Episode 340 - Interiority: The Secret Sauce of Good Fiction with Kristen Tate
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Kristen Tate discusses INTERIORITY: THE SECRET SAUCE OF GOOD FICTION, including how to calibrate the depth of interiority across multiple point-of-view characters; the difference between overt and subtle interiority, and why the “she thought” tag is usually unnecessary; how interiority functions as the glue that connects plot events and reveals character motivation; how to use it strategically in action scenes to control pacing; and how it shapes reader experience in unreliable narrator stories and mysteries.
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
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Summary & Transcript
What is it that makes you feel like you truly know a character? Like you’re not just an observer but a fellow traveler inside their experience? In most contemporary fiction, the answer is interiority—the thoughts, feelings, sensory impressions, and interior life that prose can offer in a way no other medium can. In Episode 340 of The Indy Author Podcast, editor and book coach Kristen Tate returned to talk with host Matty Dalrymple about why interiority is the secret sauce of good fiction, and how to use it with skill and intention.
WHAT INTERIORITY IS—AND WHY IT MATTERS
Interiority, Kristen explains, is everything happening inside a character that only the reader gets access to. In the deep or close point of view that dominates contemporary fiction, we’re privy to a character’s thoughts, reactions, associations, and sensory experience—anything that another person standing in the scene beside them could not observe. It’s the interior life that makes a character feel like a real person rather than a figure moving through events.
That access is one of the great privileges of prose fiction. Screenwriters, Kristen notes, have to convey interiority through performance—the way an actor delivers a line, a shift in expression, a beat of silence. Audiobook narrators do something similar: their interpretation of a line adds a layer of meaning that the text alone doesn’t provide. But in prose, the writer can simply tell us what the character is thinking. The question is how to use that power wisely.
CALIBRATING INTERIORITY ACROSS POV CHARACTERS
In a multi-POV novel, Kristen points out, you have real creative latitude in how much interior access you give each character—and that variation can do meaningful work. Giving readers deeper interiority from one character can signal who your primary protagonist is. Keeping a villain’s POV chapters shallower can preserve mystery and protect the reader from dwelling too long in uncomfortable territory. In romance, where both love interests often have POV, the goal is usually to keep access balanced so we feel equally invested in both perspectives.
Genre also shapes conventions. Literary fiction tends to use more interiority; thrillers tend toward less, in the interest of pacing. But Kristen is quick to note that these lines are blurring—the rise of the literary thriller means books like Liz Moore’s GOD OF THE WOODS can sustain deep interiority across many POV characters while still delivering propulsive plot.
OVERT VS. SUBTLE: THE SPECTRUM OF INTERIORITY
One of the most useful distinctions Kristen draws is between overt and subtle interiority. The overt version—“She thought to herself, that was rude”—can feel clunky in deep POV, where the “she thought” tag is usually unnecessary. If we’re already inside the character’s head, we don’t need to be told we’re receiving her thoughts.
Subtler and more effective is interiority woven into the fabric of voice. When a character’s way of describing the world around her reveals how she thinks—what she notices, what she dismisses, what language she reaches for—the reader is getting interiority without being handed it directly. Kristen offers a vivid example: describing a street as “dumb” is a voice-y choice that tells us something about who this character is. That’s interiority doing double duty as characterization.
Interiority is also one of the most powerful tools around dialogue. Rather than relying on adverbs or action tags to signal how a character feels, a writer can let us into their thoughts in the moment—which is especially effective when what the character is saying diverges from what they’re thinking. That gap immediately generates tension, because the reader is now holding a secret that the other characters in the scene don’t have.
INTERIORITY AS PLOT GLUE
One of Kristen’s most useful framings is the idea of interiority as the glue of your plot. Think of plot events as a chain of cause-and-effect dominoes. Interiority is what bridges one domino to the next—the moment where the protagonist processes what just happened, forms a new understanding of the situation, asks the questions the reader is also asking, and determines what to do next. Without that connective tissue, plot can feel mechanical. With it, the reader understands not just what is happening, but why, and what it means to the person at the center of the story.
That said, Kristen is clear that interiority is not a substitute for plot. It can deepen stakes, but it generally doesn’t generate them. Action, dialogue, and external events are what set the story in motion; interiority helps us feel the weight of what those events mean.
PACING: USING INTERIORITY TO SPEED UP OR SLOW DOWN
Interiority is one of the most effective pacing tools a writer has—but it works in both directions. To slow a scene down and let readers sink into an experience, you lean into interiority. Kristen cites Layne Fargo’s THE FAVORITES, in which a figure-skating competition scene is roughly fifty percent interiority. Fargo’s goal isn’t to describe the routine; it’s to take readers inside the experience of being on the ice, inside a high-stakes romantic relationship, in a moment of intense pressure. The interiority is the point.
For fast-paced action, the approach is nearly inverted. In S.A. Cosby’s KING OF ASHES, a brutal and propulsive action scene uses interiority sparingly—but at key moments, a beat of the protagonist’s interior response—shock, disorientation, the absence of pain—heightens the reader’s experience of the action rather than interrupting it. It’s the difference between a rollercoaster that just keeps spinning and one that drops into a moment of eerie quiet before the next turn.
MYSTERY, UNRELIABLE NARRATORS, AND STRATEGIC WITHHOLDING
In mystery and thriller, interiority requires particular care, because information is the currency of the genre. Kristen’s advice: be very deliberate about which characters get POV access. Giving an antagonist a POV chapter can undermine surprise unless the interiority in those chapters is carefully controlled—short, oblique, and withholding enough to generate suspicion rather than answers. She cites Mick Herron’s SECRET HOURS as an example of this done well: a POV character whose identity is concealed until late in the book.
For writers navigating this tension, Kristen offers a useful distinction: feeling moments are almost always safe, even when thinking moments are not. A character’s emotional responses, sensory associations, and memories can deepen interiority without giving away plot information. Weaving in memory—the way a smell or a landscape calls up a past experience—makes characters feel fully inhabited, like people who exist beyond the edges of the page.
Interiority also shapes how readers calibrate their trust in a narrator. In unreliable narrator novels like YESTERYEAR (Kristen’s current strong recommendation) and THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, the reader is submerged so completely in the protagonist’s point of view that they have no external vantage point from which to question what they’re being told. The unreliability accumulates gradually through interiority—small moments where the protagonist’s interpretation of events doesn’t quite line up with what the reader can observe. Done well, as in GONE GIRL, the shift in perspective when it comes is all the more disorienting for how deeply we’ve been embedded.
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.
Welcome and Guest Intro
[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 so glad to be back.
Baseball Radio Fun Fact
[00:00:07] Matty: It is lovely to have you here, and because you are a returning guest, I’m going to use my new approach, which is returning guests get to, instead of me reading the bio, share a fact about yourself that we might not know.
[00:00:20] Kristen: Yeah. So I am based here in San Francisco, and I think actually not a lot of people know this about me. I am not a sports fan at all, but I am, however, a really obsessive baseball fan, and a San Francisco Giants fan in particular. And I especially love listening to baseball on the radio. For me, it’s like — some people like the sound of thunderstorms; I like the sound of baseball on the radio. I find it very soothing. We know what all the rules are. It’s like a very copy editor-friendly sport, because there are rules for everything. Everything gets squared away nicely in the end. It’s a very tidy package. So that’s my fun fact.
[00:00:57] Matty: On the radio — I always associate the sounds of baseball with the bat striking the ball and things like that. Do you get that level of audio experience on the radio?
[00:01:09] Kristen: Oh, you do. And for some reason it’s even heightened. The wonderful thing about listening on the radio is the announcer narrates it to you, so it’s kind of like a story. I got into this actually because I lived through this massive blackout that probably a lot of people remember in New York City, and the Yankees happened to be traveling out of town, and so the Yankees game was on, and that’s what I had on the radio for entertainment. And I was like, “Actually, I like this.” It kind of — I don’t know — I had this deep sense memory of my grandmother, who was a huge baseball fan and loved listening to baseball on the radio. And the thing I realized is that listening on the radio teaches you about the game because they are narrating what’s happening on the field. When you’re just watching it, I didn’t know what a balk was — when a pitcher is about to throw and then doesn’t throw. I learned all of that naturally just by listening to the games. And the announcers are just old school. Our announcers here in San Francisco — John Miller in particular — are just old-school radio guys, and they just tell fun stories. So it’s just like listening to people you feel like you know, and there are stakes because there’s a game, and you’re getting all these stories along the way.
[00:02:23] Matty: So cool. And I feel certain we’re going to find a way to tie that into the official topic of this week’s conversation.
[00:02:29] Kristen: We can do it.
What Interiority Means
[00:02:31] Matty: Interiority. So you had proposed the title “Interiority: The Secret Sauce of Good Fiction,” which I just love. And it’s interesting, because as you were describing the broadcaster describing what was going on in the game, you know, you can imagine a very literal story interpretation of that, which is kind of like the voiceover or something like that — filling things in that otherwise we would rely on something like interiority to understand. So I think maybe we can loop back at the end and talk more about baseball radio. But just to let us know, when you talk about interiority, what are you talking about?
[00:03:09] Kristen: Yeah. So interiority is — when we’re in deep point of view, close point of view, which is, you know, 90% of current fiction — written in this style where we’re kind of deeply in the point of view of a single character at a time — it’s when we’re getting the thoughts, the feelings, the kind of sensory experiences of that character. Anything that, if you’re in the scene with that character, someone else would not be able to see. It’s anything that’s happening inside, and we’re getting access to it through that interiority.
POV Balance and Genre
[00:03:45] Matty: Is that something that you feel needs to be consistent in a multi-point-of-view book? Like if you have three points of view, is there any expectation that the level of interiority is going to be consistent across the different point-of-view characters?
[00:04:01] Kristen: It really depends, and this is where you can have a lot of fun, actually. So one way, for example, if you have a large cast novel — I would say three-plus characters whose point of view we get access to — you can tip off readers as to who your primary protagonist is by giving us deeper and more access to their interiority and kind of less of some of the other characters. I see people do this a lot with the antagonist or the villain’s POV. Sometimes that’ll be a lot more shallow, in part because it’s — I don’t know — it can be a little unpleasant to be dragged into these motivations that are darker. But it’s also just a way to calibrate. I’m also thinking about rom-coms or romances where sometimes it’ll be single POV, but it’s also very common that both love interests will have point-of-view chapters, and in that case the goal is usually to keep them pretty balanced, so we feel like we are getting both sides of their experience.
[00:05:17] Matty: And are there any conventions with regard to genre — like different genres relying more on interiority than others?
[00:05:25] Kristen: I think it’s a tool that all novels really need, unless you’re doing something very avant-garde. I did hear that the Booker Prize novel this year, which is called FLESH — and I can’t remember the author’s name — one aspect of that book is that it doesn’t have much interiority, and that was the choice of the author, to write this character who doesn’t do a lot of introspection. So that’s interesting. But otherwise I would say more interiority is more associated with literary fiction. But part of what we’re seeing these days, which I personally think is so exciting, is that genres are getting more mixed up, and we’re seeing a lot more things like literary thrillers. I did a bunch of analytical work on Liz Moore’s GOD OF THE WOODS, which was on the bestseller list for months and months last year, and I would call that a literary thriller. It does indeed have a lot of interiority from a lot of different point-of-view characters, and I think that’s part of what makes it skew literary. Interiority does pause the action a little bit. It can slow the pacing. It can also intensify what’s happening on the page. The more there is on the page, the slower the read usually is, and so that’s something we also tend to associate more with literary fiction.
Overt vs. Subtle Interiority
[00:07:04] Matty: I think one conversation that would be helpful — maybe before we dive into things like genre — is when someone is executing on interiority, there’s the flavor that is, “Wow,” she thought to herself, “that was a really rude thing for him to say to me” — that kind of overt, in-your-face, on-the-nose interiority — and then interiority that might be implied by what the person says or what the person does, implied in a more indirect way. Can you talk a little bit about that, and what are the pros and cons, if any, of each of those?
[00:07:41] Kristen: Yeah. And this is where — I mean, we could honestly do an entire episode just on this question or write an entire book on it, because there are so many gradations. In general, unless you’re writing in omniscient narration and you kind of need to flag that this is someone’s thoughts, it’s kind of like filter words, right? We don’t need to get that “she thought” tag, because if you are in deep POV, we just know that this is something the character is thinking. Now, it can be useful to have a character very, very occasionally have a thought — say you’re writing in past tense — that is in present tense, the way it might be in dialogue. So it kind of sounds like they’re saying something to themselves, or they’re having a reaction inside their brain that they’re not going to say out loud, and put that in italics. You don’t want to rely on that too heavily because it’s just kind of a clunky device. It’s like a strong seasoning you can sprinkle in; it’s not something you want to rely on. The other way I really like to see interiority come in is — when we talk about voice, sometimes what we’re actually thinking about is interiority, because we become familiar with the character’s voice through their dialogue but also through their interiority. Are they a very casual person? Are they thinking about things with curse words? How are they describing or narrating the things they are seeing? So sometimes you can get something that’s setting description, but we’re getting it through the character’s voice, so they’re interpreting it a little bit. You know, “there’s this dumb, quiet street outside.” Saying it’s dumb is a very voice-y thing. Like, why does this character think that — why is the street dumb? What makes the street dumb? That kind of thing.
[00:09:46] Matty: It makes me think of the whole show-don’t-tell thing in dialogue. I know that in one sense obviously anything can be taken to extremes, but there’s the whole “Close that door,” he said angrily versus “Close that door,” he said, crossing his arms — which I think is fine, but I get really tired if I’m reading dialogue and people have totally gone in on avoiding adverbs at any cost. I think we talked about this a little bit when we were discussing writing rules you can break, which I guess is more of a showing-or-telling interiority question.
[00:10:25] Kristen: Yeah, exactly. Especially around dialogue, your point-of-view character gets to reveal their inner feelings. For the other characters, you do have to give some other cue — about their facial expression or whatever — to pick up on what’s happening. But that’s not something you have to rely on for your point-of-view character, and I love seeing little hints of interiority woven in around dialogue lines. It’s another way to avoid a dialogue tag, right? You can have the dialogue line and then, you know, “Matty felt blah, blah, blah.” It’s also a really great way — one of the techniques I love seeing with interiority is when a character is saying something that’s at odds with what they’re thinking, and we get the dialogue line and then we get their thoughts, or vice versa. It just immediately adds a jolt of tension because then the reader knows something that the other characters in the scene don’t know, and that’s just kind of delicious. This is partly why we like interiority — we get this kind of secret access. And it kind of raises a story question too, because we’re thinking about whether the character is going to be honest at some point about what they’re feeling. That can play into the plot in really significant ways. Thinking about romance, you don’t want characters who are lying to one another who are going to end up in a relationship together. So when is the truth of that feeling really going to come out? There are all kinds of ways you can add tension and raise stakes through interiority.
[00:12:09] Matty: Are there red flags that would say that a writer is being too explicit — too just laying it out there in terms of interiority? Like the tension created by someone saying something different from what they’re thinking: you could say, “Oh, that’s a beautiful dress,” she said, thinking to herself that it was the ugliest dress she had ever seen. Are there any general tips people can use to understand how to balance the overt expression of the character versus the interior thoughts of the character so that it feels elegant on the page?
[00:12:45] Kristen: Yeah. There are kind of micro levels, which can just be about paying attention to — it’s fine to occasionally have a big chunk, especially if a character is going to go into some kind of memory, or if we need to get — not an info dump, but a layering of some information that we need, and we’re going to get it via interiority. Part of that is thinking about where you’re positioning it. It can be really smart to position it between, say, a character being asked a question and then answering it. First we get this chunk of interiority, so the scene is kind of suspended, but we know there’s going to be movement. Or if you have some kind of continuing action happening in the scene, the interiority can be woven into that. I think the danger zone is when you open a scene with interiority and readers don’t have a chance to get grounded in a setting, an action, or a dialogue exchange. We’re just in the character’s head and we can’t visualize where we are. I’ve seen this happen in first chapters where an author is so eager to tell us so much about their protagonist that, you know, maybe the character is sitting in a room or has just woken up, and it’s really all interiority with no movement. That can delay our engagement with the story, and it can just be very flat and static and boring. Interiority in general doesn’t move, and it can add to the stakes that are already there, but usually — with some exceptions — it’s not generating the stakes.
[00:14:46] Matty: Interesting. I guess maybe at a micro level it is generating stakes, in the sense that if the reader knows the character is saying something that’s not what they believe, that’s sort of a micro stake. But you’re saying it’s not generating the major stakes of the story.
[00:15:05] Kristen: Yeah. I mean, there’s not a kidnapping threat or anything like that, right? We need action and dialogue and those other things to kind of set the story in motion. Interiority isn’t really necessarily good at conveying plot. If you think about effective plots, often we get surprises. The protagonist will get surprised. Well, you can’t generally be surprised by your own interiority, right? You can have those awakening moments — like at the end of Jane Austen’s EMMA, where she realizes, “Oh, I’ve been in love with Knightley all along.” But those are quite rare, and actually the reader knew that quite a lot earlier too. You need those other elements. It’s one tool, but it should never be the only tool.
[00:15:53] Matty: Yeah. The idea that popped into my head — and we’ll see if this makes any sense — is that one of the things you said made me think of the caution to writers not to use looking in a mirror as an excuse to describe the point-of-view character. After you’ve read three dozen of those, you’re like, “Oh God, not looking in the mirror again.” I think there’s maybe a similar hazard with interiority, unless the point-of-view character is having those aha moments.
Secrets, Plot Glue, and Mystery
[00:16:30] Matty: And so if you’re letting the reader into some of the character’s internal thoughts but holding some back — I’m trying to think of specific examples; I’m sure this probably happens all the time in mystery and suspense — at some point I think the reader would kind of feel cheated, like, “How come you only gave me one tenth of the explanation for this interior dialogue going on with the character, but not all of it?” Can you make any sense of that?
[00:16:57] Kristen: Yes. Yeah. I mean, this is really tricky. I do see this a lot. I’m thinking about Charlotte McConaghy’s WILD DARK SHORE, for example, which is a book where there are a lot of backstory secrets. All of the characters are keeping — they all have these monumental secrets. And McConaghy is very smart about how she trickles out that information, and part of the way it works is by having so many point-of-view characters. If we were in a single point of view for that whole novel, we would get impatient — we know all of these characters are keeping secrets — but because she keeps shifting points of view and keeps bringing in new story questions, she holds off the full explanation. We just keep getting hints. We know, for example, the kind of inciting incident: this woman washes up on the shore of this very remote island, and she’s nearly dead, but not dead yet. We start to understand that she experienced a traumatic fire in her past, but it’s quite late in the book when we get the full story of that fire. So it’s partly about knowing the terrain — we need to know that there was a fire, but we don’t need to get all the blow-by-blow details about what happened to her in that fire and all of the effects until later in the book. The other thing I was thinking about is what interiority can do in your plot — and this is very much true in mystery and thrillers. If you think about plot incidents as cause-and-effect dominoes, you knock over one and it’s going to knock over the next. Interiority is the thing that can bridge — that can bring us from one to the other. The protagonist experiences some kind of action or incident that surprises them or shifts the plot in some direction, and then we see them react via interiority. Maybe they’re processing it, maybe they don’t understand it yet, we know what their questions are, they maybe make a new plan about what’s next — and then that’s the thing that motivates the next action they take. In that sense, interiority can be kind of like the glue of your plot: it shows us how those pieces fit together and makes it feel realistic and understandable. We understand this character’s motives because we’re getting that kind of internal processing.
[00:19:39] Matty: One of the things I’ve spoken about — it might have been in previous conversations with you, and I know I’ve spoken about it with Renee Gutteridge, another multi-visit guest — is this idea that the option of using interiority is something that screenwriters are jealous of authors being able to do. But I was also thinking about this in terms of — so I’m watching THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE.
[00:20:04] Kristen: I just got through season two, and it’s very interesting — like what you were saying about at the end of the McConaghy book where everything sort of wraps up, all the secrets become revealed. I just watched the last episode of season two, and there was a lot of wrapping up going on, even though the series continues.
[00:20:20] Matty: But there were these points, especially in the last episode or two, where I was like, “Oh yeah, I can see it.” A character isn’t speaking, but they have a look, and I’m like, “I think I know what’s happening there.” So it’s almost like the filmmakers are finding ways to suggest interiority, even if they’re having to do it in a visual way rather than a textual way for their audience.
[00:20:44] Kristen: Yeah, I think about this all the time, because it’s fascinating to watch something filmed that you’ve read, and vice versa. And I think it really depends on the skill of the actor — to convey, you know, it’s the way they deliver a line, and their body language, and their expression — that’s how we intuit what they’re feeling, and that’s why that skill is so important. I’ve been thinking about this too with audiobooks, and the extra layer of information we get just through the way the audiobook narrator delivers a line. There is a way in which an audiobook gives you more of an interpretation, because it’s the narrator’s interpretation of that story. But we’re also getting extra information about their assumptions about what a dialogue speaker is thinking, just in the way they deliver that line, which is pretty interesting.
[00:21:48] Matty: Shifting back to genre-specific things for a moment — do you have any perspectives on a genre like mystery, where what people know and what they’re saying or displaying is very different? Any thoughts specific to that genre on how someone should or should not use interiority?
[00:22:10] Kristen: Yeah, I think here you want to be really careful about which characters get to have POV, right? Because that’s a big part of how you’re going to control information. This is the danger — another danger — of giving your antagonist POV chapters, because it can reduce that element of surprise. Unless you do it in a very oblique and stylized way. I have seen that done, where we get just peeks, and maybe we don’t actually know who the point-of-view character is. Mick Herron does this in SECRET HOURS, actually. There’s a point-of-view character whose identity we don’t know until the very end. We start to get some suspicions, and it’s part of the fun. But he doesn’t linger there very long — those point-of-view scenes are very short, and there’s not much interiority in them, because you don’t want to — you know, part of the charm of mystery and thriller is having that information revealed to us and calibrating what the reader knows versus what the protagonist knows versus what the other characters know. The thing where you’re always safe is: you have to be very careful in those processing moments, but the feeling moments are pretty much always safe. So if you’re writing in that genre and you’re thinking, “I want to deepen the POV, but I don’t want to give too much away,” the thing you can always do is come back to feeling — internal responses, associations, and memories. That’s another layer we access through interiority that can make our characters feel real. It’s very normal for us to operate in the world and see something and remember the last time we saw something similar. We operate by association like that all the time. And so even if it’s not especially relevant to that scene, weaving in memories like that makes your character feel round and whole, like they have lived in the world outside the pages of this book. So that can be another place to mine.
[00:24:37] Matty: I had a couple of chapters like what you’re describing with the Herron book, where I have somebody watching the protagonist, and they were very short chapters — but they were the most time-consuming chapters to write, because at each point in the book there was going to be some subset of people that the reader was going to say, “Oh, is this so-and-so or so-and-so or so-and-so, or somebody we haven’t met yet?” And so I would have to write the chapter and then go read it from the point of view of someone who thought it was person A — what hints was I giving or withholding? And if they thought it was person B, what hints was I giving or withholding? That’s very fun, but it’s also very tough.
[00:25:12] Kristen: Yeah, it’s high stakes for an author to do that.
Pacing Action with Interiority
[00:25:24] Matty: One of the things you had mentioned was the idea of controlling the pacing of a scene. We’ve talked about that a little bit, but how do you make sure that interiority isn’t slowing down a scene you want to move quickly, or how do you use interiority to elongate a scene that you do want people to linger in?
[00:25:37] Kristen: Yeah. I love studying this, so I have a bunch of scene studies on my website where I’ve actually just tagged every element of the scene and seen where they land. And I’ve done a number of action scenes now, and it’s fascinating to me to see different choices. I can think of two in particular that are good contrasts. One is from THE FAVORITES by Layne Fargo, and it’s a competition scene. This novel — it’s so fun; I think it should have been on the bestseller charts longer than it was — it’s basically WUTHERING HEIGHTS meets Ice Capades, and it’s about Olympic ice dancers. It’s fantastic. In the first competition scene we get, the stakes are high and you expect an action scene, but what we get is very little action. Fargo narrates maybe three different beats of the actual routine, and most of the scene is focused — the scene is 50% interiority — because what she wants us to see is how Kat, who’s our female protagonist, feels out on the ice and how she’s thinking about the stakes of this moment. Kat is also in this very complex romantic relationship with her male competition partner, and so she zeros in on, like, the way his hands feel on her waist and moments like that. This is an early competition scene, so there are later competition scenes where Fargo does not do 50% interiority, because she wants the pace to feel fast. Here, she’s doing a couple of things. She’s enticing us into the novel, fulfilling the promise of the premise: most of us are not Olympic-level ice dancers, and we have no idea what it feels like to be out on that ice. We can see it from the audience or on TV, but we can’t access the experience. So she’s doing the thing that a novel can do — taking us inside the experience of this really crucial moment and what it feels like. There she really wants to slow us down, give us some backstory, focus on the emotions of that scene. That’s one pathway. Now for a faster-paced action scene where you really do want it to feel fast and propulsive and exciting — I just keep talking about S.A. Cosby’s KING OF ASHES because it’s just very, very good. He has a scene — kind of the first scene where a lot happens; this book is very violent and very graphically so, in a lot of clever ways — but this is the first scene that is this way, and it really packs a punch. All of these things are happening: there are guns, someone’s gotten punched in the mouth, a character gets his pinky chopped off. There’s a lot happening. And so Cosby really focuses on the action. But at really key moments, we get our POV character’s interiority to heighten the action — to convey that he’s in shock. He’s not even feeling pain. He’s feeling absolute shock at what’s happening. And so that gives us another layer; it actually heightens the tension of the scene, because we’re kind of shocked alongside him and getting to experience that. And then later in the novel, when this character is participating in the violence himself, there’s no longer shock. So it ties into the character arc as well. But Cosby takes a much lighter touch with it.
[00:29:28] Matty: Well, the scene that popped into my head — just to go to the other end of the literary spectrum — is RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. I think it’s at the beginning of the first movie, where Indiana Jones is going into the tunnel and terrible things are happening, and then he picks up the statue from the platform, and then there’s this moment where he has the realization that this is not the end of his escape attempt. And then there’s a whole other set of actions of him trying to get away from all the other traps that have been set as a result of the statue being picked up. It sounds like — I haven’t read the Cosby book, but it kind of sounds like that — where there’s action, action, action, and then there’s a moment where you kind of step back for just a second and the point-of-view character is having a realization or assessing the situation or recalibrating what to expect, and then the action resumes.
[00:30:26] Kristen: Yeah. If you’re a rollercoaster fan — think about those moments where you come down from a bunch of spins or something, and then it gets quiet for a minute, and then all of a sudden, unexpectedly, you go take some other turn. The kind of whiplash there is really exciting, and that’s one of the things you can do with interiority — just have this little moment of pause and then get it started again. And just the movement of that is really fun for readers.
Unreliable Narrators and Wrap-Up
[00:31:12] Matty: I wanted to loop back one more time on one of the things we’ve kind of touched on, just to see if there are any other lessons we should be plumbing here, and that is shaping how readers judge or experience the narrator’s reliability. We’ve already talked a little bit about what happens when the character is saying something different from what they’re thinking. Any other thoughts about how we can use interiority — or avoid it — to support that kind of goal?
[00:31:22] Kristen: Yeah. If you’re dealing with an unreliable narrator, the interiority is key. I don’t want to do any spoilers here because this is a brand-new book, but I just read YESTERYEAR a couple of weeks ago, and I’m still thinking about it. I think we’re all going to be talking about it for quite a while. This is something that the author does very well. The premise of YESTERYEAR is that this kind of trad-wife influencer who has a fancy farmhouse and makes her own bread and all of that — she wakes up and is actually living in 1855 Idaho instead of 2025 Idaho. It’s just a delicious premise. And really all the way through, we start getting hints that the way our protagonist interprets the world is not always consonant with reality. But we’re really at sea about how, because we don’t have any other points of view. So I think that’s a great example where the author is really playing with it and hinting at it. I’m thinking too about the novel that came out several years ago — THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW — where we are very deeply in that character’s point of view. And because we’re so deeply in her point of view, it’s kind of like being in this airless tunnel. We don’t have any gaps that allow us to make other inferences; we just have to go with the way she’s interpreting the story until we get some other characters that come in. GONE GIRL is another great example of really being locked into one point of view and then having this dramatic shift into another — and the contrast between what the protagonist thinks is happening and what’s really happening, and what another point-of-view character outside the story thinks is happening versus what we’ve been led to believe is happening.
[00:33:26] Matty: I looked up YESTERYEAR — it’s Caroline O’Donoghue.
[00:33:30] Kristen: Thank you. Yes, highly recommend.
[00:33:33] Matty: And I’m going to subtitle this episode “Matty Mentions Arbitrary Movies and Kristen Has to Try to Tie Them In.” Because the other movie that popped into my head, as you were talking about understanding more about the character, is PSYCHO — and Norman Bates sort of describing why he’s doing what he’s doing. I went into this conversation figuring that in general interiority was going to be a way for us to feel more empathy with a character. But there are certainly circumstances where the more you find out about the interior thoughts of a character, the less empathetic they are. The Norman Bates example is one that just popped into my head. Any thoughts about the extent to which you use interiority to pull the reader toward the character as opposed to distancing the reader from the character?
[00:34:26] Kristen: So two different things. One is that there are characters who may be antagonists, or just may be a protagonist who’s making deep mistakes, or just a point-of-view character who’s making some big errors. This is very typical in romance, but we see it all over the place. And the goal is to see them evolve — or not. Sometimes we’ll have characters, especially an antagonist, who can’t evolve. But part of what readers want to see is the why. How did they get like this? What happened in their backstory that traumatized them or led them to make these choices? Why is this character so greedy and focused on money? That character might not change and we might not like the choices they make all the way through — maybe they start the novel greedy and end the novel greedy. I’m thinking of Gatsby here — that grasping for fame and influence and power. If we understand why a character became that way, we do feel some empathy, but it’s more that we understand motivation. And I think this is partly why we read novels. Other people are a mystery to us, and that’s a tragedy in many ways — an impossible tragedy to surmount. We are only ourselves, so we only have direct access to our own brains. But novels give us this illusion that we can truly, deeply understand the motivations and feelings of other people. And so when you show us a character who’s maybe fatally flawed, we can not enjoy seeing that — but also feel moved by the portrayal.
[00:36:32] Kristen: I have to confess — this is another thing that not everyone knows about me — I am a little bit of a wimp when it comes to horror, and I have actually never seen PSYCHO. My daughter is really working on me and pushing my boundaries. Maybe someday I’ll be able to see it, but I’m not there yet.
[00:36:48] Matty: So I have to ask, what makes you able to read a very violent book like the Cosby book but struggle with a horror movie like PSYCHO?
[00:36:58] Kristen: I think for me it’s the jump scares. I have a really hard time with them. I can do violence for some reason. It’s creepiness — anything that taps into something I’m actually afraid of. I forget which movie we watched, but it definitely pushed my boundaries. There were two characters who were clearly not human, and they were getting ready to kind of come into a house, and I was like, “Okay, I’m out. I can’t. I’m going to have nightmares about this one.” Like vampires, though, I can deal with vampires. Or I have an editor I work with who was writing fantasy and is now writing zombie novels, and I have no problem with zombies — I guess I can understand them.
[00:37:48] Matty: That’s so interesting. I know for me — I’ll say to people that I can’t read books or see movies with a lot of violence, and then I’ll mention, “Oh, you know, I saw BAND OF BROTHERS,” where every other person is getting killed or dismembered or something. And I realize that for me the difference is it’s not actually violence — it’s intentional infliction of pain. Whether it’s physical or psychological, if something terrible happens to someone physically and it’s an accident, I don’t really mind absorbing that as an audience member. But I really have trouble stomaching things where the pain someone’s going through has been inflicted just for the purpose of inflicting pain.
[00:38:32] Kristen: Yeah, you might struggle with KING OF ASHES then, I’ll be honest. So — warning.
[00:38:39] Matty: I got to meet S.A. Cosby, as I think I mentioned last time we spoke, and he’s such a lovely person with so many great things to say. He was the keynote speaker at this conference I went to, and I was like, “Ooh, I wish I could read his books, but I don’t think I can. I think maybe I better not.”
[00:38:53] Kristen: Yeah, it was fun.
[00:38:54] Matty: Oh, well. But we’ll have to — I’m still working on getting him on the podcast, so I’ll clip this section out too and say, “Shawn, here’s another example of us talking about you.”
[00:39:05] Matty: So cool. Well, Kristen, the conversations with you are always so much fun. Thank you for humoring all my odd examples. Please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.
[00:39:16] Kristen: There’s always something to say about interiority, I think. You can find me at — my business name is The Blue Garret — so you can find everything at thebluegarret.com. And I believe when this comes out, we will have just wrapped up a pop-up novel study of Freida McFadden’s THE INTRUDER. I’m going to have all of that packaged up. If you want some charts and graphs and to see how she uses interiority in a scene, that’ll be a free download on my website, so come check it out.
[00:39:46] Matty: Great. Thank you so much.
[00:39:48] Kristen: Thanks, Matty.