Episode 332 - Writing Rules You Can Break with Kristen Tate
Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!
Amazon Music | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | Castbox | Pocket Casts | Podbean | Player FM | TuneIn | YouTube
Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment on YouTube!
Kristen Tate discusses WRITING RULES YOU CAN BREAK, including why the longer you edit the fewer hard rules there seem to be, when adverbs earn their place and when they’re redundant, why telling is a tool novelists have that screenwriters envy, how passive voice can actually sharpen a mystery, what separates a prologue that hooks from one that delays, and how the convention around point of view is already shifting in commercial fiction.
Kristen Tate has been a freelance editor for over a decade, helping authors transform their work from rough draft to finished book. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University, with a focus on publishing history. She is the author of Novel Study: Decoding the Secrets and Structures of Contemporary Fiction and writes a regular newsletter full of craft advice and encouragement for authors.
Episode Links
https://www.thebluegarret.com/
https://www.instagram.com/bluegarret/
https://bsky.app/profile/kristentate.bsky.social
https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebluegarret/
https://www.youtube.com/@BlueGarretBooks
Here's the link to that Emma Darwin piece Kristen mentioned about shifting POV: https://emmadarwin.substack.com/p/ten-ways-to-move-point-of-view-and
Here’s an article from Kristen about the S.A. Cosby chapter she mentioned: https://newsletter.thebluegarret.com/p/point-of-view-handoffs-and-the-interplay-of-action-and-interiority-in-king-of-ashes-by-s-a-cosby
And here's a piece about summary in Schwab's Bury Our Bones that relates to our showing vs telling discussion: https://newsletter.thebluegarret.com/p/summary-as-character-development-in-v-e-schwab-s-bury-our-bones-in-the-midnight-soil
Summary & Transcript
Kristen Tate is a freelance editor with over a decade of experience helping authors transform rough drafts into finished books. She holds a PhD in English from Columbia University with a focus on publishing history and is the author of NOVEL STUDY: DECODING THE SECRETS AND STRUCTURES OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION. Returning for her second appearance on the podcast, Kristen walked through five widely repeated writing rules—and explained why each one deserves to be questioned rather than followed blindly.
THE LONGER YOU EDIT, THE FEWER HARD RULES THERE ARE
Kristen opened by observing that many of her clients arrive with a classroom mentality—expecting to be graded on their commas. She encourages them to reframe the relationship: they are hiring her to be the comma expert so they can focus on craft. Among editors, she noted, a recurring realization is that the longer you work with language, the fewer absolutes you find. Fiction in particular rewards flexibility, and the real question is not whether a rule has been followed but whether the language is doing what the book needs it to do for its audience.
ADVERBS ARE NOT THE ENEMY
The familiar prohibition against adverbs has a legitimate core: a strong verb is almost always better than a weak verb propped up by an adverb, and a page dense with -ly words will sound clunky, especially on audio. Kristen also pointed out that adverbs tacked onto dialogue tags often duplicate work the dialogue itself has already done—a sign that the writer is second-guessing their own showing. But the solution is not to strip every adverb. The goal is to notice where they are doing real work and where they are redundant, and to dial back rather than eliminate.
SHOW, DON’T TELL—EXCEPT WHEN TELLING IS THE RIGHT TOOL
Kristen drew a distinction between showing and telling that goes beyond the usual advice. Showing creates visual, filmable scenes; telling encompasses interiority, summary, backstory, and emotional texture—tools that novelists have and screenwriters envy. She cited V.E. Schwab’s THE INVISIBLE LIFE OF ADDIE LARUE (published as BURY OUR BONES IN THE MIDNIGHT SOIL in some editions), which covers five hundred years of its characters’ lives and relies heavily on summary to bridge the gaps between the scenes Schwab wants the reader to witness. Telling, Kristen argued, is the salad dressing—the element that makes all the other ingredients come together. Elizabeth George’s mnemonic THAD (Talking Head Avoidance Devices) is useful for remembering to keep scenes grounded in setting and action, but the deeper craft is knowing when to shift from showing into a character’s thoughts, memories, or emotions.
PASSIVE VOICE HAS ITS USES
Kristen acknowledged that passive voice can dilute prose and obscure who is acting—the reason politicians reach for constructions like “mistakes were made.” In fiction, active verbs generally carry more force. But she identified situations where passive voice is the better choice: when the actor is unknown or unimportant, or when the writer deliberately wants to withhold that information. Her example was a mystery in which the point-of-view character notices a red Ferrari parked in a neighbor’s driveway. “There was a red Ferrari parked next door” keeps the spotlight on the car, which is the important detail; tap-dancing around the passive construction to identify who parked it would be clumsy and beside the point. Matty added that passive voice can also serve an unreliable narrator, allowing a writer to hold back information grammatically for a later reveal.
PROGRESSIVE VERB FORMS CREATE IMMEDIACY
The advice to avoid “-ing” verbs (progressive forms like “she was running” instead of “she ran”) follows similar logic to the passive voice rule: the simpler form is more forceful. But Kristen pointed out that progressive forms do something the simple past cannot—they drop the reader into an action that is still unfolding. “Matty ran” reports a completed event; “Matty was running” places us in the middle of it. That quality makes progressive forms especially useful for opening an action scene or layering backstory and interiority over a sense of ongoing motion. As with every other tool, the key is moderation: used sparingly and intentionally, the progressive form creates immersion; overused, the repeated -ing becomes its own distraction.
PROLOGUES, EPILOGUES, AND CHRONOLOGY
Kristen traced the anti-prologue sentiment to a legitimate concern: prologues that deliver a block of backstory delay the reader’s investment in the protagonist’s current problem. The better approach is usually to strip that backstory out and weave it in small chunks after the hook. But she cited Jane Harper’s THE DRY as an example of a prologue that works—a single page in omniscient point of view that ends with a devastating image of a crying baby alone in a house full of dead bodies and blowflies. It succeeds because it is short, stylistically distinct from the rest of the novel, and functions as a hook rather than an information dump. She also suggested that some prologues would work better simply labeled as Chapter One, and that writers with long backstories might consider restructuring their chronology—as Rebecca Roanhorse does in BLACK SUN—rather than front-loading it. On epilogues, Kristen noted that readers are more forgiving because they have already committed to the book but cautioned that if the epilogue is doing the work of wrapping up the main story, it should probably just be the last chapter.
HEAD-HOPPING AND THE EVOLUTION OF POINT OF VIEW
The conversation closed with what Kristen called the most historically contingent of the rules: never switch point of view within a scene. She traced the convention from the omniscient narrators of nineteenth-century fiction through the head-hopping common in thrillers of the 1970s and 1980s to the current preference for deep, close point of view. But she noted signs that the pendulum may be swinging back, citing omniscient narration in recent literary fiction by Lauren Groff (MATRIX) and Maggie O’Farrell (THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT), and a skillful mid-scene POV handoff in S.A. Cosby’s KING OF ASHES. She recommended Emma Darwin’s blog post “10 Ways to Move Point of View in a Scene” as a resource for writers interested in experimenting with the technique.
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 Kristen Tate. Hey, Kristen, how are you doing?
[00:00:05] Kristen: Hey, Matty. I’m great. How are you doing?
[00:00:07] Matty: I am doing great. And just to give our listeners, I viewers, a little, reminder of you. Kristen Tate has been a freelance editor for over a decade, helping authors transform their work
She has a PhD in English from Columbia University with a focus on publishing history. She’s the author of NOVEL STUDY: DECODING THE SECRETS AND STRUCTURES OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION, and writes regular newsletter. Very good newsletter full of craft advice and encouragement for authors. And Kristen was on the podcast fairly recently, back in episode 322 when we talked about becoming a better writer by being a
And I think. as is the case with most of my returning guests, this episode came about because at some point we mentioned something in that episode and thought, oh, we have to get together and talk about that
[00:00:51] Matty: and the thing that came up was writing rules. You can break and, I love this topic.
I think I’ll, post a link to this episode. Well, I don’t even have a link to this episode in the show notes. Very early on in the podcast, I had one of these like, what rules can you, can you ignore? which was fun, but high time to get back to it. yeah.
[00:01:10] Kristen: Everyone loves to break rules.
[00:01:11] Matty: Yes. Yes, exactly.
And I think that the only, you know, I’ve heard many people who are very experienced in this, profession, say the only, the only hard and fast rule is that there are no hard and fast rules. So, it’s always good to take a look at, these things and make sure that we’re not following something just because we’ve heard it from someone we think
[00:01:30] Kristen: Yeah, a hundred percent.
[00:01:32] Matty: So, you suggested a couple of, writing rules that we should talk about, but I’m also curious just to, provide some context about how you see this playing out. Just generally, not rule specific, but generally among your editing clients, like, do people tend to adhere to the rules early because they don’t really know the ropes Or maybe later in their career because they’ve become like,they’ve
[00:01:57] Kristen: Yeah, I, I see it play out in a number of ways. Like, I think, especially for, writers who haven’t worked with an editor before, they often come to me with a frame of like, this is gonna be like English class and I’m going to be graded on my commas, or all
and I try to really, it’s hard to break people out of that, but I try to remind them that actually. Like they are hiring me to fix their commas. They are hiring me to be the comma expert, to be their like comma guru. I am not right. Like when I change something and track changes, that’s not like a, a red mark, right?
It’s not gonna go against their, their grade. So part of it’s just shifting the frame and then I think also encouraging people to kind of loosen up their sense of what a rule even is, right? As you were just saying, I think many people come to me and they, come from, writing in another field, and maybe that just was essays back in school where, you know, or even, nonfiction where there are more hard and fast rules, or very formal writing or, writing reports or something like that.
and fiction is just,The kind more rules you look at the bendier they seem and the more gray area there is. and I think, When I talk to fellow editors, that’s one of the things that we all kind of notice is like, the longer we do, we do this work, the, the fewer hard and fast rules there, there seem to be.
So part of it is just like helping people understand that language is changing, right? We’re not coming at this from like a. Constructivist, we are gonna like, hold fast to these language rules. We’re really coming at it from a, like, what, what does the language need to do for
Where do you wanna push the boundaries? If you wanna, if you wanna push the boundaries of language change, right? Like that’s, this is one way
[00:03:51] Matty: Yeah, I think it’s, interesting that there’s this kind of theme that’s come up in my last couple of conversations that is you should know the rules of the road and then break them intentionally, not break them unintentionally, and.
so if, if there’s some hard and fast rule air quotes, that you’re hearing, you should be aware of that, but not necessarily be bound by it. because you’ll need to recognize that some contingent of readers will think you’ve made a mistake if you break that rule. And it’s also interesting ’cause earlier today I was, I was formatting a book for a
And so the, the thing was going from like word to vellum and I noticed that. word and Vellum were flagging different words as incorrect. so even like the authoritative sources aren’t agreeing on something as as simple as like sort of straightforward grammatical rules. So, yeah, if even the, if even the theoretical experts are disagreeing, then that
[00:04:52] Kristen: Yeah.
[00:04:53] Kristen: And also, when I’m doing a, a copy edit or a line edit for a client, we talk about what, what the style guides, are, are gonna be to start with like, Chicago Manual of Style is kind of the basic for most copy editors in the us. But it’s built for nonfiction
But you know, depending on where the, the author is based or where the characters are from, we might use a different dictionary, right? Like, what are our spelling conventions gonna be? So it’s more about tailoring it, like which rules are the correct rules for this book and
[00:05:27] Matty: Yeah.
Yeah. The other example that popped into my head is I had a friend who got some feedback from. An editor that said in a sentence like she said that she was going to the store. They were striking out that in all those situations, so it was saying, she said she was going to the store, but there are certain automated spell checkers that it flag, it would flag that sentence as erroneous unless you put that, that in.
At which case, at which point it would think the sentence was okay. So,
[00:05:57] Kristen: yeah, and that’s the other, Some. That’s the other thing I kind of see with my clients. I can tell which ones have used a program like ProWritingAid, for example, which I actually like. If you’re gonna use any of them, I think that’s the one to use.
It is if you’re a fiction writer. Mm-hmm. in particular, it is really built for fiction. however, if you correct it to reach their a hundred percent score, you’re actually, you’ve probably overcorrected, right? So go through it. Notice what they’re saying, but there are some rules that, we might address today.
Like they, they flag every adverb, that’s something we, we talked about last time. Like, you don’t need to take out every adverb, you might need to dial it back. You probably don’t wanna take out every single one, because then you might be introducing new problems. Right. Passive
[00:06:45] Matty: Yeah.
[00:06:47] Matty: Well, let’s start out with the, with the classic no adverbs, So what do you think is the legitimate part of that
[00:06:56] Kristen: Yeah, I think, some of it is, like the legitimate part is that, sometimes a writer will lean on an adverb when the better choice is a stronger verb, right?
Stronger, more dramatic verb. So that’s one thing to notice. the other thing to notice. That is definitely true for this, piece of advice is that adverbs will stick out, especially if you are reading aloud or you’re listening to an an audio book because of the ly, right? So if
10 adverbs, the reader’s going to hear that repetition and it is gonna feel a little clunky. So that’s a case where you would want to dial it back, like figure out which ones are the most important. and sometimes it’s a craft thing too. I find sometimes writers, they’ve already
But they’re, they are adding the adverb to also tell us just in case we didn’t get it from the showing. Yeah. And so it’s, it’s, it they’re
[00:08:00] Matty: Yeah. There’s, I think, I can’t remember if it was in our conversation or another conversation where I was saying that, my dream is to have people who will, be advanced readers and read my
And then just stick in little notes about. Whatever they’re experiencing at that moment and having someone say like, yeah, I got it the first time in that circumstance, I think would be, would be very
[00:08:23] Kristen: Yeah. Well, and that’s, I mean that’s, your editor’s primary job too is to kind of be that stand in for the reader and we’re using our instincts and our ears and all of that too, to flag
[00:08:34] Matty: Yeah, I think that kind of thing is a lot easier to hear than to see on a page. And so if you’re reading a sentence or a scene out loud and it’s like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, he said, angrily, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. She responded, irritated, go blah, blah, blah, blah. He re, he rebutted with irritation.
it’s, it just jumps out at you when you’re hearing it.
[00:08:54] Kristen: Yeah, and I think, I mean, your examples are exactly right, like pay extra attention to adverbs that are just tacked onto the, the end of a dialogue tag, right? Because there’s so many better things you can do. Right? Get that emotion into the dialogue line itself, or add an action tag that shows us that character being angry,
Yeah. Or if we’re in that, that person’s point of view, like, like you can tell us through interiority, like that’s a great example of like,
[00:09:23] Matty: Yeah. So show don’t tell is another one of those things that writers are always hearing and. And again, let’s
[00:09:35] Kristen: I mean, it is generally good advice, right? You want,
[00:09:39] Matty: like you don’t want to have two heads in an empty room just talking at one another. the mystery writer, Elizabeth George has this great mnemonic that I, I use all the time.
[00:09:49] Kristen: It’s called she. Refers to Thad talking head avoidance devices. So really just having like something happening in a scene, like if you just need, two characters to have a conversation, like you want that to not be happening kind of in a blank box. So like. Put them in a setting, have them do something, have something visual, for the reader to visualize if this was filmed, like, think about like
Right? It also kind of adds to the, the realism effect that you want to achieve. on the other hand, you’re not, you’re writing a novel. You’re not writing a screenplay. so this is where I think writers can take it too far, especially if they have been doing more watching than reading. They forget that there are tools that we get to use as novelists that actually screenwriters they would kill for, right?
It’s very hard for screenwriters to use interiority, right? They have to reach for things like voiceover or things like that that can be a little clunky, but it’s very easy, especially if we’re writing. in kind of close first point of view or close third point of view, where we’re really deep in a character’s perspective, very easy to just kind of layer in, a detail about what a, a character’s thinking, a memory that they have or how they’re feeling about something, an emotion that they’re feeling, or a little bit of a memory that might be coming up.
All of that is telling, right? You can’t, you can’t film it. There’s nothing, it’s thoughts, there’s nothing for, for readers to, to see. And yet it just adds depth and texture. It makes your characters feel real. It makes your story world feel real. and then the other thing that
Right. so I’ve just been working on,the V.E. Schwab novel, BURY OUR BONES IN THE MIDNIGHT SOIL, which we, I have a NOVEL STUDY book group last year, and we read that and it’s, it’s fantastic. It’s also a enormous, it’s like 500 pages and she covers I think half a, like 500
[00:11:56] Matty: Yeah.
[00:11:57] Kristen: And so it has this vast scope. And in order to get us to this, the, the bits that she wants us to see in these, the lives of these very long lived characters, Schwab uses a lot of summary, because we need to know a tiny little bit about what’s happened in like, say the last hundred years of this character’s life.
But not all of it. and that’s, that’s a telling tool, right? So sometimes we need those tools. it’s, it’s kind of like if you think about, I dunno, building a salad or a sandwich, right? You, you need like the salad dressing, you need the mustard. You need those, those little bits that kind of make everything kind of come together and sing.
[00:12:37] Matty: Yeah, I was just wrestling with one aspect of show Don’t tell. I guess it’s, I think of it as show don’t tell. It was that I had a very short scene where I needed to have one character relay some information to another character so that that other character had it for a subsequent scene. And it was very, it was very short, and
That the reader had seen happen to that first character. And so I thought, oh, well, I’m just gonna ax that. And then in the subsequent scene I will have the character say, you know, she looked through the texts that her brother had sent her, letting her know that blahdi blah. And so I started writing that out and, and that also didn’t seem quite right, like then.
That seemed too, sort of just expository or, Awkward, but, but I couldn’t think of a good, like they both had downsides. It was just this piece of information that I need to convey to the To the reader that the one character got the information, and I also kind of have to convey that she got the information accurately, that nothing was lost in translation when she got the information from the other character.
And I, I’m gonna go back and forth like half a dozen times on this ’cause I just don’t see how either showing the person, giving her the information or just telling that the second character got the information, both seems kind of unsatisfying to satisfy that, plot need.
[00:13:57] Kristen: Yeah, it’s, we all have like those moments in
I think in that case, you kind of think about other tricks that you can use to make it interesting. Right. This is where, again, like, can this be happening? While, like, can that be layered over something else happening? Can it be tucked into a little moment where she’s got a brief break in the action from something else that’s happening in the
You know, she’s doing something and then this comes in and so readers are kind of distracted from the fact that, you’re giving it to us twice. the other option would be to kind of lean into on one side or the other. maybe she has a lot of feelings about, you know, a big reaction
these text messages, and that can be a way to just show us something different, Or, kind of exploit the, like part of what we’re doing all the time as novelists. And I think. We don’t always realize it is like exploit information. Asymmetries, An information gap where one character knows something or has a really different take on something than another
and so that provides instant tension for your readers. It’s really interesting, so that could be another way to kind of lean into it. So like showing us, even though you’ve already shown us. That thing. Show us something different about that thing if possible. Something that
[00:15:22] Matty: Yeah. Yeah, I think that it probably won’t end up being surprising, but I can see it becoming a good, just sort of check in with the reader about where things stand. And I can imagine, forming it in a scene where she reads like one part of the text and then she kind of considers how, like, thinks about that.
and then she reads another line of the text and thinks about that. So you are getting that interiority, you are getting another character’s perspective. and you’re interspersing this. Like he told her these three things, with information that is, is kind of new. But is also recalling for the reader, like, where do things stand now?
[00:15:58] Kristen: Yeah. I think that’s really, that’s really smart and kind of gets people, it’s one of the tricky things with when you’re writing, a mystery or a thriller or anything with a really big scope is, um,making sure your reader isn’t lost in your plot and remembering that, your reader is probably not gonna be reading quite as carefully as, as you are and they are not gonna know the story world as,
So, just get, getting readers back up to speed and trusting that like if a reader finds it boring, that they will skip ahead to the next exciting bit. Yeah,
[00:16:29] Matty: they’ll skim a bit.
[00:16:31] Kristen: Yeah. Um.
[00:16:33] Matty: So I think that another, this brings us another sort of stylistic, guideline, which is avoiding passive voice.
So, again, I think we’re, spoiler alert. We’re gonna say that this isn’t a hard and fast rule, but, talk, talk about the downside of pa,
[00:16:52] Kristen: So, I mean, I think, we’ve, we’ve seen many examples of say like a political figure using passive voice to avoid
Saying something like mistakes were made instead of, I made a mistake. It’s a very, it’s a kind of waffle move. That’s disappointing. Yeah. it’s something we watch for, if someone’s. Messed up. And they’re making an apology. An apology, right? Like, are they actually owning this? Like, do they understand that they messed up or not?
So that’s, I think that’s, and that’s correct. Right? you know, if, if a journalist is writing in that way, for example, we want them to be really clear about who the actor is. Like who shot the gun that killed the guy. Yeah. Right. We don’t, that should be in the headline, Um,
and then for fiction writers, the true part of this is that, active verbs do have more impact, you know, we get the direct form of the verb rather than like the form, you know, with a kind of was in front of it. Like that’s kind of cluttered up and diluted a little bit. So passive voice can dilute your writing and it also can obscure the actor.
But the flip side of that is that sometimes. The person who or thing that did the action is either not important or actually we don’t want to reveal it yet. so for example, if you’re writing a mystery novel and your character, your point of view character has like just, pulled up at their house, they’re driving their car and they notice that there’s a red Ferrari parked in the neighbor’s driveway, right?
It’s fine to say. There was a red Ferrari parked next door. they don’t, maybe they know that their neighbor doesn’t drive a red Ferrari, but they don’t know who parked that car there, and it’s not material. so I have seen cases where, a writer has like done a bunch of like, kind of clumsy tap dancing to avoid the passive voice.
When sometimes it’s absolutely fine and actually what you want, because the important part of that information is the red Ferrari. So like, let’s just highlight that and get to that, without worrying about now
[00:19:03] Matty: Yeah. And I can also imagine in a, Unreliable narrator kind of story that you could use passive voice to fun effect.
absolutely. Like setting an expectation with a reader that they think they know who is taking the action, and yet you’re grammatically,
[00:19:19] Kristen: Yeah. it’s, it’s a tool, right? And we get to use it as long as we are aware of how we’re using it and what effect
[00:19:27] Matty: Another sort of stylistic, piece of advice we’ll hear is avoid, progressive, verb forms like ING words. can you just give an example of, of what you mean by that and then, where that
[00:19:41] Kristen: Yeah. I mean, this is, again, this is very similar to passive voice, so, a progressive forum is like I was running.
Right. or whatever character is running, Matty—Matty is running. it’s, it’s basically you’re, you’ve got two, two words. You’ve kind of broken or like diluted the verb across two words rather than one. if you’re writing a past ha tense, it would be Matty ran, right?
So Matty ran is more forceful, however, Matty is running. Drops us into the scene, right? If you start a scene that way, we are running with you, you are in the middle of the action, right? Or, and this works in past tense too. Matty was running, right? So there are, there are times when you want to, to draw your reader right into the action and make it clear that this is an action that we’re in the middle of, and
We’re, we’re, we’re here, we’re still running. There’s other stuff happening, but we’re running. yeah,
[00:20:42] Matty: I like that. I often, when I’m arguing with my editor about this, I am tapping into that idea that it’s an in-progress action. but I never really thought about the. Reader experience of that? I was thinking of it more just mechanically or logistically like it’s,
So it made more sense to me to use I an ING word, but that idea of the involvement of the reader I think is a very cool observation.
[00:21:09] Kristen: And again, you don’t wanna use it every time, right? Save this for, say, an action scene or save it for a scene where actually you have a bunch of backstory or some interiority that you wanna layer in, but you wanna kind of give some, you, you wanna give the
Amidst all of that, use it in one of those scenarios. You know, don’t reach for it every single time. Use a verb. ’cause that would be. Annoying. And again, the, the ING, just like the ly, if you’re using it over and over again, a little bit of repetition can actually be cool, right? Just like we, like parallel sentences that come in threes.
three is good. If you’ve got more than that, someone might get
[00:21:52] Matty: I remember somewhere reading, I think it was a piece of dialogue in a book, but that it was like a conversation between a writer and someone else. And the, the other person said, you writers really like things in groups of three, don’t you?
It, in fact,
[00:22:07] Kristen: our brains like it. Yeah. It’s just the
[00:22:11] Matty: Yeah.
[00:22:12] Matty: So we’re gonna move from, sort of stylistic things to more structural things. and I know this one is gonna be a fun one. Don’t include a prologue. Where do you think this came from?
[00:22:24] Kristen: I mean, I think a lot of people have a lot of
I’ve heard a lot of feelings about this from agents in particular that,you know, especially like kind of first time novelists. can want to, like, they know that there’s a crucial piece of backstory that you know, is gonna reveal their protagonists, like life history and their
And because it is. Backstory, meaning that it happens before the real action of, of the story. One, impulse is to put it into a prologue and start the reader there. and that can, the, this is like the good reason for the, the rule is that. that can delay the reader, really getting invested in the protagonist’s current problem, right?
We have to wait for a long time to find out what their actual situation is. So that’s why I think many people say, just strip that off and not strip it off and like, forget about it, strip it off, and then artfully weave it in small chunks into your story. After you’ve started the action, right after we know what your protagonist is up against, like after we’ve seen, their big problem and we’re curious about it after you’ve hooked us, then start to give us some more of that backstory that we’re gonna need to understand, the choices that they’re gonna
[00:23:51] Kristen: all of that said, I’m sure you could look at your bookshelves and pull off a book and find, a novel that has a very successful prologue. but again, you need to know what this tool is for and why you are using it. So prologues I’ve seen that are very
Right. often they do something that’s stylistically really different from the rest of the book. the one I was just thinking about the other day, that’s a novel I wanna revisit is, really great like mystery slash thriller novel called THE DRY by Jane Harper. And, you know, we start with, the discovery of the bodies and we see it in the prologue.
It’s very short. It’s one page and it’s actually kind of in. Omniscient point of view, we’re, we have a kind of, kind of disembodied narrator and we’re seeing, we’re entering this house and we’re actually, if we’re kind of in anyone’s point of view, it’s these blowflies that are there, kind of gravitating towards these.
Bodies that are there, it’s very creepy. very effective. and then at the very end of the prologue,we’re told that this house is empty. or we’re, we’re told actually that there’s not another living heart within thousands of miles, I think is the phrasing. And then the very last line of the prologue is something like, and then a baby starts to
I mean, it, it really packs a whammy. Yeah. So we’ve got, a baby alone in this house with all of these dead bodies and these blowflies. So we know that they’ve been there for a while. It’s very effective and sets the stage. So, prologues can work, but you just need to really know. Why, why you’re doing it, and making sure that it’s part of what’s hooking the reader and not information that you are very, very eager for the reader to know, right?
So figure out which, which it, which it is, and just, be very careful. You only get those first few pages to really capture your reader and you don’t wanna throw them away on a backstory that’s less exciting than,
[00:26:02] Matty: Yeah, there’s all sorts of thoughts about that.
[00:26:06] Matty: One is that, I’m not sure this would be called a prologue, but I’m realizing that, I think of prologue as two things.
One is like stuff that happened in the past that we need the reader to know. We think we need, we need the reader to know, to set up the story. And then I think the other one is that it’s happening in the future and you give people a glimpse and then you go back in time like 10 years
Prologue that you described could be like that. I mean, I don’t know if it is, but it could be,what led up to this happening as opposed to this is setting the stage for stuff that’s gonna happen in the future. And I would think that the danger there is that, especially like. If you read that prologue that you’ve just described and you turn the page in the next chapter is, you know, Jane flipped the eggs in the griddle and, wondered if she should have wheat toast or rye, then that, that’s so
It can be so jarring to go from that like hooky sort of prologue to, now we’re, taking care of the shoe leather. I can imagine that could be, not a reason not to do a prologue, but one of the things you have to
[00:27:11] Kristen: Yeah,
[00:27:11] Matty: palatable.
[00:27:12] Kristen: Absolutely. Yeah. You have to think, you have
I mean, the other thing to think about is, should your prologue just be chapter one, right?
[00:27:23] Matty: Yeah.
[00:27:23] Kristen: That’s often the case is that,it might be something about the material, but it actually just could be that. This is chapter one, and then we go back in time for chapter two.
[00:27:34] Kristen: or it could point to, what you’re, you realize that your story has a slow start and a slow start can be fine.
Right? We, there are many successful novels that, that just have a really gradual build. Tana French is THE SEARCHER is one that I can think of, and it’s, it’s very deliberate. but if that’s not what you want, you might need to like actually kind of. mix up your entire chronology, especially if you’re writing like a fantasy or something
I’m thinking about, the fantasy novel BLACK SUN by Rebecca Roanhorse, where, It’s a very complex story and she’s very deliberate about where she drops us in. And it’s not in chronological order. We actually kind of jump ahead to this, like, the climax, we see the climax of the novel, from one character’s point of view, and then we kind of jump.
Several weeks back in time to kind of the beginning of the main thread of the novel, and then after that we jump way back in time to something that could, well, in a previous version of that, that novel been a much more extended prologue that covers the entire backstory. That is
We really need to have it. But instead of giving it in one big chunk, she takes us straight to the like, you know, we see something really exciting is gonna happen. We don’t know quite what to make of it yet. Then we get oriented in the present day timeline, and then she chunks up
Gives it to us, as we, as we’re on this kind of larger timeline journey. So every once in a while we’re dipping back in time. that’s something Laura Dave also does that in THE LAST THING HE TOLD ME. we kind of, jump back to the backstory in standalone chapters, but we’re never
So if you have this long prologue, that’s another thing to think about. Like, do I just need to. You know, do I need to mix up my chronology in some way so that I can really get readers hooked into the story and like
[00:29:40] Matty: Yeah. I do like the idea about, do you not call
Even if you then have to start out chapter two with 10 years later or
[00:29:51] Kristen: Yeah,
[00:29:52] Matty: 10 years earlier, whatever that might be. because then it seems more integral to the, to the story and not just like prologue often. Feels to me as a reader, like it was something that was just bolted on. yeah. And if I jump into chapter one and it has this sort of providing backstory or providing four story or whatever you would call that, then I don’t mind that I, I’d rather see it presented as a, just a chapter.
[00:30:14] Kristen: Yeah. Yep.
[00:30:16] Matty: Does any of this carry over to epilogue? So I just read a book that had an epilogue, like I got to the end of the last chapter and I was like, huh, well that’s interesting. And then the, the next thing was an epilogue and it had a lot of the wrap up that I was looking for. are, are any of these things we’re talking about related to prologues, also applicable to epilogues?
[00:30:34] Kristen: That’s a really good question. Um, well, so one thing is. Like readers will give you a lot more grace with an epilogue than they will with a prologue, right? Because they’ve made it to the end. in the situation you described, it actually sounds like that should have been the last chapter, right?
If they haven’t really wrapped up the story and it takes the epilogue to do that. I really think of the epilogue as. Again, like a prologue, something that exists outside of the mainframe of the story. Right? So, in a romance novel, for example, it’s very common for us to see an epilogue where, we’ve had the, the happy ending.
Like they’ve figured, they’ve figured everything out, they’re together, and then the epilogue shows us a snapshot of them being. Being happy, right? Yeah. Like five years down the road or whatever.
[00:31:23] Matty: Yeah.
[00:31:23] Kristen: it also, if you’re writing a series, this can be a place where you drop a really fun breadcrumb for the next book in
So I, I work with an author who writes zombie horror novels and he does this very successfully, where we just get like a little bit of a scene where we can’t tell exactly what’s gonna happen, but we’re like. Oh, oh, no. Like they’re safe for now. But this other thing that they don’t know about is, is, is percolating.
So that can, it’s a way of like pulling readers,you’ve, you’ve, you’ve finished, but you wanna pull them a little bit further into the
[00:31:56] Matty: Yeah, I have done that in my Lizzie Ballard thrillers where I’ve wrapped up the story and I think I presented as a, an epilogue because I want it to be very clearly separate from, it’s kind of like a slightly more, literary equivalent of, in the next adventure of Lizzie Ballard, such and such.
But I’m like in, in essence, kind of giving them the first chapter of the next story. And I even did that at the end of the, what will be the last book, book six. I had that kind of thing because I couldn’t help myself and I kind of wanted, because I intend to continue the series,
I wanted to pull people into that, but I also kind of wanted to, Just let them know that whether it ever showed up on the page or not, the
[00:32:37] Kristen: Yeah. I think and I,
[00:32:38] Matty: I have fun with those as a reader and
[00:32:40] Kristen: it’s really fun and you get to experiment with it again like you can. Um, it’s a place where.
You like readers will expect that the rules are off, all bets are off. This is an epilogue. It could be anything. So you could shift to a point of view that you’ve never written from before and that you won’t dip into again. That can be really fun. I’ve had an, I had an author once,
You. And it was really cool and really fun and she pulled it off. So like it’s just a fun place for you as an author to kind of play around a little bit and try, try something.
[00:33:20] Matty: Yeah. Yeah. now I’ll have to go back to that book, which is, has been in the early reader drawer for a little while. ’cause now I wanna go back and play with that last chapter.
[00:33:31] Kristen: Yeah. See what else you can get away with.
[00:33:33] Matty: Yeah. Um,
[00:33:37] Matty: and I think also that. I can imagine kind of a, a mechanical purpose of an epilogue of labeling. Something as an epilogue is that, especially with eBooks, because you don’t have that tactile sense that you’re getting near the end, I can imagine that
Convey to the reader that this is gonna be the last chapter. and so read it accordingly as opposed to, oh, that was interesting, that was interesting. And then they turn the page and they realize the book is over. it’s too bad that you can’t, I mean, unless you’re tracking the percentages on the screen of your e-reader, I’ve, I’ve run into that where I’ve gotten to the end of the book and I was like, wait, what?
And then I paged back electronically, back and forth a little bit to make sure I haven’t, like paged too far ahead. But it would be kind of a marker to say like, this is the last thing you’re gonna be hearing
[00:34:24] Kristen: Yeah, I think that’s true. Although I think, I think that’s a craft issue if that’s happened, right?
[00:34:31] Matty: Yeah, for sure.
[00:34:32] Kristen: sometimes, sometimes like, authors forget that we need kind of some falling action after the climax. Yeah. Right? Like, we need to get everyone kind of reoriented. This is also the place where you get to kind of lean back into your theme, right? Like the action is
Your readers actually wanna stay with you for at least a few more pages. Yeah. And so, thinking about why you wrote the book in the first place and coming back to that and maybe having, your protagonist or another character be thinking about that or voicing it or, or showing it in some
Like what’s a final scene that kind of encapsulates your theme? Like, where can you put these, these characters as they are. kind of coming back to earth after your earth shattering climax, right? Yeah, yeah. so I think if you have had a, the experience where you’re like, wait, this is over, then, I don’t know, maybe the, the writer missed that, that
[00:35:28] Matty: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:35:31] Matty: So, we’ve come to the last of the, writing rules you can break, to discuss. And this is gonna be interesting because this is one that I would say, oh, well, yeah, sure. This is just, this is just a rule, like there’s no reason to, to not to violate this rule. And it is never switch point of view within a scene.
I think this is because I got this hammered into my head so much by my editor. That I’m very aware of it as a writer and also very aware of it as a reader. And it makes me crazy, especially if I’m reading like a very well-respected, critically acclaimed book and suddenly they’re like popping between people’s brains and I think, oh my gosh, how could
So, talk a little bit about why that is often a rule, but how maybe it
[00:36:14] Kristen: Yeah, so part of this is like helpful just to like, think about where we. like how we came to this point. and this is kind of where my academic background is helpful. So I, when I was an academic, I specialized in the 19th century British novel, and there we
Everyone’s heads, right? Like that omniscient narrator is in everyone’s business tells us all about it, right? Think about Dickens Austin. They know what’s happening everywhere, and they will tell us, but also that narrator has kind of a voice and a presence. Now the novel being, it’s a novel, right? There’s a reason we, we call it this way,
So even if you read, say, a thriller from like the 1970s or eighties, you’ll see something that to us we would now identify as head hopping, right? we’re, we’re clearly kind of primarily with this protagonist, but all of a sudden we’re able to like see into the bad guys’ thoughts. And that’s in part because we, in the last, I would say like 20 years have really gravitated towards like, really close, deep in POV
I think part of that is, I don’t know, hard, hard to know why that style has changed. I think it’s something about wanting to get closer to characters and also kind of understanding how different people are. Right. and, and, and really wanting to get a kind of closer view of the
That said like, the novel’s gonna keep changing. And I definitely, like, as I’ve been reading in the last couple years, I have taken note of, some trends and you’ll see it often first in literary fiction. So, we’ve seen some big literary fiction books. Where, the author’s using
Lauren Groff’s MATRIX is one. THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT by Maggie O’Farrell, who also is the author of HAMNET. That was, just up for an award is another, and omniscient point of view. A again, we’ll kind of hop around, but it, this omniscient point of view feels different now if
What is typical, not what like the literary fiction people might be trying out as an experiment. I am seeing commercial fiction writers, genre fiction writers play a little bit more with point of view, but do it, really carefully. So, S.A. Cosby’s novel, KING OF ASHES, which is. Very, very good and very like squarely commercial.
very well done. He does this really cool kind of point of view handoff in one scene where we have two characters, a brother and a sister. They’re together. We are clearly in the brother’s point of view. We’ve had a lot of his interior thoughts and then, The sister gets ready to leave the scene where they’re both in and she walks out the
We are then in her thoughts as she drives off, and it’s so clever. It feels very seamless, because, Cosby is kind of careful to, like, he doesn’t go straight from. The brother’s thoughts to the sister’s thoughts. There are some interim steps where we’re in the brother’s thoughts and then we’re just getting kind of neutral setting description, action description that’s not colored by, his interiority
And then we get kind of the same with the sister, kind of, doing these actions and then we get her interiority and also importantly. We don’t go back, we don’t hop back to the brother in the same scene. Once we move to the sister, we stay there. Um, so the, the writer, Emma Darwin, has this fantastic blog post, that actually just should be an entire book, I think called, 10 Ways to Move Point of View in a scene.
I think I’ll, I’ll send you the link so you can put it in the show notes. but there are many ways you can do this. You just have to be, again, you have to know what you’re doing. Do it once. Do it really carefully and have a reason for doing it right. Don’t just kind of do
[00:40:14] Matty: Well, I just have to say that I just saw S.A. Cosby at the Beta Ocean Writers Conference this past weekend, and he was, so charming and so funny and so inspirational, and I’ve been trying to figure out how I can reach out to him to invite him to the
And what I’m gonna do is send him, this, this interview with a timestamp for, when you started saying such nice things about him and I followed up with more nice things. We’ll see if we can’t get Sean on the, on the podcast through that. but for point of view, I think that where it’s jarring to me, like if it’s very consistently omniscient, I
It’s more jarring when it feels to me like someone for whom that’s not the natural way that, that I write or read when it just pops in. like I was reading something earlier today, and it was clearly from,person a’s point of view. And at the end it said, and then he disappeared into the
You really can’t have him disappearing into the forest unless in that last sentence, it’s from the other PO point of view of the person who’s watching him. And I think it’s those little trip ups where it doesn’t feel like I could think about that and say, is there some
Not that I can think of. So I think maybe it’s that, that sense of intentionality and consistency in its application versus, you’ve gotten through 97 pages and on page 98 there’s this weird thing about like
[00:41:41] Kristen: Right? Or is he like literally about to disappear, right?
Yeah. Some of this, for me as an editor, I would kind of, I would go look forward and see, okay, what’s coming next is that, a deliberate distancing because we are going to move into the point of view of a character. whose point of view we haven’t been in before, and the
But sometimes you can, it is just a slip up because the, the author. it is the author watching the character rather than being in the character and writing from that, from that perspective. And it’s, it’s hard to juggle all of those hats, especially if you’re doing a multi POV novel.
[00:42:19] Matty: Well, I do think that maybe a, a learning at the base of all this is that getting back to the, you can violate the rules, but you should know you’re violating them. Is that, I think that more people. Straight. I don’t even wanna say straight. They decide to not
for legitimate creative purposes, they just need to be aware that you’re sort of attracting attention to the language by doing that or attracting the attention to some other aspect of the book, like the structure, whatever that might be. In a way that is either desirable or maybe not desirable. Like if you’re writing something where a thriller, where you people want people to be really engaged in the action and then suddenly you’re doing something weird language wise, maybe that’s not
Whereas if you’re writing like a memoir or something, where attention to the language is what you’re going for, then. Using those variations from the guidelines can be exactly what you want, because now you’re attracting attention where otherwise a reader’s eye might just breeze
[00:43:25] Kristen: And I think that’s always that, like, that’s your final arbiter is the reader. Right? it can be hard for writers to, to put themselves in the reader’s head just because you have such deep familiarity with. Your creative world and your and your characters, but this is where an editor or a beta readers can kind of clue you in.
like if you’ve done something experimental like that and you’re not sure how it’s gonna land, get a reader in there to tell you, because that’s, Unless you are trying to confuse and disorient your reader, that’s, that’s generally not the, not the goal. And you know, if that’s what’s happened, then you have to go back and, and rethink what you’re, what you’re doing.
it’s, it’s fine to break the rule if it has the effect, the intended effect on the reader. Right. If it doesn’t have the attendant effect, then there is no point in you breaking the rule, right?
[00:44:19] Matty: Yeah. This is one where. It would be great to have a very, very cooperative beta. Reader and give them like a chapter of this sort of avant garde thing that you’re thinking of doing, and have them read it out loud and feel free to like editorialize, like
Or, oh, that’s so cool, or I have no idea what’s going on. Or it annoys me that you use commas in that way, or whatever it might be.
[00:44:41] Kristen: Yeah, it’s tricky because you have to also know kind of where your beta reader is coming from and are they a constructivist or a instructivist when it comes to their comma usage,
[00:44:52] Matty: Yeah, exactly. Well, so fun.
[00:44:54] Matty: I’m so glad we got together again and we’re gonna have a third conversation coming up. I’ll have that be a little secret about what that’s gonna be about, but I know people will look forward to that. so Kristen, thank you again and please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do
[00:45:08] Kristen: Yeah, so my name is Kristen Tate and my business name is The Blue Garret, so you can find everything, at my website, the TheBlueGarret.com. I have a twice weekly newsletter that’s. Full of just kind of my musings about how, how are we, how’s the writing going these days? and that’s also where I linked to my NOVEL STUDY posts, and everything else I’m doing.
So that’s the best way to find me and keep up with what I’m up to.
[00:45:31] Matty: Great. Thank you so much.
[00:45:32] Kristen: Thanks, Matty.