The Chubbuck technique, whole — and why writers should learn it from her, not from us

There is a version of Ivana Chubbuck's work that circulates among writers, and it consists of exactly one idea: characters have an inner monologue that differs from what they say, and dialogue gets better when you know what it is. That idea is real, it is hers, and it is roughly one twelfth of the technique.

We build a tool that leans on that one twelfth, so we have an obvious interest in you thinking the whole thing is worth your attention. Take the recommendation at the end of this post with that in mind — and then take it anyway, because we think it is right.

What the technique is actually for

The core claim in The Power of the Actor (2004) is not about emotional truthfulness in the abstract. It is a specific argument about what drives a performance: a character is not feeling something, a character is trying to win something. Pain is not the destination. Pain is fuel that gets spent in pursuit of a goal.

That distinction is the whole engine, and it is where most adaptations of her work for writers go wrong. "Give your character a wound" produces static, self-pitying scenes. "Give your character a wound they are using to get something they want, right now, from the person in front of them" produces scenes that move.

The twelve steps

Presented as she orders them, with a note on what each one does for prose. Read this as a map, not as instruction — the technique is taught out loud, in a room, with someone watching you, and there is a reason for that which I will come back to.

1. Overall objective

What the character wants across the entire story — not a theme, a want. Stated as something another person could grant or refuse. For a novelist this is the spine that stops a character from becoming a different person between chapters.

2. Scene objective

What they want in this scene, and how it serves the overall objective. The most useful diagnostic question in the whole technique is the one this generates: if nobody in the scene wants anything from anyone, why is the scene in the book?

3. Obstacles

What stands between the character and the scene objective — physical, emotional, and other people. Chubbuck's emphasis is that obstacles should be raised, not lowered: the harder the resistance, the more the character has to spend to push through it, and the more we learn about them.

4. Substitution

The actor replaces the fictional other person with someone real from their own life who provokes the needed response. This is the step that does not port to writing, and pretending otherwise is where a lot of "Chubbuck for writers" material quietly falls apart. You are not performing; there is no live partner to look at. What does port is weaker and worth having anyway: knowing precisely who this character reminds the viewpoint character of, and letting that colour what they notice.

5. Inner objects

The specific images running behind the eyes when a person speaks or listens. Not "she remembered the argument" but the actual picture. For prose this is the antidote to abstraction — it is the difference between writing that a character felt betrayed and writing what they were seeing while they felt it.

6. Beats and actions

The scene is divided into beats; each beat gets a verb the character is doing to the other person — to shame, to disarm, to recruit. Transitive verbs, aimed at someone. This is the step that most improves dialogue on the page, because it forces every exchange to be an attempt to change another person rather than an exchange of information.

7. Moment before

What happened in the seconds immediately preceding the first line. Not backstory — the immediate prior event that the character walks in carrying. Novelists routinely start scenes at the door with a neutral character. This step is the fix.

8. Place and fourth wall

Where they are, in sensory specificity, and their private relationship to that space. A kitchen a character grew up in is not the same room as a kitchen they are visiting, and the prose should not describe it the same way.

9. Doings

The physical business — what the hands are doing. Chubbuck's insistence on this is practical: behaviour under pressure reveals interior state more reliably than statement of interior state. Most "show don't tell" advice is a vaguer version of this step.

10. Inner monologue

The uncensored internal stream, running underneath and often against the spoken line. This is the step that escaped into the writing world on its own, and the one our tool is built around. Its power comes from the gap: dialogue is what a character is willing to say; inner monologue is what is true. Scenes get their charge from the distance between the two.

Note that it depends on steps 2, 3 and 6 to mean anything. An inner monologue with no objective behind it is just a character narrating their mood.

11. Previous circumstances

The history the character brings — the events that formed the wound the overall objective is trying to resolve. This is the step people mistake for the whole technique.

12. Let it go

Do the preparation, then abandon it and play the scene. For writers: do the work in your notes, then write the scene without consulting them. The preparation is meant to change what you notice, not to be visible in the output. Prose that shows its homework reads like homework.

What a novelist actually gets from this

Two things, in our experience, and they are unevenly valuable.

The first is a diagnostic for flat dialogue. Steps 2, 6 and 10 together give you a test that any scene either passes or fails: what does each person want, what are they doing to the other to get it, and what are they not saying. Scenes that fail all three are the ones a critique partner calls "on the nose" without being able to say why.

The second is harder to get and worth more: the reorientation from feeling to wanting. It changes how you write a character in distress. It is also the part least likely to arrive from reading about it, which brings me to the point of this post.

Why you should learn this from her, in person

Everything above is the technique as a system, and a system is the part that survives being written down. It is not the part that matters most, and I want to be straight about that even though it undercuts the usefulness of this post.

What Chubbuck actually does is deep personal work. It is soul-moving, and it is genuinely hard — not hard like a difficult exercise, hard like standing somewhere you have spent years arranging your life not to stand. Every one of us has zones we do not go into, and we do not avoid them arbitrarily. We avoid them because going there hurts, and because at some point the avoidance was the sensible thing to do.

You cannot do that alone. Not because you lack discipline, but because the wall is doing its job — it is built precisely so that you will not notice you are turning away from it, and you will always find a reason that the turning away was justified. It needs someone across from you who has seen several thousand people arrive at that same wall, who can tell the difference between "this person needs to stop" and "this person is about to protect themselves out of the most important twenty minutes of their year", and who knows when to push, why to push, and how far.

That is what she does. She takes you past the point you would have stopped at, and on the other side of it there is something of your own you had no access to before — a real thing, from your own life, that you had filed somewhere unreachable. You come back with it. It is yours now in a way it was not that morning.

And here is why this matters professionally rather than only personally. Writers write about conflict, about wanting, about need, about people changing under pressure. You can write those from the outside — most writing does — and it produces work that is competent and slightly reported, the way travel writing by someone who studied the country reads differently from travel writing by someone who lived there. Once you have actually stood in one of those places yourself, you know what a person in that situation genuinely feels, as opposed to what the literature says they feel. You are not inferring it. You have been there, because she walked you there, and you would almost certainly never have got there on your own.

That is the difference between work that is good and work that is world-class, and it does not come from a framework.

Set against that, the inner monologue is a game. A useful game — it will genuinely make your dialogue sharper, your scenes less inert, your characters less transparent — and it is the game our tool plays. But it is a game, and the deep work is not, and anyone telling you the two are the same thing is selling you the cheaper one.

There is also a plain practical layer. Several steps only exist properly in the room: substitution needs a live partner and someone to stop you performing an emotion instead of pursuing an objective; beats and actions are calibrated by watching whether the other person actually changed; step twelve is close to unlearnable on paper, because on paper you can always look at your notes again.

The Chubbuck Studio is in Los Angeles and runs classes and intensives; The Power of the Actor is the book, and it is the right first purchase either way. Take the class even if you never intend to act, and go in expecting to be moved rather than instructed.

Where our tool fits, honestly

Narrowly, and downstream of all of the above.

The Inner Monologue Dramaturg takes a scene you have already written and scores each line for how on-the-nose it is — how closely what the character says matches what they mean — and surfaces a candidate inner monologue underneath. It implements step 10 as a diagnostic, on finished text.

It does not teach you the technique, it will not do steps 1 through 9 for you, and it cannot tell you whether a scene belongs in your book. It tells you where your characters are saying exactly what they feel — which is genuinely hard to see in your own work, because you know what the line is for and cannot hear how flat it lands. That is a real and narrow use, and overselling it would be the fastest way to make this post worthless.

We also publish it when our tools lose a test, which is the other half of taking craft seriously.

Writers With AI is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Ivana Chubbuck or The Chubbuck Studio in any way. Nobody asked us to write this and no arrangement of any kind exists between us. The description above is our reading of publicly published work, and any interpretation or disagreement in it is ours, not hers. If you want the technique, get it from the source.