Valuing & judging

Notice how the narrator is eavesdropping on the character's private thoughts and reporting them back to us.

It almost sounds as if the character is speaking aloud, especially in the last line.

There's a lot of evaluation happening in this snippet:

• Bod evaluates the howl and determines that anything that could terrify the ghoul-folk must be more terrifying than he can imagine.
• He evaluates his potential death and realises that because he values his own identity and history, he is happy to die so long as he retains those (as opposed to becoming a ghoul and forgetting himself).
• Finally, he wraps everything up with a simple, summative evaluation: "that was good", meaning, the way he might die.

You can see a contrast between the first two evaluations, which are quite grammatically complex, and the final one which is simple.

For this one, you have to get inside your character almost like you're in first person point of view.

1. Imagine your character in a situation.
2. Start by describing a perception—what they see, hear, smell, taste.
3. Then describe their internal reaction—what do they think or feel? (In third person, you do this by describing their thoughts almost as if they were talking to themselves.)
4. Have them discuss at length their evaluation of the situation—what do they judge to be happening?
5. Finally, wrap it up with a summative evaluation: overall, is this good or bad?