing fiction well, but there first has to be some action or event for the protagonist to reflect on. Even the most interior of writing recognises this.

I’ve recently finished (and reviewed) Claire Louise Bennett’s novel Big Kiss, Bye Bye, one of the most interior novels I’ve read in a long time. Even though the bulk of that novel is built on reflection, those reflections are about things that have happened, or that will happen. The novel opens like this:

“Two weeks from now I won’t be living here anymore. I’ll be in the woodshed in L-. Xavier won’t know I don’t live here anymore. We are no longer in touch. It’s been three months since his last email, which I did not reply to. There really was no way of responding to it. I sort of feel like calling him now — I wonder what he would say? But it seems irreversible, that’s really how it feels.”

Although all of this is reflection, in the sense that it is happening inside the narrator, you can see is predicated on action: the protagonist reflecting on an email from Xavier (an action), and the fact that she will move home in two weeks (also an action), and Xavier will not know where she is.

Bennett is an experimental, highly literary novelist, which means she’s very much concerned with how language is used to capture the world. Her novels often contain not so much scenes, but echoes of scenes — things that have happened in the past which the protagonist is still processing in the novel’s ‘today’. Bennett, a virtuoso writer, can get away with this. For the rest of us though, reflective moments need to be given more thought, and packaged inside of or respond to some clear action, or we risk irritating readers like Carol[*].

One of the things about fiction is that there are usually two things happening at once. There is a series of events that your character or characters pass through from the beginning to the end of the novel or story. This is the plot. Then there is the way those events cause change to occur in your character (or offers them the possibility for change which they refuse to accept.) It’s this second component of fiction that reflective scenes are about. They are about the character internalising and processing what has happened to them. In other words, if we think about the novel as a character going through a series of escalating external events that dramatically transform their nature, the reflective scene is where you put those internal transformations. The shifts in thinking which are often small and incremental.

I often baulk at rules in fiction (which I’ve written about here), but here is a rule that I find very helpful, which comes from Nancy Kress’ book on writing Beginnings, Middles and Ends. She tells us the following:

“When you’re in the swimming pool, swimming laps, at the start of each lap you push off from the side of the pool. If you push off hard, you get to glide a longer way before you have to start pumping arms and legs. An exciting, action or conflict filled dramatic scene is a “push” to the narrative. You can then “glide” with a section of exposition or reflection without losing the reader’s interest.”

The thing about action in fiction (which I’ve written about here) is that it creates energy in the form of forward momentum. This is what Kress is saying is, if you’ve created enough forward momentum in your fiction, the reader will tolerate periods of reflection, in fact they may well need a lull in the action, a change of pace to allow everything that’s happened to properly land inside of them. According to this logic, reflection should follow a significant piece of action.

Another way of thinking about a reflective scene, is thinking of it as action, but action that occurs internally. It’s action that occurs inside the character in the sense that something is changing, or shifting ever so slightly in the character’s mind. A reflective scene prevents the action from being meaningless events that accumulate across the pages of your novel. It’s not just action that’s happening; it’s that the action is meaningful and consequential to your character.

The test for whether or not a reflective scene is needed in a novel, so says Lord Saunders, is that it causes something else happen. Saunders writes:

“One of the ways a swath of thinking ‘earns its way in’ is that it is naturally caused by something — a man walks into another man who is helping along an elderly lady and this causes him to think of his own mother. [But is also earns its keep when it] causes something — that man then goes and calls his mother.”

I think that is a useful rule: if some other piece of action is caused by the reflection, the reader will have the sense of things moving forward. But I also think there are other ways for a reflective scene to earn its keep. For example, if the character relates to the events that they are reflecting on in a really unexpected way. An encounter with death, for example, becomes a moment of wonder or awe. Or your character, after years of being insulted or denigrated by a family member and after years of resisting it, suddenly thinks, “hey maybe there is some truth to what they are saying”. The reflection thus earns its keep by causing some key change inside the narrator. These are just some ideas. In either case, the reflection is predicated on action — an accident or illness in which the character encounters death, or a series of conversations. Either way, you can see that these types of reflection are significant in narrative terms, because they are linked to moments of change.

One of the stories I’m reminded of here is Lauren Groff’s excellent story ‘Eyewall’ from her remarkable collection Florida — the whole book is a masterclass in writing. In that story, a woman bunkers down in the luxurious house she once shared with her husband, as the landscape around her is torn apart by a hurricane. Although the story is mostly about the woman’s reflection on her past, her marriage — her husband who left her for a younger woman and died of cancer revisits her as a ghost, she remains in the house that ordered their elaborate life and watches the world around her disintegrate. Their house, so carefully constructed around their marriage to contain their comfortable but ultimately shallow life “was scattered into three counties.” Towards the end of the story Groff writes (exquisitely):

“On my way downstairs, I passed a congregation of exhausted armadillos on the landing. Birds had filled the Florida room, cardinals and whip-poor wills and owls. Gently, the insects fled from my step. I sloshed over the rugs that bled their vegetable dies onto the floorboards. My brain was too small for my skull and banged from side to side as I walked. Moving in the humidity was like forcing my way through wet silk. Still, I opened the door to look at the devastation outside.”

I always think of that story when I think about the ratio of reflection and action. Groff gets away with so much reflection, so much flashback here because the action happening around her character is so charged and momentous. It’s the destructive power of the hurricane that she is watching that allows her to go inwards. A hurricane outside creates the narrative sense that anything could happen: the whole story is thus charged and electric. I always try to remember that when I write reflective scenes: if the action has enough fury, enough potential to cause change, it will scaffold the reflection. It’s not so much what the action causes to happen, but how it forces change in your character. Here the narrator is learning that life in its most natural state is not ordered but chaotic.

One question to ask yourself when writing is how is my reflection packaged in action? Is there a moment of action foregrounded that allows the reflection to take place? Or is the reflection causing some change or new piece of action to occur. Reflection in other words, should always be tethered to or anchored to a piece of action: that’s the key takeaway here.

This post is written with thanks to Carol, which I would like to remind people, is not her real name and who would probably hate most of the books mentioned here.

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