Episode 325 - Reveals as the Striptease of Fiction with Tiffany Yates Martin
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Tiffany Yates Martin discusses REVEALS AS THE STRIPTEASE OF FICTION, including why reveals are one of the most powerful yet mishandled tools in fiction, techniques for concealing and timing information using POV, structure, and reader assumptions, the dangers of being too cryptic or too obvious, how beta readers can diagnose whether your reveals are working, and a practical checklist for crafting reveals that are intrinsic to the story.
Tiffany Yates Martin has spent more than 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 authors. She is the author of Intuitive Editing: A Creative and Practical Guide to Revising Your Writing and the novel The Fantasy Makers. FoxPrint Editorial has been named one of Writer's Digest's Best Websites for Writers for three years running. She leads seminars and workshops for conferences and writing organizations across the country and contributes craft and publishing articles to numerous industry outlets.
Episode Links
https://foxprinteditorial.com/
https://foxprinteditorial.teachable.com/p/reveals - A self-directed deeper-dive online course on secrets, twists, and reveals
Summary & Transcript
In this episode of The Indy Author Podcast, Matty Dalrymple talks with editor, author, and writing instructor Tiffany Yates Martin about the craft of using secrets and reveals in fiction. Tiffany, returning for her seventh appearance on the podcast, draws on her extensive experience as a developmental editor to explain why reveals are among the most powerful—and most frequently mishandled—tools available to fiction writers.
WHY REVEALS GO WRONG
Tiffany explains that she sees the misuse of reveals frequently in the manuscripts she edits. The instinct to incorporate a reveal is sound, she notes, because reveals are inherently compelling to readers. However, the execution often falls short. Authors may withhold too much information, leaving readers confused rather than intrigued, or they may deploy reveals as a device to generate excitement when the story does not truly require one. Tiffany compares the overly cryptic reveal to the social media post that teases “something big is coming” without providing any context—it aims to create suspense but instead produces irritation. The fix, she says, is to give readers almost all the pieces of the puzzle while withholding a key piece or two, so that the mystery propels the reader forward rather than leaving them adrift.
DEFINING THE REVEAL
The conversation establishes that a reveal is distinct from ordinary suspense or narrative questions. Tiffany defines it as a specific piece of information about the story that, when allowed to become known, has a major impact on the characters, the plot, or the reader. Reveals encompass secrets, twists, withheld information, and unknowns used to create suspense. Importantly, reveals are not limited to mysteries. Tiffany cites examples from literary fiction, upmarket fiction, and thrillers, including Remarkably Bright Creatures, Water for Elephants, and Gone Girl, to demonstrate that the device works across genres. She emphasizes that a reveal should be reserved for something essential and intrinsic to the story, not used simply as a cliffhanger or to inject momentary excitement.
TECHNIQUES FOR CONCEALING AND REVEALING INFORMATION
Tiffany outlines several techniques authors can use to hide or delay information effectively. These include using the premise itself, as in a mystery or in Where’d You Go, Bernadette; using character motivations, as in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, where the protagonist’s literal-mindedness naturally conceals information from the reader; using story structure, as in The Husband’s Secret, where multiple points of view allow the author to delay revelation by shifting to characters who do not yet know the secret; and using reader assumptions, as in The Sixth Sense, where the audience draws incorrect but reasonable conclusions from the information presented. Tiffany notes that a hallmark of a well-executed reveal is that on a second reading, the clues are visible in retrospect—delightful rather than frustrating, because the author did not lie to the reader but simply allowed them to make their own assumptions.
TIMING THE REVEAL FOR MAXIMUM IMPACT
Using Liane Moriarty’s The Husband’s Secret as a detailed case study, Tiffany demonstrates that when a reveal occurs is as important as what is revealed. In that novel, different characters learn the central secret at different points in the story, and each revelation serves a different narrative purpose. The wife’s discovery drives the middle of the story. The reader’s discovery reframes the premise. A final character’s discovery fuels the climax. Tiffany stresses that authors should consider who the reveal is being kept from and when its disclosure will be most profound for both the characters and the story. She contrasts this with novels like A House Without Windows, where the entire narrative is built around withholding the truth until the very end, and Water for Elephants, where reader assumptions carry the concealment naturally.
THE DANGERS OF BEING TOO COY OR TOO OBVIOUS
Matty and Tiffany discuss two common pitfalls. The first is when the reader knows too little—the reveal feels cryptic and the reader disengages. The second is when the reader figures out the secret before the characters do, which can undermine investment in both the character and the story. Tiffany notes that if a reader gets ahead of the author, the story loses its power. She also warns against relying on what Matty calls “magical ignorance,” where a character implausibly fails to recognize something obvious in order to preserve the secret. Tiffany adds that concealing information from readers through a first-person or deep-third point of view only works for so long—at a certain point, the repeated deflection begins to feel like an authorial device rather than an organic character behavior.
HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT AND MISDIRECTION
The discussion turns to advanced techniques for experienced writers, particularly in genres where readers expect a reveal. Tiffany describes how an author she recently worked with made the actual murderer the protagonist’s first and most obvious suspect, then debunked that suspicion with believable evidence—effectively hiding the truth in plain sight. She also discusses Ruta Sepetys’s I Must Betray You, set in Romania under Ceaușescu’s regime, where readers know a family member is a spy but multiple misdirections keep the identity and the true motivations concealed. Matty adds that she values the idea of a double reveal—the reveal of who and then the reveal of why—which requires even greater skill to execute convincingly.
THE ROLE OF BETA READERS IN TESTING REVEALS
Both speakers emphasize the importance of outside feedback when working with reveals. Matty shares a recent experience in which a beta reader suggested repositioning a reveal to the end of a chapter for greater impact and also reported where she had guessed the secret and where she had been misdirected. Tiffany recommends asking beta readers specific questions about whether they felt hooked, whether they were surprised, and where they figured out the secret ahead of time. She notes that authors are especially likely to misjudge the effectiveness of their own reveals because they already know the full story. Tiffany offers a beta reader questionnaire as a free resource on her website and urges authors to invite frank, specific feedback rather than soft-pedaled responses.
A CHECKLIST FOR CRAFTING EFFECTIVE REVEALS
Tiffany closes the craft discussion with a practical framework for authors. She advises writers to identify the specific puzzle piece they want to withhold and from whom, then to confirm that the reveal is intrinsic to the story rather than merely decorative. From there, authors should build in enough context to ground the reader—Tiffany likens this to providing enough puzzle pieces for the picture to be recognizable while withholding a key piece or two. She then recommends planting breadcrumbs so that a second read reveals the clues that were hiding in plain sight and determining the moment when the reveal will have the greatest impact on the characters and the story. The conversation closes with Tiffany noting that even pantsers benefit from thinking through their reveals in advance, since laying the necessary groundwork after the fact is far more difficult than planning it from the start.
This transcript was created by Descript and cleaned up by Claude; I don’t review these transcripts in detail, so consider the actual interview to be the authoritative source for this information.
[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, my friend. I’m fine. How are you?
[00:00:08] Matty: I am doing great. And as longtime listeners of the podcast will know, Tiffany is a multi-time visitor. This will be appearance number seven, and previous episodes we have talked about tapping into your author voice, creating character motivation, the three stages of story, being the captain of your author voyage, how to receive and give critique, and X-raying your plot.
And if you want to find any of those, you can go to theindyauthor.com/episodes-all and search for Tiffany. And since I’ve introduced Tiffany so many times on the podcast…
[00:00:39] Matty: My new policy is that repeat guests get to share a fact that our listeners might not know about them instead of hearing the formal bio.
[00:00:47] Tiffany: Okay. I like that. Well, let’s see. I have been an editor for my entire career, I always say, but a lot of people know that I actually started as an actor and I sort of happened into editing at a certain point from that. And when I was an actor, I hosted a game show for a season in Atlanta on the local Fox affiliate network called That’s Atlanta.
That was a trivia game show about Atlanta, and we’d have local celebrities on, we’d have just local citizens on. It was three cameras, mostly improvised, and one of the coolest experiences I ever had as an actor, despite how ridiculous it was.
[00:01:38] Matty: So I have to ask how you got that gig.
[00:01:41] Tiffany: Funny story. I was moving to New York, and it’s sort of a truism, kind of like with writing, that when you suddenly don’t want it as much, you’re way more attractive. And so because I was moving, my agent got me this audition in Atlanta and I was like, eh, whatever. And I just goofed off. I have an improv background, and so I just played, and then I moved, and then they said, by the way, you got the job.
And so every six weeks, because I told them I wasn’t there anymore, I had to fly back and shoot like six episodes in a row.
[00:02:13] Matty: Oh my goodness.
[00:02:17] Matty: Well, I think that that lesson—I have experienced that as well. The story about like, when you don’t want it anymore, it’s so much easier. My experience was my one semester at the graduate English lit program at University of Michigan, and I was surrounded by—everyone else was from like Stanford and Yale and Harvard.
And they had already read all the books that we were studying and I hadn’t. And after like three quarters of a semester, I decided I wasn’t interested. And the last quarter of that semester was the best time.
[00:02:43] Tiffany: Isn’t that funny? It’s like you take the pressure off yourself.
[00:02:48] Matty: Yeah. I think if I could have brought that mindset to the entire semester, I probably maybe would still be there.
[00:02:53] Tiffany: Well, I was just going to say the takeaway from that is if we can get out of our own way as far as expectations, there’s a lot under there we’re probably not allowing to fully flower.
[00:03:04] Matty: Yes, exactly. That is always a good reminder for people to hear, I think.
[00:03:09] Matty: So we agreed that we were going to come back and talk about secrets and reveals in fiction. And whenever I talk with anybody about a topic that they have clearly thought deeply about, as you have about secrets and reveals in fiction, I always like to ask, what did you see in the writing community that made you think this was something that needed some examination?
[00:03:29] Tiffany: So even though I do teach and speak a lot now, I still do a lot of hands-on editing, and I’m always grateful because it’s where I see a lot of the things I wind up teaching about. And this was a big one. I see this a lot in authors’ manuscripts where the instinct to do a reveal is really good because they’re delicious, they’re catnip for readers.
It creates a mystery. It has great impact when you reveal it. But they’re tricky. They’re a really delicate balancing act between offering enough information to ground and orient the reader and make them care—and you can overcorrect, you can offer too much, and then readers are figuring things out and the story feels anticlimactic.
And too often I think I see authors using them because they’re a powerful device when they’re not necessarily the strongest choice for their particular story. And then when they do, there’s all these techniques where it can seem either coy or manipulative or cryptic, or it can be so smooth and seamless that it creates the effect you want, or it just feels so random and unsupported that it feels like a cheat when the reveal comes out.
So I just figured I would try to demystify it.
[00:04:49] Matty: And I think a lot of people think of secrets and reveals especially with regard to mystery. But I’m assuming that this goes beyond mystery, that any kind of genre can have the secret or the reveal that can be powerful if used in the right way, but might not be the kind of whodunit sort of reveal that you would get in a mystery.
[00:05:07] Tiffany: Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely—something like Gillian Flynn, Liane Moriarty, any mystery—it’s the whole premise of the mystery. But a lot of stories use reveals. I’m thinking of things like Water for Elephants, where we think we know what happened in the story, and then at the end we realized there was a piece of information withheld.
And that’s considered, I guess, upmarket, literary. Remarkably Bright Creatures has a reveal in it where we understand the connection between all three characters. So it can be powerful for any genre, but just creating questions and mysteries in your story isn’t necessarily what we mean by reveal. Like when we’re talking about it, it’s used sort of like the HGTV reveal where we use it to both refer to the makeover itself, the device itself, and also to the act of revealing it. So when we use “reveal,” we’re talking about things like what you said—secrets, twists, mysteries, withheld information, unknowns used to create suspense. Plot twists can be considered a reveal.
So it’s not just your basic suspense or questions that you’re going to create all the way through the story. It’s a specific piece of information about the story that when you allow it to be known—and we’ll talk more about who knows it—then it has a great impact on the story and on the reader.
[00:06:37] Matty: And based on either the stories you’ve read or stories you’ve edited, stories you’ve written maybe, do you feel as if it’s—is it easier to approach reveals about what they should accomplish, like the best practices, or the pitfalls? What’s the best way to approach that topic?
[00:06:53] Tiffany: I think both. And it just depends what works for you. I think the best thing to do when trying to incorporate them is to just understand what makes them work. Because if you understand that—like anything, if you understand the principles of it, then you know how to apply them to your own work.
Because there’s a lot of different types of reveal we just talked about, the different, I guess, literal types of reveal you might use. But there’s also—reveals can be something that you are going to reveal can be concealed from a character. It can be concealed from the protagonist. It can be concealed from the reader.
It can be all three. It can be one or the other, like the reader knows something the protagonist doesn’t, or the protagonist knows something another character doesn’t. So there’s all kinds of permutations of it.
[00:07:40] Matty: So I don’t know that I would necessarily break it down by genre because mysteries are built on reveals, but the principles are the same across any genre. So as far as why they don’t work in general, I think one of the reasons I see most often is that they just feel—the reader doesn’t know enough, and so they wind up feeling coy or cryptic or confusing.
[00:08:03] Tiffany: And that would be the example I always give. Everybody has that Facebook friend who posts things like, “Something big is coming, but I can’t talk about it,” or “I can’t believe that just happened to me.” And the idea is the same thing as a reveal like that. It’s trying to create mystery and suspense and expectation, and whoever’s reading it, it’s trying to elicit a reaction.
But really what it does in most of us is annoy us and feel manipulative because we don’t have enough information to know why it matters, and we sense the author’s hand when that happens. In the story, we see that the author is deliberately withholding information.
This is a really clumsy example, it’s off the top of my head, but things like, you know, “When she walked into the store, she couldn’t believe he was there after all these years. How could he have the nerve? What was she going to say to him after all this time?” And it wants to be exciting. Something exciting is happening here, but we don’t know what, so it doesn’t really move the reader.
So what I always just suggest is that the author lays in more context, more pieces of the puzzle. One thing that happens in a coy or cryptic reveal is that the author has tried to leave out too many puzzle pieces. And I always say that if everything is a mystery, then nothing is, because readers just don’t engage.
So it’s best to think of it as giving readers almost all the pieces of the puzzle, or enough for us to understand the picture we’re trying to put together, but withholding a key piece or two. So in an example like that, you might say, “She hadn’t seen him since he walked away from her at the altar.” And just that one piece of information grounds the reader enough that now we don’t need to know what happened exactly. We don’t need to know what happened afterward. We know enough that we’re hooked and it’s a breadcrumb. We want to know more.
[00:10:07] Matty: I can imagine that one of the pitfalls of reveals is that people might think of them in the same way as like a cliffhanger. And if you’re writing something that’s sort of episodic or you’re writing a thriller where it’s more of a trope that each chapter is going to try to carry you into the next chapter with a bit of a cliffhanger at the end, and dropping the reveals in in that way.
Like, I think about the stories or the movies that I enjoy and it’s not repetitive reveals. There’s usually one big reveal or maybe a couple of relatively major reveals, and the other ones don’t kind of slap you in the face as a reveal. Maybe it is a reveal, but everything isn’t pegged at eleven.
So do you have a sense of what people can watch out for in their own writing that’s saying like, now you’re getting carried away and you shouldn’t be using this as a device to keep the reader engaged? It should be used in either a more subtle way or maybe a couple of big ways.
[00:11:15] Tiffany: Yeah, I think that’s the whole purpose of a reveal. Like, again, it’s not the same thing as just creating questions and suspense in the story. That’s something you should do all the way through, and you do it by giving readers things to wonder about, by baiting a hook and then giving us the answer.
But as you said, if you do that by withholding a bunch of information about what’s actually going on, the whole thing just feels like a mystery. A reveal is best used for something that is essential and intrinsic to the story that has a major impact on either the characters or the trajectory of the plot.
[00:11:55] Tiffany: So, for example, Liane Moriarty’s The Husband’s Secret is about a woman who discovers a sealed envelope, a letter in her attic addressed to her in her husband’s handwriting, to be opened after he dies. Well, he is still alive. It was clearly buried in a box. So much of the first part of the story is about what the hell is in that envelope.
But does it have to be held to the end? No. When you reveal something can help further the story and create a specific effect. So in that story, we actually find out what’s in the letter about a third of the way through. And actually, so at first no one knows what’s in it—the wife doesn’t know, the reader doesn’t know. It’s a three-protagonist story, so none of the protagonists know. And then the wife finds out what’s in it about a third of the way through. A few chapters later, the reader finds out what’s in it. And then another character finds out later in the story, and one doesn’t find out until the very end. So with each of them, when it’s revealed dictates what the story is about.
For the wife, her story is about dealing with the fallout from what she knows is in it. For the reader, at first that’s the delicious hook, but once it’s revealed, the premise of the story is what happens, how that reverberates among all three of these characters and dictates their arcs. And then the character who finds out at the very end—that revelation is key to the climax of the story.
So it has to be revealed there. Doing it mindfully and deliberately is really important for making it effective.
[00:13:40] Matty: And are there specific different approaches you would use when the reveal is to the reader versus the reveal is to a character about something that the reader already knows?
[00:13:49] Tiffany: Well, there’s a lot of different techniques you can use with reveals in general. Some of them are more effective depending on who you’re keeping it from. So for example, you can use the premise itself, and that would be something like a mystery where the whole point of it is to uncover the clues, but also Where’d You Go, Bernadette, which is not a mystery. The whole point of the story is to literally figure out where Bernadette went.
You can use the character motivations or who the character is. Like, there’s a story by Mark Haddon called The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and it’s kind of almost an unreliable narrator device for the reveal, because the information that the—I’m trying not to spoil every story for your listeners.
[00:14:34] Matty: I realize this is a tricky aspect of talking about reveals.
[00:14:37] Tiffany: It is. And when I teach on it, I’m like, okay, I’m just going to spoil these, but let’s try not to if we can help it. So I think I can help it, but if it feels too cryptic, tell me and I’ll fill in more detail. There is a big reveal about the boy’s life, something he doesn’t know and readers don’t know, but the author is able to conceal it from readers because the character is autistic.
And so he takes everything very literally. He believes wholesale things that he is told, and because he does, the reader never really questions it either. In The Husband’s Secret, Moriarty uses the character motivations because at first the wife is dying to tear into it and she doesn’t because she thinks, oh, maybe he doesn’t want me to, maybe it’s something really sappy and he doesn’t want me to open it.
But he forgot it was in there. So then she talks to him and she tells him that she has it and that she’s going to open it. And he begs her not to. He’s like, oh, it was a foolish thing and I really don’t want you to see it. And so she resists because she feels like it’s a breach of his trust if she does it.
But then later, when he comes home, I forget what happens, but something shifts and suddenly she realizes she has to know what’s in it. So in the middle of the night, she sneaks up and opens it. So we’re changing the motivations.
There’s a story by Nadia Hashimi called A House Without Windows. That’s predicated on the idea that a character—at the very beginning in the first scene, we have a first-person prologue of an Afghani woman who’s found in the courtyard of her house next to a bloody knife and the body of her husband. She’s arrested. She’ll be put to death if she doesn’t defend herself, and she refuses to speak on her own behalf.
So that’s the only time we ever see her direct perspective. And the rest of the story is told from two different characters, both of whom are invested in finding out what happened. But the whole point of it is that she deliberately doesn’t want anyone to know what happened. So we’re using the character’s motivations in that one.
You can use the plot itself. That would be any murder mystery, like Lucy Foley’s The Guest List, where we slowly learn different facts about the character and we see things unfolding over the course of the story. You can use the story structure, like I was talking about, The Husband’s Secret with three protagonists. Because of that, she’s able to withhold the secret from the reader for two extra chapters because she just goes to two other different points of view that don’t know it.
Gone Girl does that at the beginning. We’re only getting Nick’s first-person point of view, and we’re seeing Amy’s diaries up until the point of her disappearance. So we don’t know the truth about what happened to Amy until part two of the story, when we get Amy’s direct point of view.
You can use the point of view itself. Like, a first person—obviously anything the character doesn’t know or deep third, the reader can’t know. And omniscient, you can let the reader know things that the characters don’t know.
You can use reader assumptions and expectations. This would be like The Sixth Sense, where we’re just making inferences based on what you’re showing, but you’re sort of using the reader’s—you’re misleading us in a benign way. Like, you’re showing us clues. For example, the scene with Bruce Willis—it’s an older movie, but I’ll just go ahead and spoil it because it’s really old.
The kid sees dead people, and Bruce Willis is a psychologist who’s talking to the kid. And in one scene you see him sitting with the mom in total silence, and the reader’s assumption is, oh, he’s just told her something really difficult about her kid and she’s upset and they’re just having this moment.
And later it’s revealed that he’s dead and the kid sees him and he doesn’t know he’s dead. And you just see how cleverly those little clues were laid in, and it wasn’t that we were lied to. It wasn’t that the author was misleading us. It’s just they gave us information and allowed us to make an assumption.
[00:18:52] Matty: Yeah, one of my favorite movie scenes. I love The Sixth Sense, and one of my favorite scenes is when he’s at dinner with his wife. It’s their anniversary dinner, and it’s kind of set up like—I mean, in reality she has gone to the restaurant that they always went to for their anniversary and she’s having dinner by herself, which is obviously an unhappy situation for her.
And he shows up. But the sense is, I mean, exactly like you’re saying, you assume that she’s not talking to him because she’s pissed off at him for some reason.
[00:19:18] Tiffany: It’s brilliant.
[00:19:19] Matty: Yeah.
[00:19:20] Tiffany: And one thing I love about that movie, if people haven’t seen it or even if you have—when you go back at the very end, Shyamalan shows us the clues that he paved in there. He goes back, like the red doorknob on the basement, and I forget what else he shows. It’s been a while. But one thing about a really well-laid reveal is that it will make readers want to read it again because we want to see how we were—
[00:19:47] Matty: Wait, what?
[00:19:48] Tiffany: Yes. And on that second read, if we see things like where those misdirections were, where our own assumptions led us astray—it’s delightful because it wasn’t artificial, because it wasn’t manipulative. We clearly see how skillfully the author simply led, or allowed, or encouraged us to make assumptions that were wrong.
[00:20:13] Matty: Yeah.
[00:20:21] Matty: Yeah, I think the two pitfalls I can imagine—one of them harks back to our conversation about what did we call it, the fallacy of magical knowing. And then we sort of started talking about the fallacy of magical ignorance, and the idea that if the reader knows something that a character doesn’t, at some point you get to the point where you’re like, there’s no way that person doesn’t know that. Like, that’s such a frustrating reading experience where you feel like the author is relying on someone being unusually dense in order not to recognize the secret.
[00:20:51] Tiffany: To build on that, we were talking earlier about ways reveals can go wrong, and I said with the reader doesn’t know enough. The other one is that readers know too much. And you’re right, if we get ahead of the author or we get ahead of the characters, we may be very satisfied with ourselves, but it also takes the fun away from the story because we’ve outwitted the character or we’ve outwitted the author, so we feel like we’re a step ahead of them.
And like you said, it’s hard to justify how something that we see so clearly the character is not seeing, and it can undermine our investment in the character.
[00:21:32] Matty: Yeah, I think there’s the reader knows more, and then when the character knows more, I think this gets to what you were saying before about the coy reveal—that if you’re not given enough information or the buildup is too long, or you see it coming but you’re not getting the payoff. Can you talk a little bit about the dangers of being too coy with the reveal?
[00:21:56] Tiffany: Yeah, you have to find ways to do it that feel organic.
[00:22:01] Tiffany: So, we talked about Water for Elephants a minute ago, and I think I have to spoil this one. So at the very beginning—it’s Sara Gruen, I’m not sure how she pronounces her name—at the very beginning, the story opens on what is kind of the climax of the story, where we see the—I think it’s the ringleader of the circus is murdered, and the protagonist of the story, who’s a much younger man in this prologue, sees it happening.
And that’s sort of the setup for everything we see. And then it’s a dual-timeline story where we partly follow what led up to that in the past, and then we also see the man who’s now living in an assisted living home, and we’re recalling all these events from his perspective.
And then later in the story, we find out that the author allowed us to use our own assumptions to believe that it was the man’s love interest, the woman who was the elephant trainer, who killed the ringleader, when it was actually the elephant. So because we think we know what happened, it never occurs to us to feel strung along throughout the course of the story.
[00:23:21] Tiffany: Now, let’s say you have a reveal like the one I just talked about, A House Without Windows, Nadia Hashimi, where we know what happened at the beginning, or at least we know what is found at the beginning, but we don’t know what the woman actually did, whether she killed her husband or not.
The device that makes that work is the fact that, as I said in the prologue, we have her first-person point of view, and then the two main character points of view are her mother and the lawyer who’s defending her. If we had her first-person point of view throughout the story and we still never knew what that motivation was or what actually happened, that would quickly begin to feel manipulative, because you can conceal to a degree for a certain amount of time.
You can conceal from readers what a character herself knows, even if you’re in a direct point of view like first person or deep third, with clever little devices. Like, we’re not always fully honest with ourselves. So you could have an unreliable narrator. You could have someone who’s in denial or suppressing it. But again, that only works for so long unless you had actual amnesia or memory loss, and that’s a main premise of the story. Then that can work. But at a certain point, you’re going to run out of ways to say “she wouldn’t let herself think of that now,” because if you do that enough times, it does start to feel like a device, and anything that calls attention to the author’s hand pulls the reader out of the story. That’s why these are so tricky.
[00:24:58] Tiffany: I call them the striptease of literature, because like a striptease, if you just walk out and put it all out there, it’s not very exciting. But if you walk out and you don’t take anything off but a sock and a glove, that’s also not very exciting. You really have to balance how much and when and what you’re choosing to reveal and use it really judiciously. Like I said, and as you said, if everything is a reveal or some kind of mystery, then you really lose the impact of whatever the thing is.
That could be the backbone of the story. That could be the hook for the story. You have to very deliberately decide which thing serves the story by withholding, and from whom and for how long. And then salt in context enough so that readers have their feet planted. Like, that should be a propelling mystery.
[00:26:02] Tiffany: But the reader—I talk about good questions and bad questions. The readers should never have bad questions like, “What’s going on?” or “Why should I care?”
[00:26:13] Matty: “What the hell?”
[00:26:14] Tiffany: Yes. I mean, one example I give is, you have a character walking down the street and she hears footsteps behind her and she’s really nervous, and she turns around and it’s her uncle. Who cares, right?
Like, we don’t know enough context. Even if we know she thought he was dead, that’s still not enough context. We don’t know the stakes. Why does it matter? Like, okay, it’s interesting that a dead guy is back, but did she spend his inheritance and now she’s like, oh, got to reckon with that? Or was he out to get her and she thought she was safe from him?
We need to know why the reveal is germane and important to the story.
[00:26:59] Matty: Yeah, I think sometimes this is so hard for an author to judge themselves. And this conversation was very well timed because I just got back some comments from my first beta reader, my first and favorite beta reader, and I had a reveal—not a huge reveal, but an “Oh, that’s interesting” kind of reveal—in the middle of my book where there were two characters and they were portrayed as two different people. But then it turns out it was the same person. It was a woman who was in disguise, and then somebody who had met her in her other persona sees her and says, “Oh look, it’s so-and-so.”
And I thought it was acceptably—like, this is a fun reveal but it’s not the big reveal. But my beta reader said, you can cash this in a lot more if you have the reveal be the end of a chapter, because it kind of gives it that punch. And then you show the outcome of the one character recognizing that it’s the same person in the next chapter.
And that’s not something—I think it was hard for me to judge whether it was a significant enough reveal that it merited that kind of end-of-the-chapter attention. And the other thing that was useful is she said, “I kind of thought it was the same person”—and these were the parts where she’d get to this part and think, “I think this is the same person.”
And then she said she’d be in these other parts and be thinking, “No, no, it’s not the same person.” And that’s another thing I think is so hard for an author to judge themselves—like, how secretive are you being? Or is this apparent to everybody else, or have you left no breadcrumbs so no one could possibly see that coming? Like the breadcrumbs you were talking about in The Sixth Sense.
[00:28:44] Tiffany: Particularly with reveals, I think it’s important to have beta readers or crit partners, for the reason you say. I mean, in the best of circumstances we are filling in the blanks between all that we know about the story and what’s actually made it on the page, and then that’s sort of times ten with reveals.
Because we may think we’re being appropriately mysterious, but we’re being cryptic. Or we may think we are salting in just enough subtle clues, but it’s very obvious. So I think you need feedback, and that’s actually the advice I always give about diagnosing them. You can do your best, but I think it’s helpful to ask people how hooked they felt by it, and whether they were surprised by the reveals, and whether the payoff felt satisfying, and then dig deeper.
Actually, I always advocate offering questions as guidelines to your beta readers anyway, particularly beta readers more than crit partners, because they’re often not writers themselves, for many people, and it helps elicit the kind of specific, focused feedback on how well your story’s coming across on the page that you need to help you understand whether your intentions are clear and where you might strengthen the story to make sure you get that across more.
So one of the resources I offer on my website is a beta reader questionnaire. But particularly with reveals, ask about were they hooked, were they surprised? And then dig deeper. If they felt like the reveal didn’t quite hold together, where did they figure it out ahead of time and how did they figure it out ahead of time? Or where and why did they feel confused or uninvested by what was clearly being hinted at? What was it specifically about the reveal that didn’t have the impact you hoped it would?
Ask for really frank feedback. Hopefully we always do this with our beta readers and our crit partners, but this is not the time for the soft pedal. You want your readers to very clearly reflect back to you where they saw the man behind the curtain.
[00:30:57] Matty: Yeah.
[00:30:58] Matty: When I—most of my novels are either thriller or suspense, but some of them have mystery aspects, sometimes as sort of a subplot. And I always ask my beta readers at various points in the story, just tell me who you think done it.
[00:31:11] Tiffany: Oh, that’s a good question.
[00:31:12] Matty: Ideally I want it to be spread evenly across all the possible suspects, including the person who actually did it. One thing that I’ve heard mystery writers say is, “Oh, I dropped in this clue and it suggests the actual murderer, so I’m going to take that out.” And I was like, no, you have to implicate everybody at one point or the other. Or the readers are just going to say, well, the only person that they haven’t implicated is this person, so clearly that’s the bad guy. You have to implicate the bad guy as much as everybody else.
[00:31:46] Tiffany: Well, you can take that a step further. That’s one of the techniques you can use, especially in something like a mystery. The more you have the character suspect—I just finished working with an author on one where the murderer was potentially the most obvious suspect, but she had the protagonist immediately think so and think so for quite some time during the story. And then she debunked it. She gave the reasons why it wasn’t plausible and they were believable reasons.
And so we accept it. It’s hiding in plain sight. Do more than drop the clue. Have them really suspect who the murderer might be or who the suspect might be, and then figure out a reason that they would dismiss that suspicion.
There’s this weird psychological thing where you almost carry the reader along with you if you’ve done it well, and they think, “Oh, well, they did their due diligence. It’s not that person.” And they just buy it, and it’s like the magician who’s using sleight of hand—don’t look at this hand, this hand is doing exciting things. And suddenly they don’t look at that hand anymore.
[00:33:01] Matty: Do you think that there’s a difference in approaching a reveal when people are going to a story for a reveal, as they would with a mystery, and where the reveal is—if the reader is expecting a reveal, is the approach different than if you’re applying a reveal in a genre where that’s not necessarily sort of a required trope?
[00:33:27] Tiffany: I don’t know if the approach would be different so much as—because we know there’s a reveal coming, like you said, readers are going to be on the lookout for it. So I think you almost have to be more mindful of using tools of benign manipulation and misdirection.
So for example, Ruta Sepetys has a story called I Must Betray You. That’s all about kids, people living in Romania under Ceaușescu’s regime, which is very oppressive, and everybody is spying on everybody. So we have this reality set up, and early in the story she has one character tell the protagonist, “Spies are everywhere, including within our own walls.” So we know that within this family somebody is a spy, and we’re looking at every single thing.
But she really cleverly misdirects us because there’s more than one. And also the one that we think it is at first, we find out indeed was spying, but for a completely different reason that was much more sympathetic than the one we originally thought. So the character was more of an ally than an antagonist.
She really kind of messes with our expectations. But because we know somebody’s a spy and the family is only like four people big, it requires you to be even more attentive to hiding the clues in plain sight, to leaning into some of the mystery, to misdirecting readers. All the techniques you would use to pull off any reveal, you kind of have to pull off exponentially more skillfully in that kind of story.
[00:35:12] Matty: Well, I like that idea of the double reveal—the reveal of who it is and then the reveal of the why, why they’re doing it. And with each level of reveal, you have to be more and more skilled at handling the story so that it supports the weight of all those reveals.
[00:35:27] Tiffany: So I think when you’re doing it, the first question to ask yourself is, what is the puzzle piece you want to withhold and who do you want to withhold it from? Is it from readers? Is it from your protagonist or another main point-of-view character? Is it from another character? And who is withholding it?
Then ask yourself why. If you’re doing it to just put a little spice into the story, or because you think you need to shock the reader or it will have great impact—that may not always be the strongest reason to do it. It should be something absolutely intrinsic and germane to the telling of the story.
For example, in The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett—Stella and Desiree are twins who run away from their hometown together, and then one of them—they’re incredibly close, but a year later, one of them disappears. We have no idea what happened to her, and neither does her sister, and neither do any of the other characters.
Well, that’s not really the focus of the first part of the story. It’s the effect of what happened to her on the other characters. So we don’t even hear anything about her until maybe midway through the story, when we start to follow her story and we understand why she left. And then the fallout from that converges in the third part of the story, where we see how the fact of her leaving and the fact of her being rediscovered by the family affects the family dynamics.
So that’s intrinsic to the whole story. That reveal is the premise of the story. In a mystery, it’s going to be the premise of the story. In something like Water for Elephants, it makes the reader question what we thought we knew about the story and changes the impact and meaning of it at the end when we learn the truth.
So it’s also intrinsic to the story. In The Kite Runner, the secret about what happened with his childhood best friend—I think we learn maybe a third of the way through, but it’s dictated his entire childhood and his entire adult life, the main character. It was a betrayal that he committed against his best friend. And so in the first part of the story, it’s kept because we’re unspooling that part. The story is sort of bracketed with present and past scenes, and in the first part we see the present at the beginning and how it has affected him, and then we see what leads up to it.
So we don’t actually learn what it is until about a third of the way through. But then after that, the course of the story changes as a result of him facing what he did and then trying to make it right. So that will dictate where you want to put the reveal and what you’re revealing.
Then start building in the necessary context and foundation for it. Remember, if everything’s a piece of the puzzle and we don’t have any of the pieces of the puzzle, imagine trying to put together a puzzle when someone hands you two blue puzzle pieces and goes, “Go.” We have to have at least some idea of the picture that we’re putting together. We need to know a little bit more about what pieces we have so we can start to figure out how they go together.
So we need enough to know for the revelation of the information or the event to reverberate for the characters and the plot and the reader. Or, I say that having enough context is sort of the difference between finding a beautifully wrapped present with a tag on it that says it’s from your best friend under the tree, and finding a plain brown paper–wrapped box on your front doorstep. One is lovely and one is annoying and possibly threatening.
Then start paving in the clues. This is not necessarily how it will unspool in the story—this is maybe your process as an author so that you can figure out what to reveal when. I always talk about the Watergate question: What does the reader need to know and when do they need to know it?
Start dropping your breadcrumbs in a really well-orchestrated reveal. As we said, a second read will let readers see where they are, so figure out how and where you’re going to pave them in and what techniques you’re going to use to keep the information hidden without that coy, cryptic feel or manipulating the reader.
And then, when will the reveal have the most impact? We talked about in The Husband’s Secret it was in the first third. In A House Without Windows, the whole point of the story is whether she killed her husband or not—we don’t find out until the very end. Same with Water for Elephants. Gone Girl comes maybe halfway through.
So for that, you have to consider who the reveal is being kept from and when the impact is most profound on the characters and the story. And then just make sure you get beta readers to look at it and see if it’s effective.
[00:40:37] Matty: Yeah, I realized that one of the reasons I was sort of teeing up the reveal that I used as an example—about the person who’s actually two people who are actually the same person—is that it’s not intrinsic to the story in the sense that, I think we had talked in a previous episode about the fact that I like to keep my cast of characters as small as possible.
And so as I was working through my outline for the story, I had a woman who was doing this one thing and I had a woman who was doing this other thing, and then I just thought logically, she’s one of the bad guys and the bad guys only have a limited number of people to tap into, so they would use the same person for both these tasks.
And so it was more—it wasn’t like, “Ooh, and then it’s going to be a big reveal.” It’s like, no, this is kind of logical and I can have fun with the reveal, as opposed to the story hanging or relying on that reveal being really revelatory to the reader.
[00:41:30] Tiffany: So I think without that logical piece, though, it might have felt contrived, because yes, it’s fun, but if there’s no germane story reason for it, it might have felt like an author manipulation. So I think it was smart of you to pave that in.
That’s why I think thinking them through beforehand is a really good way to approach them. And this applies even if you’re a pantser, just because if you totally pants it, it’s possible, but then you have to go through and lay all this groundwork. Whereas if you’ve thought it out, I think it can help direct how the story builds.
[00:42:06] Matty: Well, I’m realizing that we probably should have done the “What’s one secret about you that nobody knows?” as the end of our conversation instead of the start of our conversation. We’ve already had one reveal from you so far. But Tiffany, it’s always lovely to speak with you. Thank you for coming on for episode seven. So please let everyone know, if they don’t already know, where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
[00:42:30] Tiffany: Thank you, Matty. Thanks for having me again. It’s always such a delight to talk to you. The best place to find me is FoxPrintEditorial.com. It’s where you can find—I don’t do a lot of social media anymore, but you can find my weekly blog, which is full of craft tips and business tips and writing life insights. And then my online courses are there. There’s a ton of free resources for writers—downloadables, guides, checklists, recommended resources, links to people and organizations that can help writers. So please do check that out.
[00:43:08] Matty: And I am just scanning your actual bio because I know in there—oh, FoxPrint Editorial, named one of Writer’s Digest’s Best Websites for Writers. So that’s why.
[00:43:19] Tiffany: Three years in a row. Thank you for bringing that up.