Episode 236 - Creating Character Motivation: The Fallacy of Magical Knowing with Tiffany Yates Martin
April 30, 2024
"Ask yourself, what does your character want? Can you articulate that? Why do they want that or think they want that? What deeper desire or drive lies beneath that vague or glib answer that you might initially give? What are the specifics behind it? What is this situation hitting on deep in your character that they may not even be consciously aware of?" —Tiffany Yates Martin
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Tiffany Yates Martin discusses CREATING CHARACTER MOTIVATION: THE FALLACY OF MAGICAL KNOWING, including an explanation of what "magical knowing" is, what leads a writer to fall back on it, and the signs that you're relying on it; the importance of understanding the character's overarching goal and of laying in brushstrokes of both context and specifics; the challenge of finding balance; the power of dissecting your own story and the value of outside eyes; and the pitfalls of "magical ignorance."
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
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Tiffany Yates Martin has spent nearly thirty years as an editor in the publishing industry, working with major publishers and New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling and award-winning authors as well as indie and newer writers. She is the founder of FoxPrint Editorial and author of INTUITIVE EDITING: A CREATIVE AND PRACTICAL GUIDE TO REVISING YOUR WRITING. She is a regular contributor to Writer’s Digest, Jane Friedman, and Writer Unboxed, and a frequent presenter and keynote speaker for writers’ organizations around the country. Under her pen name, Phoebe Fox, she is the author of six novels.
Links
Tiffany's Links
https://foxprinteditorial.com/
https://www.facebook.com/tiffanynyates/
https://www.instagram.com/tiffanyyatesmartin/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ-TMebXV5sg8-fQkVeg_0w
Past Podcast Appearances:
Episode 152 - The Three Stages of Story with Tiffany Yates Martin
Episode 112 - Being the Captain of Your Author Voyage with Tiffany Yates Martin
Episode 088 - How to Receive and Give Critique with Tiffany Yates Martin
Episode 065 - X-raying Your Plot with Tiffany Yates Martin
Episode 053 - What Authors can Learn from TV and Movies with Tiffany Yates Martin
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
https://foxprinteditorial.com/
https://www.facebook.com/tiffanynyates/
https://www.instagram.com/tiffanyyatesmartin/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ-TMebXV5sg8-fQkVeg_0w
Past Podcast Appearances:
Episode 152 - The Three Stages of Story with Tiffany Yates Martin
Episode 112 - Being the Captain of Your Author Voyage with Tiffany Yates Martin
Episode 088 - How to Receive and Give Critique with Tiffany Yates Martin
Episode 065 - X-raying Your Plot with Tiffany Yates Martin
Episode 053 - What Authors can Learn from TV and Movies with Tiffany Yates Martin
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Tiffany! Do you understand your characters’ intrinsic need as well as their want? Was that obvious to you when you started your story, or did one or the other of them become clear to you over time?
Please post your comments on YouTube--and I'd love it if you would subscribe while you're there!
Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!
AI-generated Summary
In The Indy Author Podcast hosted by Matty Dalrymple, guest Tiffany Yates Martin, an experienced editor and author, discusses the concept of "magical knowing" in writing and its implications for character development. Tiffany explains that magical knowing is a narrative shortcut where characters suddenly understand or realize something without the narrative groundwork that logically leads to that knowledge. This can occur in any genre, from detective stories to romances, and often stems from an author’s desire not to over-explain or from their intimate knowledge of the story, which may not fully translate to the reader.
Tiffany emphasizes the importance of showing how characters come to their thoughts, feelings, or realizations, likening it to showing one's work in a math problem. She suggests that authors should avoid leaps in logic and instead provide specific, detailed groundwork that allows the reader to understand and believe in the character's journey. This includes exploring the character's motivations, desires, and the personal stakes involved in their actions and decisions.
The discussion moves into the necessity of external and internal motivations for characters, highlighting the need for clear, believable reasons behind their actions. For example, in a detective story, rather than having the detective simply "know" who the culprit is, the narrative should provide tangible clues and reasoning that lead to this conclusion.
Matty discusses her experiences and challenges with magical knowing in her own writing, exploring how she has worked to identify and rectify it in her manuscripts. Tiffany highlights the role of external feedback, such as beta readers, critique partners, and editors, in identifying areas where the narrative may rely too heavily on magical knowing.
Additionally, the conversation covers the concept of "magical ignorance," where characters are inexplicably unaware of something obvious to the reader. Tiffany advises that authors should carefully lay out the reasons why a character may have certain blind spots or misunderstandings, thereby preventing the narrative from appearing contrived or forced.
Towards the end of the discussion, Tiffany and Matty delve into the editing and revision process, where much of the work on addressing magical knowing takes place. They discuss the importance of questioning every aspect of the character's journey to ensure logical consistency and emotional authenticity.
Tiffany also touches on the difficulty of letting go of beloved story elements that don't serve the narrative's coherence or believability, stressing the value of being open to change and reevaluation during the editing process.
The conversation concludes with Tiffany highlighting resources available for writers seeking to improve their craft and avoid pitfalls like magical knowing, pointing to her work and online platforms as valuable tools for authors.
Overall, the discussion emphasizes the critical importance of well-grounded character motivations and development in creating compelling, believable narratives. Authors are encouraged to meticulously examine their characters' motivations and actions to ensure they are convincingly portrayed and logically consistent throughout the story.
Tiffany emphasizes the importance of showing how characters come to their thoughts, feelings, or realizations, likening it to showing one's work in a math problem. She suggests that authors should avoid leaps in logic and instead provide specific, detailed groundwork that allows the reader to understand and believe in the character's journey. This includes exploring the character's motivations, desires, and the personal stakes involved in their actions and decisions.
The discussion moves into the necessity of external and internal motivations for characters, highlighting the need for clear, believable reasons behind their actions. For example, in a detective story, rather than having the detective simply "know" who the culprit is, the narrative should provide tangible clues and reasoning that lead to this conclusion.
Matty discusses her experiences and challenges with magical knowing in her own writing, exploring how she has worked to identify and rectify it in her manuscripts. Tiffany highlights the role of external feedback, such as beta readers, critique partners, and editors, in identifying areas where the narrative may rely too heavily on magical knowing.
Additionally, the conversation covers the concept of "magical ignorance," where characters are inexplicably unaware of something obvious to the reader. Tiffany advises that authors should carefully lay out the reasons why a character may have certain blind spots or misunderstandings, thereby preventing the narrative from appearing contrived or forced.
Towards the end of the discussion, Tiffany and Matty delve into the editing and revision process, where much of the work on addressing magical knowing takes place. They discuss the importance of questioning every aspect of the character's journey to ensure logical consistency and emotional authenticity.
Tiffany also touches on the difficulty of letting go of beloved story elements that don't serve the narrative's coherence or believability, stressing the value of being open to change and reevaluation during the editing process.
The conversation concludes with Tiffany highlighting resources available for writers seeking to improve their craft and avoid pitfalls like magical knowing, pointing to her work and online platforms as valuable tools for authors.
Overall, the discussion emphasizes the critical importance of well-grounded character motivations and development in creating compelling, believable narratives. Authors are encouraged to meticulously examine their characters' motivations and actions to ensure they are convincingly portrayed and logically consistent throughout the story.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Tiffany Yates Martin. Hey, Tiffany, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Tiffany: Hi Matty. Good, how are you?
[00:00:08] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners and viewers a little background on you, Tiffany Yates Martin has spent nearly 30 years as an editor in the publishing industry, working with major publishers and "New York Times," "Washington Post," "Wall Street Journal," and "USA Today" bestselling, and award-winning authors, as well as indie and newer writers. She's the founder of Fox Print Editorial and the author of "Intuitive Editing: A Creative and Practical Guide to Revising Your Writing." She's a contributor to "Writer's Digest," "Jane Friedman," and "Writer Unboxed," and a frequent presenter and keynote speaker for writers' organizations around the country. Under her pen name, Phoebe Fox, she's the author of six novels.
And she's been my guest a ton of times on the podcast, so I'm going to include links to all of those in the show notes. Every time Tiffany does one of those presentations or writes one of those articles or sends me a blog post, I always think that would be a great topic for a podcast interview. But one came across my PC that I was just so intrigued with that I invited Tiffany back to talk about it, and it is "Creating Character Motivation: The Fallacy of Magical Knowing." And I thought a good way to start this out would be to ask you, Tiffany, to explain what you mean by magical knowing.
What is “magical knowing”?
[00:01:13] Tiffany: First, thanks for that great introduction, and I was hoping you were going to mention that I'm what, a five-timer now?
[00:01:19] Matty: You are a five-timer. I don't think that even includes the contributions you made to my "Perspectives On" episode.
[00:01:26] Tiffany: Oh, those were fun. Yeah, I want my "Saturday Night Live" five-timer jacket.
[00:01:30] Matty: Yay. You, Dale Roberts, and Michael Aran are vying for the jacket at the moment.
...
[00:01:40] Matty: What is "magical knowing"?
[00:01:42] Tiffany: I see it in manuscripts, not a lot, but it's an author shortcut where rather than showing on the page why a character thinks something, feels something, reacts in a certain way, or has a realization, they just know. Something tells her she could trust him, or suddenly she realized she'd loved him all along. It usually looks something like that, where it's an unsupported shift in the character that we haven't seen on the page.
[00:02:21] Matty: I think that the way I see this a lot is in detective or sleuth stories, mysteries, where there's the "she just knew that he was the one."
[00:02:30] Tiffany: Yeah, you see it a lot in romances. I see it in every genre, honestly, and it's twofold. I think it comes from not wanting to spoon-feed readers, which is a great instinct, and we can talk a little bit more about how to balance that. It also comes from the author knowing so much about their own story that they're filling a lot of it in their head.
[00:02:51] Tiffany: It's hard to know what's coming across on the page to readers and what you think is coming across because you know it. We often assume an objective value to something, like, "oh, she was so afraid of losing her job," or "if she didn't address this issue, she was worried they were facing divorce." That, by itself, doesn't impact us unless you lay the groundwork and dig a little deeper so that we understand why this job is important and why it would be bad to lose it, beyond the general dislike of job loss. There's got to be something deeper and more specific. And that's actually the key to addressing magical knowing in general: remove the leaps and generalizations and get really specific and granular.
Tiffany: It's like when you take a math test in school and they tell you, "Yes, you got the right answer, but you didn't show your work." You have to show your work. We need to understand how the character gets to where you're telling us they've gotten, or it feels like an authorial device.
[00:04:04] Matty: It's probably very obvious if someone looks in their manuscript and sees phrases like "she just had a feeling" or "I just knew he was the one." That's pretty obvious. But in the spirit of identifying if this is going on, are there any subtle clues that a writer can look for in their own work that indicate they're falling back on magical knowing?
[00:04:28] Tiffany: It's hard to see it in your own work, as it's difficult to see many things in our work, because we're filling in the blanks since we know the story so well. You need to be a bit forensic and deliberate about it. Having outside eyes, whether it's a beta reader, critique partners, an editor, or a book coach, can provide objective feedback. But you can also dissect the story yourself, which is something I advise in my editing work with authors. Ask yourself questions and dig deeper to see if you can identify not just overarching instances of magical knowing but also individual ones.
For example, do we understand what drives your character? Why does losing a job or a marriage matter to them? Have you conveyed that on the page? Write down what your character wants and what drives them. Then ask yourself, how would a reader know this? Pinpoint where you've shown this on the page. Another piece of advice is to dig deeper than you might initially. For instance, if your character is an architect who dreams of building eco-conscious buildings to make a name for herself, explore what makes this dream unique and important to her.
Tiffany: We often assume we understand the goals and motivations of our characters, but there's a deeper level, which I refer to as what's driving them, underpinning their motivations. We need to understand both their external and internal goals. It's essential to explore why specific outcomes matter to them personally. It's not enough to state that a character in a given field wants to achieve greatness or become a trailblazer. We must delve into the personal reasons driving these aspirations.
What personal experiences or insecurities are influencing their ambitions? For instance, does a female character feel the need to prove herself due to societal pressures or past discouragement? Identifying the character's deep-seated longing or lack is crucial in understanding what they desperately seek and why. This longing or lack is the void they are trying to fill.
When reviewing your story, it's beneficial to conduct a separate editing pass focusing solely on these aspects. This involves a granular and forensic analysis of each line and scene, assessing how well it conveys the character's desires, motivations, and the logical progression of their realizations.
Characters, like people, are shaped by their experiences and relationships. These factors subtly guide their actions, even if they're not consciously aware of them. By laying the groundwork and hinting at these underlying influences, you allow readers to infer the reasons behind the characters' actions, thus avoiding the pitfall of having them act in seemingly unmotivated or undeveloped ways.
[00:09:27] Matty: Many things you mentioned made me realize that I had been considering magical knowing more in the context of external knowledge, such as in mysteries and thrillers, where the character just knows who the culprit is. However, there's also an internal aspect, more prevalent in genres like romance, where the knowing pertains to self-awareness. To counteract this, I annotate my manuscript with notes on what the characters know, think, and feel at various points, helping to justify their actions, such as why someone would risk entering a dangerous situation.
I may not put it explicitly on the page. I may, but I might not. At least I know that, and I'm checking myself against it. The same could be true of these inwardly directed motivations, like her reacting more extremely to this person in this situation because it reminds her of a previous relationship. Maybe that doesn’t come out until later, but are there differences in how a writer should approach the management of magical knowing if it's more internally versus externally focused?
[00:10:53] Tiffany: Maybe you point your attentions in different places. I said there was the blanket element of it, which is more what I was just describing, which you're calling internal. That's motivating the entire character arc. Then there are those specific moments. What you were talking about with analyzing every scene and articulating those things, that sort of hits on something I call the want, the action, and the shift for every scene.
What is the character's overarching goal?
[00:11:22] Tiffany: This is laying the groundwork. I want to talk about the more granular ones that you're calling external. But in every single scene, your character has what I call an uber goal, their overarching goal, the main thing they're trying to achieve in the story, whatever you've decided that is, and their main motivation for that.
But in every scene, there's also a more immediate goal, related to that ultimate goal, something they're trying to achieve in order to ultimately attain that distant goal, the overarching one. So in every scene, can you identify what that is? What is the thing in this scene that they need to do, get, accomplish, find out?
In order to get one step closer to that final destination, what action in the scene do they take to do that, and how does the success or failure of that action affect them and cause a shift in them that either pushes them farther along the path toward that goal or derails them from it and forces them to renegotiate their strategy, find their motivation to go after it again, or send them into a tailspin from which they have to recover?
And if you can do that for every scene, you are paving bigger picture stepping stones, but also at the scene level. You and I talked earlier about what I call the "but therefore" that I stole from the "South Park" creators, and you called it, I think, the "because because" or "because and then."
[00:12:55] Matty: Yeah, you have to be able to say the character does this because of something, not despite something.
[00:13:02] Tiffany: It could be "despite," actually, but the way the "South Park" guys talk about it, they say every single scene should be connected with the words "but" or "therefore," meaning every scene is an obstacle to what came before. "She was going down the road to get to the market but a bus ran her over." Or, "therefore."
It's causal. "She was going down the street to get to the market and therefore she was standing there when the killer drove by, and she was able to identify the license plate." These are terrible examples, but if you can do that, your scene has the logic, causality, momentum, and forward push that we're looking for.
We see the groundwork laid for why things are happening, how they're happening, and what's making the character see it. But the more granular moments you're talking about have a lot to do with character in our life, I think, and showing, letting readers be privy to what's going on inside them. So when I say inner life, I don’t mean large swaths of internal monologue, which can bog your story down and get very navel-gazing.
I mean letting readers understand, in whatever way works for your style and your story, what's going on inside the character. Because without that, we are always kept at a distance from the story, and that’s one of the main causes of magical knowing. In the interest of not spoon-feeding all of that to the reader, authors just tend to skip over it.
And then you get the "he just knew," or we just see them acting as if they have come to some realization or shift, but we were not made privy to it.
The pitfalls of "magical ignorance"
[00:14:50] Matty: In terms of the internal things, there's almost another flavor of magical knowing, which is "magical ignorance," where the character should know something, like internally, fact-based things, but they don’t recognize something about themselves that’s apparent to the reader. Sometimes I read those and think there must be something else going on here that the character doesn’t recognize. They're having this magical ignorance that they’re not recognizing something that’s apparent to everybody else. Sometimes it plays out in a very satisfying way, where it becomes clear that what you thought was the obvious thing is not the obvious thing, or the reason the person isn't recognizing it is explained later on. But then sometimes you just get to the end and think, no, that person should have known that all along.
[00:15:36] Tiffany: It feels device-y and like incomplete character development, and we sort of see the author's hand, because you're forcing your character not to see something that the reader is questioning why they wouldn’t see. But the solution is the same. You have to lay the groundwork, so if your character is not seeing something obvious, if they have a blind spot, you just have to pave in why.
Maybe they always see the best in everyone, and so they can't see the bad intentions in their best friend that we are clearly seeing through their actions. Maybe they are socially naive because they were raised in a commune without any social engagement. I’m coming up with very strange examples today.
But if you establish it as the reality of the story, the reality of the characters, and develop both deeply and specifically enough, you don’t have to spoon-feed us. We are putting these puzzle pieces together as readers, ourselves, and you’re engaging us directly in the story that way, by giving us the puzzle pieces. We're here fitting them together, so your character doesn’t have to see it, and you don’t have to spell it out, but you have dropped those breadcrumbs that we have been faithfully gathering.
[00:16:51] Tiffany: So now we're starting, and I'm mixing metaphors here horribly, but now we're starting to see the full picture. I often refer to this as laying in brush strokes of context. It doesn't have to be big swaths of info dump. If you just, little by little, stroke in shading here and there throughout the story as you develop the character and move the story forward, we will infer these things for ourselves. That's what draws us so deeply into a story and makes readers feel hooked. We're not just passive recipients of the story; we're not just watching these characters on a screen in front of us. That's what makes us start to feel as if we are them. We're in it.
[00:17:35] Matty: And when you're judging whether you're spoon-feeding too much or you need more of that, like, I know my pitfall, according to my editor, is that I assume the reader is more in sync with my understanding of what the character is doing than I should. So after his pass, I normally have to go in and be more explicit about things that I erroneously thought were sufficiently clear, but do you have guidance about that? What is too much and what is not enough?
[00:18:03] Tiffany: Oh, that's a really good question.
[00:18:05] Matty: I know that's a really long question. We could do a whole other podcast episode on that.
The challenge of finding balance
[00:18:09] Tiffany: Yeah, and it's funny, I always joke that the answer I give most frequently to questions about craft is also the world's most frustrating answer, which is, it just depends. Finding the balance in story, in general, between too much and not enough in almost every story element is one of the biggest challenges of storytelling and mastering craft. It can vary depending on your genre, your reader, the story, the author. In that regard, sometimes the only real way to find it is through outside eyes, because you're not necessarily the best judge of that. Like you said with your editor, you are doing what you think is the best, most effective way to lay the groundwork we're talking about, to brushstroke in the context.
But whether or not it comes across that way to the reader is not always something you can see until you get editorial objectivity on your own work. You can do that to a degree, but it's almost impossible to have it 100 percent on your own work unless you literally step away from it for like six months and then go back to it with really fresh eyes. A lot will become apparent to you. One of the main jobs, I say this all the time, of an editor, or anyone who's giving you feedback, is to hold up the mirror and to let you see more clearly what you have on the page because it's so hard to assess it yourself when you're in the middle of it.
[00:19:37] Matty: So, I always suggest that authors go about doing their own editing and revising that way too. Go through and just ask yourself: Why? Why does your character want what they want? First of all, can you articulate that? Why do they want that or think they want that thing?
[00:19:55] Tiffany: Where does that come from? What deeper desire or drive lies beneath that vague or glib answer you might initially give or generalized answer? What are the specifics behind it? What is this situation hitting on deep in your character that they may not even be consciously aware of? That they may be picking up in other characters and drawing conclusions from.
Just go through and, I mean, I literally do that line by line when I'm editing. Do I see that? Do I have questions in my mind as a reader? Like I said, it can be a bit harder to do, but if you know your intention in a scene, you can address these concerns. Often authors will tell me, after I ask those questions, "Well, I explain her motivation four lines down." I'll go four lines down and see why that feels sufficient to them because they know her full story. But for readers, you're still just vaguely hinting at something that we don't have enough context on yet to fully understand.
The importance of specifics
[00:20:58] Matty: I found that when I've gone back to my manuscripts to address the critique from the editor about it not being clear why the characters are doing this, it's less about stating "he did this because he was very angry with his roommate," and more about adding actions, like in long passages of dialogue, and going back to add some physicality to it. This sheds more light beyond just the words onto maybe what he's thinking or how he's feeling.
[00:21:20] Tiffany: Exactly, adding physicality that reveals more than just the words is helpful.
[00:21:28] Matty: Sometimes adding adverbs, as appropriate, helps too. I'm proof-listening to the audiobook of my fifth Lizzy Ballard novel, and every once in a while, the narrator interprets it in a way I didn't anticipate. Looking at the words on the page, I can see why she thought that, but if I had included something like "he closed his fist over the lapel of his jacket before he spoke," it would seed a little more hint that this person is really supposed to be more angry than irritated in this scene, or more contemplative than passive for whatever it might be.
[00:22:13] Tiffany: What you're describing is using show to indicate, giving clues that let us draw the conclusion. So, one way to avoid spoon-feeding is to show rather than spell it out. If we're seeing the behavior, we start to put the pieces together, like "Oh, they're uncomfortable. That must hit on what we found out three chapters ago about how their father used to belittle them as a child every time they tried to reach for something outside of their comfort zone," or whatever it is. We make those connections based on what you are showing us.
But sometimes it can also be tell, just not in the spoon-feeding way like "she was angry because." If you tell us a little bit, it’s like glancing off the thing instead of putting your finger right on it. Think about times when you, okay, let's use a specific example from the blog post you wanted to talk about. When people ask me why I moved to Austin 17 years ago from Florida, they often ask why. I give them my standard anecdotal answer, which is I visited Austin and just had a vibe about it.
I felt like it was a great place to be. And that is true to a point, but it's the magical knowing. In the blog post, I talk about several things. First of all, what led me to even start looking for someplace else. Many people get a bit carried away. I don't know why. But I really think that if you are going to be a parent, you should consider all aspects. I became interested in the foster to adopt program and started thinking about Austin.
Why though? Because what I really was looking for in the foster to adopt program was having a family. I was single. I wanted to have a sense of love, belonging, and security and not be on my own anymore. So that was the way I thought I had to do it because I was living in this retirement town where dating was practically a dead zone.
[00:24:41] Tiffany: But again, so now we have a little more clarity of motivation. I didn't just go, "Oh, that looks like a great place. I just know it. I feel it." I did a lot of research. I came to the town and spent some time, like a week and a half, maybe total in two different visits. I researched the demographics, the educational level, the political slant, the population, the cost of living, and what parts of town I would like. I got really granular with it. I looked at census data, the ratio of men to women, and the age distribution. This was the farthest thing from just knowing, but just knowing makes a fun anecdote.
To a degree, it did feel like that. Like, I got here and there was a day where I just thought, "This feels right." But it felt right for all those reasons that I may not have been articulating at the time to myself or anyone else, but that was what was going into that magical moment of just knowing. If I were a character, you would lay that groundwork so that even if the character isn't putting those pieces together, the reader can.
I can imagine a story where a character decides to move from Florida to Austin just because they have a vibe. They're looking for something and they don't know what. We need more than that.
[00:26:06] Matty: Yeah, and they may subconsciously have all that going on, but they themselves are magically ignorant of what's driving them. It could be the focus of the story to delve into why they made this decision and what it is about their past that affects it. That could be very entertainingly and gradually revealed to the reader, where the author understands more about what their character is doing than the character does.
[00:26:31] Tiffany: That is the basis of a lot of stories, especially in genres like women's fiction. A common trope is a character leaving home, forging ahead on the hero's journey, or coming back to wherever. "Back" may mean actually returning home or going somewhere new. They're fleeing something they're trying to get away from, or they're going towards something they want, or both. And again, they may not fully know what that is. As you said, the story may be about uncovering that, but the reader needs to see some clues. You can't ask us to take on faith that they just want to start over and this is a place where they think they'll find a better life because those are vague terms. We don't know what they mean, so we have nothing to hook into, nothing to root for them to achieve. We need the specifics.
[00:27:31] Matty: Yeah, I realized that, shifting gears a bit toward more of the external, the externally focused magical knowing is, I think, more driven by plot issues than character motivation issues. Because what I imagine is, falling back on the mystery novel or the police procedural, for example, "he just knew that this person was the bad guy." I've got to believe it's in part because you need to get the sleuth to pursue a person and you don't know how. It's going to be just as frustrating to a mystery or police procedural reader to read that and not know why; it was because he secretly knew about his gambling problem or he noticed, in a Sherlock Holmes way, that his boots were dirtier than they should be if he was really an accountant.
We do get vibes from people, right? That's real, but it's not just like, "Ooh, I'm getting a vibe." The animalistic part of us is picking up on cues, and that's what you have to show on the page. What are they seeing from that character? Where's that vibe coming from? Is it shifty eyes?
[00:28:45] Tiffany: Or, like you said, the clue on the boot? Is it drumming their fingers on the table? I'm using a bunch of cliches here, but you see where I'm going with this: give readers the clues, show us what the character is seeing through their eyes, and we will understand where that magical vibe, in air quotes, is coming from, because you've shown it to us.
What you're describing is lazy writing, right? It's lazy, frustrated writing. Nothing against any author who does that; we've all done it. It's like, "Just trust me, she knows." Because we get to a point where we've backed ourselves into a corner and we need to push the story forward.
And we don't always know how that happens. It’s great that you brought that up because those are great clues to look at where you have either shortcutted to something like that or felt that frustration and go, "Okay, let's dig a little deeper. Let's do the hard work where it feels like I'm at a dead end, I can't get through, and just keep at it until I break through." Because somewhere in there, if you dig deep enough in the character, in the plot, in the physical clues, whatever it is you've left out, it’s there if you just mine down to it.
[00:30:05] Matty: Well, I mentioned earlier about a conversation I had with Mary Carroll Moore about using "because." We had been talking about "the character does this because," and I applied that to the book I'm working on. I found myself in a situation where I needed to get a character from where they were to Baltimore for later plot purposes, and I didn't really have a good "because" yet. I started running through, just as the character would, what are all their options at this point?
They could go to Baltimore, or they could hunker down where they are, or they could hit the road without any particular destination in mind. And I realized there was a perfectly legitimate reason for them to pick the Baltimore option among all the others. Once I reassured myself of that, then I could go ahead with them going to Baltimore and seed in the appropriate things that make that, among all the list of things they could do, the one they pick.
But I think that moment where you say, "Wait, why are they doing that?" doesn't necessarily mean you're at the end of the road. It just means you need to understand better yourself so that you can set it up appropriately for the reader.
[00:31:14] Tiffany: One way to make this less daunting is to remember, as you just said, this is often something you see in editing and revision. It's not necessarily while you're writing. If you just need to get the draft done and you need her in Baltimore, just say he goes on vacation in Baltimore. That's fine. Put it in there for now. Then later, you can go back and do the digging. But if you stop while you're drafting, you might lose your momentum. So don't worry about it at that stage. Leave the magical knowing in. But then, as I do in my job as an editor, go in and start poking your own holes.
When you find one, that's when you hunker down and dig a bit deeper and try to avoid those coincidences, which is another manifestation of magical knowing. For example, the very person she's been trying to avoid walks into the coffee shop where she is, and 20 pages later, the exact clue she's looking for is found in a coin she found in her pocket with the right date on it, given by the barista at the coffee shop. If you string enough of those together, it starts to feel contrived and we see the author's hand. Just dig deeper and find more plausible ways of laying that groundwork. Put the brush strokes in and don't worry so much during the drafting period.
If you need to shortcut during the drafting period to reach the end, do it. Then you've got something to work with. The fun part for me is the excavation of editing, revising, and deepening, making the story exactly what you wanted it to be in the first place.
[00:32:54] Matty: I've found that framing out the story works well because I had a great scene in mind where one of the protagonist's allies goes into the home of the bad guy to get a piece of evidence to send to the police. I worked hard to make that make sense, but I finally had to admit there was no reason it would work. He would have to go into the bad guy's house. That was a cute idea, but I just had to let it go.
[00:33:24] Tiffany: I love that you did that because it's really hard to let go of something, especially when you're trying to push the story in a certain direction and it's just not going to go there unless you force it. That's a tough thing to let go of, especially for plotters. You've got your outline, which makes sense and works, but sometimes the story develops differently. It doesn’t come out on the page the way you thought it would in the outline stage, and you have to be willing to redirect if necessary.
[00:33:57] Matty: Yeah, or in this case, I could have completely overhauled the story to make it make sense for him to go into the house, but that's like 80 percent of the work for 20 percent of the payoff, just to have this one scene that I thought would be kind of fun.
Plus, I'll just use it as a giveaway for my email newsletter subscribers.
[00:34:16] Tiffany: I love that you said that too. It's really hard to let go of a darling, and I always advise having a discard file where you keep all that stuff because it can be many things. It can be harvest material for something in the future or a book in the series, but it can also be bonus material for your fans, a magnet for new newsletter subscribers, or a fun thing to talk about in an interview, like the deleted scene in movies.
[00:34:46] Matty: There was a story, which would be way better if I could remember the details, but I was at a Thriller Writers Conference some years ago. One of the speakers, who had written a World War II historical espionage novel, told a fascinating story about some research he had done. He discovered a fascinating fact, and although his publisher pushed back, he felt strongly about it. Eventually, he realized the publisher was right and now uses it in speeches like this, which I thought was very cute.
[00:35:23] Tiffany: It's hard because there is, especially with darlings, a knee-jerk desire to defend them and explain why they're necessary. I often work with publishers doing three passes for every manuscript. My rule is we'll push about something we feel strongly about, me and the in-house editors, a couple of times, and then on the third time, if the author really insists, we go hands off. But we push hard before we get to that point because there's a lot of resistance to letting go. As a writer myself, my first reaction to feedback is to explain why it's wrong.
[00:36:08] Tiffany: If you let it sit and percolate, think about it, and try to mess with it and fix it, eventually, I think we learn to trust those objective outside eyes giving us feedback. The stronger you react to something, the more likely it's hitting on a darling. Feedback that doesn’t hit something personal doesn’t elicit such a strong response in an author, so that’s actually a good way to pinpoint something that maybe needs a second look, even though you love it.
[00:36:48] Matty: A good example of that is in one of the Ann Kinnear books set on Mount Desert Island. It seemed really coincidental that these two people, otherwise with no apparent connections, knew each other through more casual interactions. I thought, "It’s not that big an island, and the community is small," so it made sense to me that these people would have met. I didn't change the fact that they already knew each other when they encountered each other, but I seeded it with more examples of setting up why it actually makes total sense that these two people are aware of each other and have interacted in some way.
[00:37:34] Tiffany: Exactly what you said is how you fix it. You don’t ignore coincidences because they happen in life. It would be ridiculous to pretend they don’t in a story, but it helps if you give us a reason to believe it's plausible. Seeding it in, like a line here and there, makes it believable.
[00:37:56] Matty: Yeah, exactly.
[00:37:57] Tiffany: It’s not major surgery most of the time; just go in and drop the breadcrumbs where you need them.
[00:38:02] Matty: Yeah, I didn’t do it overtly, but I seeded in that one character was a consultant and he charged a lot for his consultations, so he was known to the upper crust of the community because they were the ones hiring him for his services. They would have mentioned him to their friends and so on.
[00:38:23] Tiffany: And your readers remember that. We are constantly gathering the threads of the world, the story, and the characters, weaving and braiding them together to make sense of it. That's the beauty of written stories as opposed to other mediums, which I also love. But in reading, you are not just a passive observer as often is the case with movies and television. The reader is doing a lot of the connection work.
We're constantly trying to put the puzzle together. Research shows that the same areas of your brain that light up when you are actively doing these things also light up when you are reading about these things. This draws you in more deeply than more visual media. That's the power an author has. Give us a reason to make those connections, provide most of the puzzle pieces, and withhold a few if you want to create a reveal. We still need enough to orient us, ground us, and make us care.
[00:39:49] Matty: Well, Tiffany, I think you've just identified the next topic for our podcast conversations, if I can lure you back. I just had "REVEAL" written in big letters on my notes.
[00:39:57] Tiffany: Always.
[00:40:05] Matty: Thank you for coming back, and please let everyone know where they can find out more about you and everything you do online.
[00:40:10] Tiffany: You can find me at foxprinteditorial.com, which is probably the best clearinghouse for everything. I am on Instagram and Facebook under Tiffany Yates Martin. I also have a weekly blog with craft tips, business tips for making a career as a writer, and a ton of resources for authors, many of them free. One thing that might be relevant to this conversation is a beta reader questionnaire that can help get actionable feedback.
Thank you, too. I always have the best time talking to you. I lose track of time and feel like we could do this all day long. Thanks for having me on. It’s always a pleasure, and I love the service you're doing for authors.
[00:00:06] Tiffany: Hi Matty. Good, how are you?
[00:00:08] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners and viewers a little background on you, Tiffany Yates Martin has spent nearly 30 years as an editor in the publishing industry, working with major publishers and "New York Times," "Washington Post," "Wall Street Journal," and "USA Today" bestselling, and award-winning authors, as well as indie and newer writers. She's the founder of Fox Print Editorial and the author of "Intuitive Editing: A Creative and Practical Guide to Revising Your Writing." She's a contributor to "Writer's Digest," "Jane Friedman," and "Writer Unboxed," and a frequent presenter and keynote speaker for writers' organizations around the country. Under her pen name, Phoebe Fox, she's the author of six novels.
And she's been my guest a ton of times on the podcast, so I'm going to include links to all of those in the show notes. Every time Tiffany does one of those presentations or writes one of those articles or sends me a blog post, I always think that would be a great topic for a podcast interview. But one came across my PC that I was just so intrigued with that I invited Tiffany back to talk about it, and it is "Creating Character Motivation: The Fallacy of Magical Knowing." And I thought a good way to start this out would be to ask you, Tiffany, to explain what you mean by magical knowing.
What is “magical knowing”?
[00:01:13] Tiffany: First, thanks for that great introduction, and I was hoping you were going to mention that I'm what, a five-timer now?
[00:01:19] Matty: You are a five-timer. I don't think that even includes the contributions you made to my "Perspectives On" episode.
[00:01:26] Tiffany: Oh, those were fun. Yeah, I want my "Saturday Night Live" five-timer jacket.
[00:01:30] Matty: Yay. You, Dale Roberts, and Michael Aran are vying for the jacket at the moment.
...
[00:01:40] Matty: What is "magical knowing"?
[00:01:42] Tiffany: I see it in manuscripts, not a lot, but it's an author shortcut where rather than showing on the page why a character thinks something, feels something, reacts in a certain way, or has a realization, they just know. Something tells her she could trust him, or suddenly she realized she'd loved him all along. It usually looks something like that, where it's an unsupported shift in the character that we haven't seen on the page.
[00:02:21] Matty: I think that the way I see this a lot is in detective or sleuth stories, mysteries, where there's the "she just knew that he was the one."
[00:02:30] Tiffany: Yeah, you see it a lot in romances. I see it in every genre, honestly, and it's twofold. I think it comes from not wanting to spoon-feed readers, which is a great instinct, and we can talk a little bit more about how to balance that. It also comes from the author knowing so much about their own story that they're filling a lot of it in their head.
[00:02:51] Tiffany: It's hard to know what's coming across on the page to readers and what you think is coming across because you know it. We often assume an objective value to something, like, "oh, she was so afraid of losing her job," or "if she didn't address this issue, she was worried they were facing divorce." That, by itself, doesn't impact us unless you lay the groundwork and dig a little deeper so that we understand why this job is important and why it would be bad to lose it, beyond the general dislike of job loss. There's got to be something deeper and more specific. And that's actually the key to addressing magical knowing in general: remove the leaps and generalizations and get really specific and granular.
Tiffany: It's like when you take a math test in school and they tell you, "Yes, you got the right answer, but you didn't show your work." You have to show your work. We need to understand how the character gets to where you're telling us they've gotten, or it feels like an authorial device.
[00:04:04] Matty: It's probably very obvious if someone looks in their manuscript and sees phrases like "she just had a feeling" or "I just knew he was the one." That's pretty obvious. But in the spirit of identifying if this is going on, are there any subtle clues that a writer can look for in their own work that indicate they're falling back on magical knowing?
[00:04:28] Tiffany: It's hard to see it in your own work, as it's difficult to see many things in our work, because we're filling in the blanks since we know the story so well. You need to be a bit forensic and deliberate about it. Having outside eyes, whether it's a beta reader, critique partners, an editor, or a book coach, can provide objective feedback. But you can also dissect the story yourself, which is something I advise in my editing work with authors. Ask yourself questions and dig deeper to see if you can identify not just overarching instances of magical knowing but also individual ones.
For example, do we understand what drives your character? Why does losing a job or a marriage matter to them? Have you conveyed that on the page? Write down what your character wants and what drives them. Then ask yourself, how would a reader know this? Pinpoint where you've shown this on the page. Another piece of advice is to dig deeper than you might initially. For instance, if your character is an architect who dreams of building eco-conscious buildings to make a name for herself, explore what makes this dream unique and important to her.
Tiffany: We often assume we understand the goals and motivations of our characters, but there's a deeper level, which I refer to as what's driving them, underpinning their motivations. We need to understand both their external and internal goals. It's essential to explore why specific outcomes matter to them personally. It's not enough to state that a character in a given field wants to achieve greatness or become a trailblazer. We must delve into the personal reasons driving these aspirations.
What personal experiences or insecurities are influencing their ambitions? For instance, does a female character feel the need to prove herself due to societal pressures or past discouragement? Identifying the character's deep-seated longing or lack is crucial in understanding what they desperately seek and why. This longing or lack is the void they are trying to fill.
When reviewing your story, it's beneficial to conduct a separate editing pass focusing solely on these aspects. This involves a granular and forensic analysis of each line and scene, assessing how well it conveys the character's desires, motivations, and the logical progression of their realizations.
Characters, like people, are shaped by their experiences and relationships. These factors subtly guide their actions, even if they're not consciously aware of them. By laying the groundwork and hinting at these underlying influences, you allow readers to infer the reasons behind the characters' actions, thus avoiding the pitfall of having them act in seemingly unmotivated or undeveloped ways.
[00:09:27] Matty: Many things you mentioned made me realize that I had been considering magical knowing more in the context of external knowledge, such as in mysteries and thrillers, where the character just knows who the culprit is. However, there's also an internal aspect, more prevalent in genres like romance, where the knowing pertains to self-awareness. To counteract this, I annotate my manuscript with notes on what the characters know, think, and feel at various points, helping to justify their actions, such as why someone would risk entering a dangerous situation.
I may not put it explicitly on the page. I may, but I might not. At least I know that, and I'm checking myself against it. The same could be true of these inwardly directed motivations, like her reacting more extremely to this person in this situation because it reminds her of a previous relationship. Maybe that doesn’t come out until later, but are there differences in how a writer should approach the management of magical knowing if it's more internally versus externally focused?
[00:10:53] Tiffany: Maybe you point your attentions in different places. I said there was the blanket element of it, which is more what I was just describing, which you're calling internal. That's motivating the entire character arc. Then there are those specific moments. What you were talking about with analyzing every scene and articulating those things, that sort of hits on something I call the want, the action, and the shift for every scene.
What is the character's overarching goal?
[00:11:22] Tiffany: This is laying the groundwork. I want to talk about the more granular ones that you're calling external. But in every single scene, your character has what I call an uber goal, their overarching goal, the main thing they're trying to achieve in the story, whatever you've decided that is, and their main motivation for that.
But in every scene, there's also a more immediate goal, related to that ultimate goal, something they're trying to achieve in order to ultimately attain that distant goal, the overarching one. So in every scene, can you identify what that is? What is the thing in this scene that they need to do, get, accomplish, find out?
In order to get one step closer to that final destination, what action in the scene do they take to do that, and how does the success or failure of that action affect them and cause a shift in them that either pushes them farther along the path toward that goal or derails them from it and forces them to renegotiate their strategy, find their motivation to go after it again, or send them into a tailspin from which they have to recover?
And if you can do that for every scene, you are paving bigger picture stepping stones, but also at the scene level. You and I talked earlier about what I call the "but therefore" that I stole from the "South Park" creators, and you called it, I think, the "because because" or "because and then."
[00:12:55] Matty: Yeah, you have to be able to say the character does this because of something, not despite something.
[00:13:02] Tiffany: It could be "despite," actually, but the way the "South Park" guys talk about it, they say every single scene should be connected with the words "but" or "therefore," meaning every scene is an obstacle to what came before. "She was going down the road to get to the market but a bus ran her over." Or, "therefore."
It's causal. "She was going down the street to get to the market and therefore she was standing there when the killer drove by, and she was able to identify the license plate." These are terrible examples, but if you can do that, your scene has the logic, causality, momentum, and forward push that we're looking for.
We see the groundwork laid for why things are happening, how they're happening, and what's making the character see it. But the more granular moments you're talking about have a lot to do with character in our life, I think, and showing, letting readers be privy to what's going on inside them. So when I say inner life, I don’t mean large swaths of internal monologue, which can bog your story down and get very navel-gazing.
I mean letting readers understand, in whatever way works for your style and your story, what's going on inside the character. Because without that, we are always kept at a distance from the story, and that’s one of the main causes of magical knowing. In the interest of not spoon-feeding all of that to the reader, authors just tend to skip over it.
And then you get the "he just knew," or we just see them acting as if they have come to some realization or shift, but we were not made privy to it.
The pitfalls of "magical ignorance"
[00:14:50] Matty: In terms of the internal things, there's almost another flavor of magical knowing, which is "magical ignorance," where the character should know something, like internally, fact-based things, but they don’t recognize something about themselves that’s apparent to the reader. Sometimes I read those and think there must be something else going on here that the character doesn’t recognize. They're having this magical ignorance that they’re not recognizing something that’s apparent to everybody else. Sometimes it plays out in a very satisfying way, where it becomes clear that what you thought was the obvious thing is not the obvious thing, or the reason the person isn't recognizing it is explained later on. But then sometimes you just get to the end and think, no, that person should have known that all along.
[00:15:36] Tiffany: It feels device-y and like incomplete character development, and we sort of see the author's hand, because you're forcing your character not to see something that the reader is questioning why they wouldn’t see. But the solution is the same. You have to lay the groundwork, so if your character is not seeing something obvious, if they have a blind spot, you just have to pave in why.
Maybe they always see the best in everyone, and so they can't see the bad intentions in their best friend that we are clearly seeing through their actions. Maybe they are socially naive because they were raised in a commune without any social engagement. I’m coming up with very strange examples today.
But if you establish it as the reality of the story, the reality of the characters, and develop both deeply and specifically enough, you don’t have to spoon-feed us. We are putting these puzzle pieces together as readers, ourselves, and you’re engaging us directly in the story that way, by giving us the puzzle pieces. We're here fitting them together, so your character doesn’t have to see it, and you don’t have to spell it out, but you have dropped those breadcrumbs that we have been faithfully gathering.
[00:16:51] Tiffany: So now we're starting, and I'm mixing metaphors here horribly, but now we're starting to see the full picture. I often refer to this as laying in brush strokes of context. It doesn't have to be big swaths of info dump. If you just, little by little, stroke in shading here and there throughout the story as you develop the character and move the story forward, we will infer these things for ourselves. That's what draws us so deeply into a story and makes readers feel hooked. We're not just passive recipients of the story; we're not just watching these characters on a screen in front of us. That's what makes us start to feel as if we are them. We're in it.
[00:17:35] Matty: And when you're judging whether you're spoon-feeding too much or you need more of that, like, I know my pitfall, according to my editor, is that I assume the reader is more in sync with my understanding of what the character is doing than I should. So after his pass, I normally have to go in and be more explicit about things that I erroneously thought were sufficiently clear, but do you have guidance about that? What is too much and what is not enough?
[00:18:03] Tiffany: Oh, that's a really good question.
[00:18:05] Matty: I know that's a really long question. We could do a whole other podcast episode on that.
The challenge of finding balance
[00:18:09] Tiffany: Yeah, and it's funny, I always joke that the answer I give most frequently to questions about craft is also the world's most frustrating answer, which is, it just depends. Finding the balance in story, in general, between too much and not enough in almost every story element is one of the biggest challenges of storytelling and mastering craft. It can vary depending on your genre, your reader, the story, the author. In that regard, sometimes the only real way to find it is through outside eyes, because you're not necessarily the best judge of that. Like you said with your editor, you are doing what you think is the best, most effective way to lay the groundwork we're talking about, to brushstroke in the context.
But whether or not it comes across that way to the reader is not always something you can see until you get editorial objectivity on your own work. You can do that to a degree, but it's almost impossible to have it 100 percent on your own work unless you literally step away from it for like six months and then go back to it with really fresh eyes. A lot will become apparent to you. One of the main jobs, I say this all the time, of an editor, or anyone who's giving you feedback, is to hold up the mirror and to let you see more clearly what you have on the page because it's so hard to assess it yourself when you're in the middle of it.
[00:19:37] Matty: So, I always suggest that authors go about doing their own editing and revising that way too. Go through and just ask yourself: Why? Why does your character want what they want? First of all, can you articulate that? Why do they want that or think they want that thing?
[00:19:55] Tiffany: Where does that come from? What deeper desire or drive lies beneath that vague or glib answer you might initially give or generalized answer? What are the specifics behind it? What is this situation hitting on deep in your character that they may not even be consciously aware of? That they may be picking up in other characters and drawing conclusions from.
Just go through and, I mean, I literally do that line by line when I'm editing. Do I see that? Do I have questions in my mind as a reader? Like I said, it can be a bit harder to do, but if you know your intention in a scene, you can address these concerns. Often authors will tell me, after I ask those questions, "Well, I explain her motivation four lines down." I'll go four lines down and see why that feels sufficient to them because they know her full story. But for readers, you're still just vaguely hinting at something that we don't have enough context on yet to fully understand.
The importance of specifics
[00:20:58] Matty: I found that when I've gone back to my manuscripts to address the critique from the editor about it not being clear why the characters are doing this, it's less about stating "he did this because he was very angry with his roommate," and more about adding actions, like in long passages of dialogue, and going back to add some physicality to it. This sheds more light beyond just the words onto maybe what he's thinking or how he's feeling.
[00:21:20] Tiffany: Exactly, adding physicality that reveals more than just the words is helpful.
[00:21:28] Matty: Sometimes adding adverbs, as appropriate, helps too. I'm proof-listening to the audiobook of my fifth Lizzy Ballard novel, and every once in a while, the narrator interprets it in a way I didn't anticipate. Looking at the words on the page, I can see why she thought that, but if I had included something like "he closed his fist over the lapel of his jacket before he spoke," it would seed a little more hint that this person is really supposed to be more angry than irritated in this scene, or more contemplative than passive for whatever it might be.
[00:22:13] Tiffany: What you're describing is using show to indicate, giving clues that let us draw the conclusion. So, one way to avoid spoon-feeding is to show rather than spell it out. If we're seeing the behavior, we start to put the pieces together, like "Oh, they're uncomfortable. That must hit on what we found out three chapters ago about how their father used to belittle them as a child every time they tried to reach for something outside of their comfort zone," or whatever it is. We make those connections based on what you are showing us.
But sometimes it can also be tell, just not in the spoon-feeding way like "she was angry because." If you tell us a little bit, it’s like glancing off the thing instead of putting your finger right on it. Think about times when you, okay, let's use a specific example from the blog post you wanted to talk about. When people ask me why I moved to Austin 17 years ago from Florida, they often ask why. I give them my standard anecdotal answer, which is I visited Austin and just had a vibe about it.
I felt like it was a great place to be. And that is true to a point, but it's the magical knowing. In the blog post, I talk about several things. First of all, what led me to even start looking for someplace else. Many people get a bit carried away. I don't know why. But I really think that if you are going to be a parent, you should consider all aspects. I became interested in the foster to adopt program and started thinking about Austin.
Why though? Because what I really was looking for in the foster to adopt program was having a family. I was single. I wanted to have a sense of love, belonging, and security and not be on my own anymore. So that was the way I thought I had to do it because I was living in this retirement town where dating was practically a dead zone.
[00:24:41] Tiffany: But again, so now we have a little more clarity of motivation. I didn't just go, "Oh, that looks like a great place. I just know it. I feel it." I did a lot of research. I came to the town and spent some time, like a week and a half, maybe total in two different visits. I researched the demographics, the educational level, the political slant, the population, the cost of living, and what parts of town I would like. I got really granular with it. I looked at census data, the ratio of men to women, and the age distribution. This was the farthest thing from just knowing, but just knowing makes a fun anecdote.
To a degree, it did feel like that. Like, I got here and there was a day where I just thought, "This feels right." But it felt right for all those reasons that I may not have been articulating at the time to myself or anyone else, but that was what was going into that magical moment of just knowing. If I were a character, you would lay that groundwork so that even if the character isn't putting those pieces together, the reader can.
I can imagine a story where a character decides to move from Florida to Austin just because they have a vibe. They're looking for something and they don't know what. We need more than that.
[00:26:06] Matty: Yeah, and they may subconsciously have all that going on, but they themselves are magically ignorant of what's driving them. It could be the focus of the story to delve into why they made this decision and what it is about their past that affects it. That could be very entertainingly and gradually revealed to the reader, where the author understands more about what their character is doing than the character does.
[00:26:31] Tiffany: That is the basis of a lot of stories, especially in genres like women's fiction. A common trope is a character leaving home, forging ahead on the hero's journey, or coming back to wherever. "Back" may mean actually returning home or going somewhere new. They're fleeing something they're trying to get away from, or they're going towards something they want, or both. And again, they may not fully know what that is. As you said, the story may be about uncovering that, but the reader needs to see some clues. You can't ask us to take on faith that they just want to start over and this is a place where they think they'll find a better life because those are vague terms. We don't know what they mean, so we have nothing to hook into, nothing to root for them to achieve. We need the specifics.
[00:27:31] Matty: Yeah, I realized that, shifting gears a bit toward more of the external, the externally focused magical knowing is, I think, more driven by plot issues than character motivation issues. Because what I imagine is, falling back on the mystery novel or the police procedural, for example, "he just knew that this person was the bad guy." I've got to believe it's in part because you need to get the sleuth to pursue a person and you don't know how. It's going to be just as frustrating to a mystery or police procedural reader to read that and not know why; it was because he secretly knew about his gambling problem or he noticed, in a Sherlock Holmes way, that his boots were dirtier than they should be if he was really an accountant.
We do get vibes from people, right? That's real, but it's not just like, "Ooh, I'm getting a vibe." The animalistic part of us is picking up on cues, and that's what you have to show on the page. What are they seeing from that character? Where's that vibe coming from? Is it shifty eyes?
[00:28:45] Tiffany: Or, like you said, the clue on the boot? Is it drumming their fingers on the table? I'm using a bunch of cliches here, but you see where I'm going with this: give readers the clues, show us what the character is seeing through their eyes, and we will understand where that magical vibe, in air quotes, is coming from, because you've shown it to us.
What you're describing is lazy writing, right? It's lazy, frustrated writing. Nothing against any author who does that; we've all done it. It's like, "Just trust me, she knows." Because we get to a point where we've backed ourselves into a corner and we need to push the story forward.
And we don't always know how that happens. It’s great that you brought that up because those are great clues to look at where you have either shortcutted to something like that or felt that frustration and go, "Okay, let's dig a little deeper. Let's do the hard work where it feels like I'm at a dead end, I can't get through, and just keep at it until I break through." Because somewhere in there, if you dig deep enough in the character, in the plot, in the physical clues, whatever it is you've left out, it’s there if you just mine down to it.
[00:30:05] Matty: Well, I mentioned earlier about a conversation I had with Mary Carroll Moore about using "because." We had been talking about "the character does this because," and I applied that to the book I'm working on. I found myself in a situation where I needed to get a character from where they were to Baltimore for later plot purposes, and I didn't really have a good "because" yet. I started running through, just as the character would, what are all their options at this point?
They could go to Baltimore, or they could hunker down where they are, or they could hit the road without any particular destination in mind. And I realized there was a perfectly legitimate reason for them to pick the Baltimore option among all the others. Once I reassured myself of that, then I could go ahead with them going to Baltimore and seed in the appropriate things that make that, among all the list of things they could do, the one they pick.
But I think that moment where you say, "Wait, why are they doing that?" doesn't necessarily mean you're at the end of the road. It just means you need to understand better yourself so that you can set it up appropriately for the reader.
[00:31:14] Tiffany: One way to make this less daunting is to remember, as you just said, this is often something you see in editing and revision. It's not necessarily while you're writing. If you just need to get the draft done and you need her in Baltimore, just say he goes on vacation in Baltimore. That's fine. Put it in there for now. Then later, you can go back and do the digging. But if you stop while you're drafting, you might lose your momentum. So don't worry about it at that stage. Leave the magical knowing in. But then, as I do in my job as an editor, go in and start poking your own holes.
When you find one, that's when you hunker down and dig a bit deeper and try to avoid those coincidences, which is another manifestation of magical knowing. For example, the very person she's been trying to avoid walks into the coffee shop where she is, and 20 pages later, the exact clue she's looking for is found in a coin she found in her pocket with the right date on it, given by the barista at the coffee shop. If you string enough of those together, it starts to feel contrived and we see the author's hand. Just dig deeper and find more plausible ways of laying that groundwork. Put the brush strokes in and don't worry so much during the drafting period.
If you need to shortcut during the drafting period to reach the end, do it. Then you've got something to work with. The fun part for me is the excavation of editing, revising, and deepening, making the story exactly what you wanted it to be in the first place.
[00:32:54] Matty: I've found that framing out the story works well because I had a great scene in mind where one of the protagonist's allies goes into the home of the bad guy to get a piece of evidence to send to the police. I worked hard to make that make sense, but I finally had to admit there was no reason it would work. He would have to go into the bad guy's house. That was a cute idea, but I just had to let it go.
[00:33:24] Tiffany: I love that you did that because it's really hard to let go of something, especially when you're trying to push the story in a certain direction and it's just not going to go there unless you force it. That's a tough thing to let go of, especially for plotters. You've got your outline, which makes sense and works, but sometimes the story develops differently. It doesn’t come out on the page the way you thought it would in the outline stage, and you have to be willing to redirect if necessary.
[00:33:57] Matty: Yeah, or in this case, I could have completely overhauled the story to make it make sense for him to go into the house, but that's like 80 percent of the work for 20 percent of the payoff, just to have this one scene that I thought would be kind of fun.
Plus, I'll just use it as a giveaway for my email newsletter subscribers.
[00:34:16] Tiffany: I love that you said that too. It's really hard to let go of a darling, and I always advise having a discard file where you keep all that stuff because it can be many things. It can be harvest material for something in the future or a book in the series, but it can also be bonus material for your fans, a magnet for new newsletter subscribers, or a fun thing to talk about in an interview, like the deleted scene in movies.
[00:34:46] Matty: There was a story, which would be way better if I could remember the details, but I was at a Thriller Writers Conference some years ago. One of the speakers, who had written a World War II historical espionage novel, told a fascinating story about some research he had done. He discovered a fascinating fact, and although his publisher pushed back, he felt strongly about it. Eventually, he realized the publisher was right and now uses it in speeches like this, which I thought was very cute.
[00:35:23] Tiffany: It's hard because there is, especially with darlings, a knee-jerk desire to defend them and explain why they're necessary. I often work with publishers doing three passes for every manuscript. My rule is we'll push about something we feel strongly about, me and the in-house editors, a couple of times, and then on the third time, if the author really insists, we go hands off. But we push hard before we get to that point because there's a lot of resistance to letting go. As a writer myself, my first reaction to feedback is to explain why it's wrong.
[00:36:08] Tiffany: If you let it sit and percolate, think about it, and try to mess with it and fix it, eventually, I think we learn to trust those objective outside eyes giving us feedback. The stronger you react to something, the more likely it's hitting on a darling. Feedback that doesn’t hit something personal doesn’t elicit such a strong response in an author, so that’s actually a good way to pinpoint something that maybe needs a second look, even though you love it.
[00:36:48] Matty: A good example of that is in one of the Ann Kinnear books set on Mount Desert Island. It seemed really coincidental that these two people, otherwise with no apparent connections, knew each other through more casual interactions. I thought, "It’s not that big an island, and the community is small," so it made sense to me that these people would have met. I didn't change the fact that they already knew each other when they encountered each other, but I seeded it with more examples of setting up why it actually makes total sense that these two people are aware of each other and have interacted in some way.
[00:37:34] Tiffany: Exactly what you said is how you fix it. You don’t ignore coincidences because they happen in life. It would be ridiculous to pretend they don’t in a story, but it helps if you give us a reason to believe it's plausible. Seeding it in, like a line here and there, makes it believable.
[00:37:56] Matty: Yeah, exactly.
[00:37:57] Tiffany: It’s not major surgery most of the time; just go in and drop the breadcrumbs where you need them.
[00:38:02] Matty: Yeah, I didn’t do it overtly, but I seeded in that one character was a consultant and he charged a lot for his consultations, so he was known to the upper crust of the community because they were the ones hiring him for his services. They would have mentioned him to their friends and so on.
[00:38:23] Tiffany: And your readers remember that. We are constantly gathering the threads of the world, the story, and the characters, weaving and braiding them together to make sense of it. That's the beauty of written stories as opposed to other mediums, which I also love. But in reading, you are not just a passive observer as often is the case with movies and television. The reader is doing a lot of the connection work.
We're constantly trying to put the puzzle together. Research shows that the same areas of your brain that light up when you are actively doing these things also light up when you are reading about these things. This draws you in more deeply than more visual media. That's the power an author has. Give us a reason to make those connections, provide most of the puzzle pieces, and withhold a few if you want to create a reveal. We still need enough to orient us, ground us, and make us care.
[00:39:49] Matty: Well, Tiffany, I think you've just identified the next topic for our podcast conversations, if I can lure you back. I just had "REVEAL" written in big letters on my notes.
[00:39:57] Tiffany: Always.
[00:40:05] Matty: Thank you for coming back, and please let everyone know where they can find out more about you and everything you do online.
[00:40:10] Tiffany: You can find me at foxprinteditorial.com, which is probably the best clearinghouse for everything. I am on Instagram and Facebook under Tiffany Yates Martin. I also have a weekly blog with craft tips, business tips for making a career as a writer, and a ton of resources for authors, many of them free. One thing that might be relevant to this conversation is a beta reader questionnaire that can help get actionable feedback.
Thank you, too. I always have the best time talking to you. I lose track of time and feel like we could do this all day long. Thanks for having me on. It’s always a pleasure, and I love the service you're doing for authors.
