Episode 343 - Writing Better Characters with the Big Five Personality Traits with Kat Caldwell

Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Substack, Patreon, or Buy Me a Coffee!

Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment on YouTube!

Kat Caldwell discusses WRITING BETTER CHARACTERS WITH THE BIG FIVE PERSONALITY, including what the five traits are and how they function as a spectrum rather than fixed categories; why a character's "need" is really about the unconscious ways their personality causes hurt to the people they love; how to use the Big Five as a diagnostic tool when your story feels like something's off; and why a satisfying character arc means growth and not a 180-degree reversal.

Kat is a novelist and short story writer and loves to teach fiction. She writes love stories in several genres including historical romance, contemporary romance, and contemporary fiction. Kat is the creator of the Pencils&Lipstick podcast, a podcast for writers with author interviews, craft talk and insight into the publishing world. In between conducting interviews for her podcast and writing, you can find Kat traveling the world, reading, or volunteering with her church—always with a cup of cold brew close by.

Episode Links

https://www.katcaldwell.com

https://www.instagram.com/author_katcaldwell/

https://www.youtube.com/@PencilsandLipstick

https://www.tiktok.com/@katcaldwell.author

Want the Full Companion Post?

Podcast episodes are free for everyone. Expanded episode materials, including an extensive interview summary, transcript, and access to the supporter-only discussion threads, are available to paid subscribers of The Indy Author on Substack.

Episode 341 - Conflict, Character, and Motivation with Austin S. Camacho

Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment on YouTube!

Austin S. Camacho  discusses CONFLICT, CHARACTER, AND MOTIVATION, including why conflict is about opposing goals rather than violence, how to find conflict in every scene including ones between characters who agree, how internal conflict distinguishes heroes from villains, why motivation has to be personal to feel real, how to make large-scale stakes relatable by grounding them in a character’s specific fears, and why ROCKY is the perfect example of a protagonist who states his true goal out loud.

Austin S. Camacho is the author of eight novels about Washington DC-based private eye Hannibal Jones, five in the Stark and O’Brien international thriller series, the detective novel Beyond Blue, and the action thrillers True Target and Mirror Target. His short stories have been featured in several anthologies, and he is featured in the Edgar nominated African American Mystery Writers: A Historical and Thematic Study by Frankie Y. Bailey. He is a past president of the Maryland Writers Association, past Vice President of the Virginia Writers Club, and one of the creators of the Creatures, Crimes & Creativity literary conference.

Episode Links

https://ascamacho.com/

https://www.facebook.com/AustinSCamacho/

https://www.instagram.com/ascamacho135/

Summary & Transcript

In this conversation, Austin reframed conflict from a plot device into the deepest expression of who your characters are.

CONFLICT IS NOT VIOLENCE

Austin’s first disclaimer: conflict is not fighting. When most writers hear the word, they picture action scenes. What Austin means is far broader—two characters with opposing goals. Every story requires a protagonist and an antagonist whose objectives are in direct tension. If that tension is absent, there is no story. And the distinction matters because it opens up the entire range of human experience as potential conflict, not just the scenes where someone throws a punch.

He applied this to the smallest scale immediately: a husband and wife deciding when to leave for a road trip. They agree on the destination. They will disagree on when to leave, what to pack, when to take the first rest stop. That is real conflict, rooted in who these people are, and it reveals character at the same time. Every disagreement tells us something about the person who has it.

CONFLICT IN EVERY SCENE

Austin’s operating principle: every scene needs conflict, including scenes between characters who are ostensibly allies. The vacation planning example illustrates this, but so does any alliance formed between characters who have just met. Two people agreeing to pursue the same goal still disagree about when, where, how, and who leads. That friction is not a distraction from the story—it is the story, at the granular level.

He also described how scene-level conflict can mirror the story’s central conflict without being directly tied to it. A protagonist struggling to communicate with his mother can echo a larger story about a man who needs to understand his enemy well enough to stop him. The smaller conflict foreshadows the larger one, and both illuminate the same theme.

CONFLICT IS A FUNCTION OF CHARACTER

The conversation’s central insight came when Austin observed that conflict does not come from plot—it comes from character. The conflict exists because of something this person wants very badly, or fears very deeply, or cannot bring themselves to do even when it would help them. Strip away the genre, the setting, and the stakes, and what remains is a person who is defined by what they want and how far they will go to get it.

This principle applies equally to villains. Austin noted a common weakness in contemporary fiction: protagonists with well-developed internal conflict paired with antagonists who are simply evil, with no discernible motivation. The result is an uneven story where the reader eventually asks why the villain does not just give up. A compelling antagonist has to believe in what they are doing just as much as the hero believes in stopping them. He cited ROCKY’s Apollo Creed as the model: not a villain at all, but an antagonist with his own ego-driven need to win, which made the fight worth watching because both men genuinely needed the outcome.

INTERNAL CONFLICT DISTINGUISHES HEROES FROM VILLAINS

Austin described internal conflict as the primary mechanism for showing moral character. The villain, to oversimplify, will do anything to accomplish the goal. The hero has the same drive but will not take every available shortcut—and that restraint is where characterization lives. The hero knows he could win by cheating, and he does not. That moment of self-denial, especially when the cost is real, is what makes readers root for him. Austin extended the principle to villains as well: even a catastrophically bad person has something they love or something they are protecting and showing that complicates them in exactly the ways that make fiction worth reading.

MAKING HIGH STAKES PERSONAL

Matty asked how to make large-scale conflicts—bombs, world domination, civilizational threat—feel emotionally real to readers. Austin’s answer was simple: make it personal. The reason a character fights to stop a bomb is not that blowing up Manhattan is abstractly bad. It is that his parents live there. Once the stakes are connected to someone the protagonist loves, the reader can locate themselves in the story. The objective scale does not matter. What matters is that it is the largest possible stakes from the protagonist’s point of view.

He reinforced this with the observation that stakes only have to feel gigantic to the protagonist. A character trapped in a building with thirty seconds to reach an elevator that is not working faces stakes that are, objectively, small. But if the story has done its job, those thirty seconds feel enormous. ALIEN, by contrast, uses life-and-death stakes, but its power comes from watching Ripley fight to survive as a person—not from the abstract horror of the alien itself.

STATE THE GOAL PLAINLY

Austin closed with advice that cut against the instinct to withhold: let your protagonist state the goal plainly, even bluntly, to another character. It clarifies the story for the reader and anchors everything that follows. ROCKY does this in its most famous line—“All I want to do is go the distance”—and the rest of the film is the working-out of whether that specific, personal, clearly stated goal will be met. When protagonist and reader share the same understanding of what victory means, the conflict has somewhere to go.

---

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 Austin S. Camacho. Hey, Austin. How are you doing?

[00:00:06] Austin: I’m having a great day, and I hope you are too, Matty.

[00:00:08] Matty: I am, thank you very much. And to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you: Austin S. Camacho is the author of eight novels about Washington DC-based private eye Hannibal Jones, five in the Stark and O’Brien International Thriller Series, the detective novel BEYOND BLUE, and the action adventure novel WHEN DOES BLOOD RUN COLD.

His short stories have been featured in several anthologies, and he is featured in the Edgar-nominated AFRICAN AMERICAN MYSTERY WRITERS: A HISTORICAL AND THEMATIC STUDY by Frankie Y. Bailey. He’s the past president of the Maryland Writers Association, past vice president of the Virginia Writers Club, and one of the creators of the Creatures, Crimes & Creativity literary conference, which I think is also known as C3. That is a lovely conference that I can highly recommend. I have not been able to go for the last several years because it always falls right at the time of a regularly scheduled vacation that my husband and I take—that was the one downside of scheduling that vacation—but I hope to get back to it.

[00:01:08] Matty: I had invited Austin on the podcast because I know you talk a lot to writers about tips for writing conflict. I wanted to start out by asking: when you’re talking about conflict, are you talking physical, emotional, or all of the above? Just give us some context for what you’re going to be talking about.

[00:01:32] Austin: You went straight to the first disclaimer I always like to give, because conflict is not violence. When I talk about conflict in a story—because I write thrillers, people think, “Oh, the fighting scenes and the shooting scenes.” No. Conflict is really about characters who are pushing against one another, and that’s what makes a story.

If you don’t have conflict, you don’t have a story. You have to have at least two people, or two groups, and there always has to be a protagonist and an antagonist with opposing goals and objectives. That’s what conflict is about: opposing goals.

[00:02:21] Matty: Do you assess conflict on a story level—like what the underlying conflict is between the protagonist and the antagonist—or do you need to drill down further than that?

[00:02:33] Austin: Both. When you’re outlining your story, of course you start with the big picture: the good guy wants to win the fight, and the bad guy doesn’t want him to, or whatever the conflict is. But to keep a story interesting, you also need internal conflict, usually for your protagonist. You’ll also usually have conflicts with other characters. So you have your external conflict, your internal conflict, and the conflicts with supporting characters. Wherever you can find conflict, you put it in. The worse you make your protagonist’s life, the more your readers will enjoy your story. So yes, I take it all the way down.

I tell people there needs to be conflict in every scene. Even if all the people in that scene are friends, you can still find something for them to disagree about.

[00:03:37] Matty: Can you describe an example of a less overt use of conflict? Let’s say we’re having a conversation between two characters who are allies. What might constitute conflict that will help propel that scene, even if it’s not immediately obvious?

[00:03:59] Austin: Let me try to take things out of the thriller and mystery picture. Say you have two characters—maybe a husband and wife—and they’ve decided to go on a vacation. Now, that sounds like all agreement, but they’re going to disagree about when to leave, what to take, where to stop, and so on. There are all of these possible options for conflict. It’s real conflict, but it’s also conflict that all of us can relate to. As a reader, it’s good to be able to think, “Oh yeah, I’ve been there.”

And the unintended positive consequence of doing that is that each time you unveil a new conflict, you are revealing character. You’re getting us to know that person better. He’s in a hurry and just wants to keep driving until he’s done—that tells us what kind of person he is. She wants to stop every hour—that tells us something too.

[00:05:18] Matty: Does the conflict at the scene or chapter level always need to tie to the conflict at the story level? I’m having trouble thinking of an example where it doesn’t. If someone is assessing a scene and not sensing the conflict, and they need to add it in, what are the parameters for doing that in a way that’s holistically supportive of the story?

[00:05:58] Austin: It doesn’t have to be connected to the story, but it helps if it is. How about this: maybe the bad guy we haven’t met yet is hitchhiking on that same road. Now you can have a conflict about whether to stop and pick up a stranger. That ties into your plot and also gives you avenues for more conflict further down the road, because now you have the option of, “See? I told you we shouldn’t have picked up that guy.” So it’s good if you can tie it in.

Another good option—even if the conflict is completely separate—is to have it mirror or highlight the main theme. Say the protagonist and antagonist used to be coworkers, maybe in the same Army unit. At the same time, your protagonist is having some communication issue with his mother. It can look totally unrelated, but then later in the story you can reveal that better interpersonal communication might actually help him get this guy to stop doing whatever bad thing he’s doing. Interpersonal communication becomes a theme, and the smaller conflict echoes into the big one.

[00:07:57] Matty: I think there’s a balance between having it tie in and not forcing it. If someone is assessing a chapter and it doesn’t have conflict, I think there would be a tendency to just insert some because they heard that every scene has to have it, and it could result in something that feels very artificial.

For example, if you have a scene where two characters become allies—two people who’ve just discovered each other, pursuing the same goals, deciding to team up—on the surface there might not initially be any conflict. I can see how that might be laying the groundwork for conflict down the road. Are there exceptions where that’s okay, or if you look carefully, should there really be something going on there beyond the two of them simply agreeing?

[00:09:01] Austin: There really should be conflict there, especially between two people who just met—conflict about the details: when, where, how, and so on. It has also become common in fiction for the conflict between a male and female character to be sexual tension. They’ve decided they both want to catch this bad guy, but his idea of how to be a team player and hers are very different. That is great conflict, and it can keep rolling through the plot.

Maybe this disagreement becomes an argument and one of them hesitates to do something they know they should, and that gets them into trouble. Or one of them is driven to prove they’re better, so they go after the bad guy alone. There are so many ways you can use that conflict to keep the story moving.

[00:10:18] Matty: Can you talk a little more about how you can use conflict to reveal a character’s personality and their motivations?

[00:10:26] Austin: Do you remember the movie DIE HARD? On the surface it appears to be a cops-against-crooks movie. But shot through that movie is the conflict between McClane and his wife. Whatever writer said, “Hey, we need this element”—it revealed his difficulty with just admitting he’s wrong about something, and his absolute determination to make things work out. When you see that determination in his domestic life, you think, “Here’s a guy who’s not going to quit no matter what you do.” It carries over.

It reveals character in a way that would be hard to do any other way. You always want to show, not tell. You don’t want to just tell the reader, “Our protagonist would never give up.” This is a way of showing just how determined and hard-headed this guy is, and how dedicated he is once he decides where he’s going and what he’s going to do. It’s a great character-revealing system.

[00:11:53] Matty: I really like that when different aspects and sub-storylines share a common driver. This is a guy who never gives up, and it plays out in every single aspect of his life. Because if you had him besting the bad guys because he never gives up, but he’s wishy-washy in some other part of his life, you’d better have a really good reason for that disconnect.

[00:12:19] Austin: On its own, that inconsistency becomes a whole storyline you’d need to delve into. Whereas if there’s synchronicity between the underlying conflicts, each storyline balances and feeds the other.

That’s why I always say that conflict is a function of character. The conflict comes from who that person is, because ultimately the conflict is about something this person wants very badly, or wants to do very badly, or somewhere they want to go very badly. But it has to be important to that character. It’s all about who he is.

A weakness I’ve seen recently in some of what I’ve been reading is that many writers are very good at doing that with the protagonist, but then they don’t do it with the antagonist. If the bad guy isn’t absolutely dedicated to his goal, and he’s coming up against somebody who is, the reader eventually thinks, “Well, why doesn’t he just stop?” You have to show it on both sides.

[00:13:32] Matty: I want to delve more into internal conflict for both the protagonist and the antagonist. In a recent conversation, I was saying to one of my guests that as a reader, I’m not interested in hearing stories about bad people doing bad things. I am very interested in stories about good people doing bad things, or bad people doing good things. Either of those can illustrate a tug within the character’s internal workings—they want to beat out the other person for the job, but there’s also something pulling them away from it.

[00:14:13] Austin: I think this is one of the ways we illustrate the difference between the good guy and the bad guy. To oversimplify: your villain is the one who will do anything to get what he wants.

Your hero should always have internal conflict. “Hey, I know for sure that I can win this race if I take this shortcut, but should I?” That’s where we show who the hero is. The bad guy is threatening my girlfriend, and one solution is I can just shoot him in the head right now. But should I? If I’m a good guy, I want to try to talk him out of it first. Will I negotiate? Can I do this without taking a life? The villain probably isn’t thinking those things—but there’s probably something positive driving him too. “I’m going to take over the world, but I’m doing it because I want to make my mother proud.”

You can work that several ways in the story to show that these people aren’t entirely black and white. Even the worst person has something they love, or something they’re protecting, and showing that complicates them in exactly the ways that make fiction worth reading.

[00:15:42] Matty: I think one of the things that makes a really compelling antagonist—and I think this is true of some of my own antagonists—is that you might have someone who is willing to kill other people to pursue their goal, but they’re also willing to die themselves to pursue it. There’s almost a nobleness, from their own point of view, about what they’re doing, because they’re willing to pay the same price they’re exacting from others. That obviously serves as the basis for conflict, but I think the combination of conflict with those seemingly disconnected commonalities is what makes the characterization interesting.

[00:16:30] Austin: On the surface they do appear disconnected. When I was in school I was a psychology major. We talked about character—and in that sense, character isn’t about whether you do the good thing or the bad thing. Strength of character is how consistently your behavior fits your beliefs.

So if you’re the bad guy, and you’re a big bad guy, you have to have strong character: “I’m going to do anything to accomplish this goal.” And in a way, we kind of admire people with that kind of strength of character, even when the goal is negative. “This person is willing to make any sacrifice to accomplish whatever the thing is. He’s going to get this bomb in place even if he gets shot in the process.” You want to have that on both sides. You want the hero and the villain to both truly believe in what they are trying to do.

I always end up using movies as examples because everybody’s seen them. I don’t think ROCKY has a villain. It has a protagonist and an antagonist. Apollo Creed, for his own ego-driven reasons, was just as determined to win that fight as Rocky was—and that’s what made it a great movie to watch, because there’s a part of you that’s kind of rooting for both of them.

[00:18:19] Matty: Yes. That’s a great example. I like that idea that conflict isn’t always one person trying to keep the other from gaining what they want. It can be two people going for a goal in a zero-sum game, where winning by definition means the other person loses. Even if you don’t bear them personal animosity, you’re nonetheless going to enter into conflict.

[00:18:43] Austin: And that kind of conflict feels very real to readers, because it’s close to the way real life works. I don’t necessarily need to win, but I hate to lose.

[00:18:56] Matty: Yes. And I think that also makes the concept of conflict clearer outside the genres people first think of, like thrillers. It’s easier to understand how this has to play out in romance, for example. These more subtle kinds of conflict—not the trying-to-take-over-the-world level—are just as valid.

[00:19:26] Austin: Using ROCKY as the example again: if it’s a romance, it’s the exact same story if you have two men in love with the same woman. Neither of them has to be the bad guy, but they both know that for me to win, he has to lose. So the question is, how far am I willing to go? Will I flatten his tires so he can’t make that date? Well, if that’s your choice, then we cast you as the antagonist. If you’re the good guy, you’ve got the internal conflict: Should I? No, that would be wrong. And that’s fun reading for people.

[00:20:10] Matty: Yes, especially if by not flattening the tire you know you’re risking your goal. That’s a very nice character beat for readers to sink their teeth into.

[00:20:21] Austin: You are putting your success at risk because of your deeper feelings. And that internal conflict is one that, at one time or another, we have all actually experienced in real life.

[00:20:56] Matty: You had said earlier about the importance of making the conflict itself relatable. That’s probably easier for more people to think about in terms of two people vying for the same love interest, versus someone trying to prevent a large-scale catastrophe. Are there ways to make those very high-stakes, cinematic conflicts relatable for the reader?

[00:21:22] Austin: Two things come to mind. One: if it’s a big, big thing—the bad guy is going to blow up the world, destroy the United States—the issue for your protagonist doesn’t have to be about the bomb itself. The issue is, I love my country and I don’t want to see it destroyed. Or: I don’t want to see a bunch of innocent people killed.

But to take that one step further—because this is all about emotional context—make it personal. The bad guy is getting ready to set off a bomb that will blow up Manhattan. That’s obviously terrible, and the good guy doesn’t want that to happen. But if his parents live in Manhattan, then it becomes a whole different drive. Now it’s personal: “This isn’t about stopping a bomb. This is about saving my parents.” That’s the kind of approach that brings the motivation down to a personal level. It’s more relatable. If you’re Peter Parker, it’s all about saving Aunt May.

[00:22:47] Matty: That makes me think of THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, which I’ve been watching obsessively. What I find very interesting is that the people who are nominally the good guys, over the course of the series—I’m now on season three of four—are moving in their motivation from a focus on individuals (their friends, their spouses) toward humanity in general. And for the people who are nominally the bad guys, I see the opposite: a move from a very wide view of “this is what’s going to happen to humanity” toward something more personal.

Those are both fascinating character developments to watch, and I hadn’t thought about it in those terms until now. Seeing how those shifts bring them into conflict with each other is really compelling.

[00:24:02] Austin: Motivation is so important to the conflict. The show you mentioned is an excellent example of characters with true motivations. The most disappointing stories are when a character’s motivation is simply their official role. “We have to solve this murder. Why? Because I’m the police detective assigned to this case.” That’s not a motivation. There has to be more to it than that.

That idea of justifying a character’s actions solely because of their role is very unsatisfying. It’s already a boring story. We want the motivation to be deeper and more personal—maybe he had some past experience with a very similar crime where the perpetrator got away, something that makes it personal.

[00:25:11] Matty: And I think this is a good place to tie it into another piece of advice we often hear about not info-dumping. If the police detective has a reason beyond his job for solving the case, that can be very fun to dribble in throughout the story. A reveal about what happened to his relative, or his own brush with the law, or whatever it might be—the more it unfolds gradually, the more propulsive it is. It keeps you reading to find out what’s really driving this character.

[00:25:44] Austin: Yes. It can start out simply: “I have to solve this case because I’m the cop assigned to it.” It can start there, and then over time you get down to the deep-down reason. With the villain, the same thing: you can start out thinking he’s just a sociopath who decided to kill somebody, and then over time reveal that he cares deeply about something.

They have to care deeply so that we can care deeply.

[00:26:16] Matty: That’s a great way of putting it.

[00:26:23] Matty: I did want to loop back to something you said earlier about always adding one more conflict for your protagonist to address. I always wonder what the signal is that the writer has done enough. I’ll use ALIEN as an example, since I love using it for pretty much anything. The crew’s mission is interrupted—that’s one problem. Then the John Hurt character dies. Then Ripley’s implied romantic interest, the captain, dies. Then everybody else dies. Then she gets into the escape pod with the cat, and even that isn’t the end. Do you feel like there’s a natural point where you think, okay, we’re done?

[00:27:23] Austin: That is so subjective. I’m driven to keep finding bigger problems for my protagonist, or to make existing problems worse, and I don’t know if there’s a natural stopping point unless you reach the place where you genuinely cannot imagine a way to make it any worse.

[00:27:52] Matty: I suppose it’s driven by a combination of factors, including genre. If your story is basically about someone finding satisfaction beyond their day job, you probably don’t need them to be tracking down a serial killer on top of that. The stakes are intrinsically different because of the story you’re writing. And sometimes you’re also constrained by format—a two-hour movie only has room for so much bad luck.

[00:29:44] Austin: I think the stakes only have to feel gigantic to the protagonist. It’s not really about whether they are objectively huge. In ALIEN, ultimately Ripley is just trying to survive—that’s it. That’s the entire movie. But in another story you could have a character who misses an elevator. He pushes the button, it’s not working, his office is on the eighteenth floor, and he has thirty seconds to get there. No matter what the stakes are, if they look gigantic to the hero and the reader is invested in that hero, the story works.

Now, I don’t read romance because I don’t feel those stakes personally—will he get the girl? That’s not me. But that doesn’t mean they’re not real stakes for the people who do.

[00:31:03] Matty: I think it’s helpful for writers to think very explicitly about what the final resolution looks like—what the triumph in the conflict actually is. If what you want the final triumph to be is whether the protagonist lives or dies, you have the first ALIEN movie. After that, I speculate the stakes escalate: it’s no longer just about survival, it’s about saving civilization or something larger. So if you went into the first story thinking you wanted the end result to be about saving civilization, you couldn’t just stop with her jetting off into space.

[00:31:47] Austin: You do have to make the stakes very clear—in the reader’s mind, but also in the protagonist’s mind. He has to understand what the stakes are and what he absolutely, positively needs to do. Did Rocky really desperately need to be the heavyweight champion? I don’t think so. Rocky really desperately needed to prove to his girl that he was a good man, and to prove to himself that he would not quit. And when they both fall down and Apollo Creed says, “Ain’t going to be no rematch,” Rocky says, “Don’t want one.”

[00:32:41] Matty: ROCKY is one of my all-time favorite movies for exactly that reason. Someone pursuing the goal of “I want to prove myself, I want to prove that I don’t give up” is so much more compelling to me. I watched one or two of the sequels and gave up, because it felt like the goal had shifted to simply: is he going to win the fight? I’m not very interested in that storyline.

[00:33:09] Austin: You are exactly right. The real objective in the first movie was not to become the champion. In the later movies it was just who’s going to win the fight, and they kept making the bad guy bigger and the threat bigger.

But the storyline didn’t move. I was more impressed by the story that ended with, “I accomplished my goal because I went all the way to the end and proved to everybody—and to my girl—that I am not just a bum.” That just felt right.

[00:33:51] Matty: Yes. And what’s interesting is that Sylvester Stallone, who wrote the script, was not at all subtle about it. Rocky says right there in the movie, “All I want to do is go the distance.” You can read a lot into that beyond the literal meaning, but even just taking it at face value: sometimes you don’t need to be subtle. You can just lay it out—here’s my goal, and I’m going to make it or not. And if you do your job right, you have people rooting for the protagonist to meet that goal.

[00:34:22] Austin: And I think it’s good in many cases for the protagonist to state the goal that plainly to someone. Because now it’s not just clear in the reader’s mind—it’s clear in the protagonist’s mind. This is what he’s trying to do, and then you don’t get confused by all of the other stuff that comes flying in.

[00:34:50] Matty: Well, I think our conversation is a really nice illustration of how intrinsically connected these things are. We started out with conflict, just as one angle, but how central it is to character motivation and interesting characters. So cool.

Well, Austin, thank you so much for humoring all my questions about character motivation and conflict. Please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and your work.

[00:35:14] Austin: You can go to my website at www.ascamacho.com. You can find me on Facebook—I’m there every day for some amount of time—and on Instagram. Or just Google me. I’m all over social media very often, either talking about my books, talking about my conference, or just making some smart remark.

[00:35:44] Matty: Would you like to put in a plug for Creatures, Crimes & Creativity? I’m sure people would love to hear more about it.

[00:35:51] Austin: Every September we put on a three-day conference, from noon Friday to noon Sunday. We attract writers, fans, and avid readers of genre fiction—mysteries, thrillers, horror, science fiction, fantasy, paranormal. After thirteen years, I’ve discovered that those writers have a lot more in common than most people realize. The process of writing a good mystery and the process of writing a good science fiction novel are not that different. You still need the conflict. You still need the suspense. You still need strong characters.

We have a lot of fun. There are panels, and we always have a couple of keynote speakers who give a talk at dinner. All of the meals are included in the registration fee because we want everybody to stay together and hang out with our writers. We have two big book-signing events, on Friday night and on Saturday, and these last few years we’ve had between 60 and 75 authors there at once signing their books.

[00:37:12] Matty: Before my calendar changed, I did attend a couple of times, and it is a super fun conference—a very warm, welcoming group of people. I’m going to have to move my regularly scheduled trip to Maine to some other part of the year.

[00:37:33] Austin: Thank you so much for inviting me. This was wonderful.

[00:37:37] Matty: Oh, thank you so much.

Episode 340 - Interiority: The Secret Sauce of Good Fiction with Kristen Tate

Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment on YouTube!

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

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

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.

Episode 338 - The Choreography of a Scene with Rene Gutteridge

Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!

Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment on YouTube!

Rene Gutteridge discusses THE CHOREOGRAPHY OF A SCENE, including how to identify the purpose of every scene before you write it, where to enter a scene for maximum impact, how to balance propulsive moments with the quieter character-development scenes your story also needs, and why every element in a scene—from minor characters to setting—should be doing more than one job. We also talk about why so many manuscripts open with someone drinking coffee, and what to do about it.

Rene Gutteridge has been writing professionally for over twenty years, with projects spanning fiction, non-fiction, comedy sketches, novelizations and screenwriting. She is the multi-genre author of 24 novels plus several non-fiction titles. Her indie film Skid won deadCenter’s Best Oklahoma Feature, and her novel My Life as a Doormat was adapted into the Hallmark movie Love’s Complicated. She is co-writer on the feature film Family Camp, which was a Movieguide award winner and a Dove Award nominee. She is also a Screencraft finalist in true crime. Rene is co-director of WriterCon in Oklahoma City, senior contributor at Writing Momentum and is the head writer at 231 Collective.

Episode Links

Rene’s links:

https://www.renegutteridge.com

https://www.facebook.com/ReneGutteridgeAuthor

Matty’s Ann Kinnear Book 7 Serialization: https://annkinnear7serial.substack.com/

Summary & Transcript

What separates a scene that keeps readers glued to the page from one they skim past? According to author, writing teacher, and award-winning indie film producer Rene Gutteridge, it comes down to choreography—the deliberate, intentional design of every scene in your story. In Episode 338 of The Indy Author Podcast, Rene joined host Matty Dalrymple to break down what it means to truly be in the driver's seat of your scenes.

WHAT SCENE CHOREOGRAPHY ACTUALLY MEANS

For Rene, choreography is about designing a scene rather than letting the story carry you. That distinction matters because when writers allow a scene to drive itself, the result is often meandering—a scene that exists but can't justify its own presence.

Her go-to diagnostic question is deceptively simple: What is the purpose of this scene? If a writer can't answer that instantly—if they can't say what the scene does for the plot or the character arc—that's a signal to go back and look at it.

The test she applies is equally straightforward. Could you remove the scene and nobody would notice? Then it doesn't belong. Would removing it cause the whole book to crumble? Then you've got something worth keeping. The goal is to make every scene pass that second test.

WHERE TO ENTER A SCENE

One of the most common mistakes Rene sees—in beginning writers and experienced ones alike—is starting too early. Writers tend to wade through setup and warm-up before arriving at the actual moment the scene exists to deliver. The result is that readers have to work to find the reason they should keep reading.

Her advice: find the big moment in your scene, then back up just enough to give readers the context they need to understand it. That's where your scene should begin. Not at the beginning of the day. Not with waking up, getting coffee, and observing the weather—but as close to the moment that matters as you can get while still making that moment land.

Matty offered a vivid example from her own work-in-progress Ann Kinnear novel. The book opens on a cruise ship, and an early draft began with Ann going to meet her client—functional, but not gripping for a new reader. By adding scenes from the antagonist's point of view that show the inciting incident directly, the opening became what Rene called propulsive: it pulls readers forward rather than asking them to wait for something to happen.

BALANCING PROPULSION WITH THE QUIET SCENES

Propulsion doesn't mean car chases in every chapter. Rene addressed the natural follow-up question: what about the quieter scenes—the ones that let readers breathe?

Those scenes, she explained, are typically character development scenes, and character development is its own form of propulsion. In the first half of Act Two, a character who is causing problems for herself or others, second-guessing herself, or in denial creates emotional momentum even without plot fireworks. The reader isn't gripping the book with white knuckles, but they're still highly invested.

When a scene is unavoidably informational, the mandate is simple: make it entertaining. Rene's analogy was memorable—instead of a character simply driving across the country, ruminating the whole way, have the tire blow out and the grumpy gas station mechanic offer some unexpected sage wisdom. Find the thing that breaks the flatness and gives the scene a pulse.

MAKE EVERY ELEMENT WORK

The throughline of the conversation was a principle Rene stated directly: demand a lot from everything in your story. Characters, settings, and scenes don't get to just exist—they have to work.

A minor character isn't just there to deliver information. Her job is to reveal something about the main character—to push his buttons, expose his flaws, create conflict or discomfort. If she's not doing that, she doesn't get to be in the book.

Setting doesn't get to just be a sunset. It needs to add to theme, create context, do something beyond occupy space on the page.

Matty illustrated this beautifully with an example from her manuscript, where two separate scenes required crew members to be present. She realized she could make it the same crew member—serving both story purposes with one character—in a way that felt organic rather than coincidental. That, Rene said, is exactly the kind of thinking that turns good writing into a page-turner.

The payoff for this kind of thinking, Rene explained, is that readers never skim. Skimming happens when readers are hunting for the big moment because the material leading up to it hasn't earned their attention. When everything is working—subtext in the dialogue, possible clues woven into description, characters doing double duty—readers stay fully present because they never know what might matter.

THE COFFEE SCENE PROBLEM

No discussion of scene openings would be complete without confronting what Rene has seen in manuscript after manuscript: the opening coffee scene. Writers, she noted, learned long ago not to start in bed. So now they start in the kitchen.

The underlying principle hasn't changed, though: readers don't pay for a book to read about real life. They live real life. They know how to drink coffee.

Before cutting such a scene entirely, Rene recommends asking whether there's anything you can do with it—whether there's information or character development embedded there that could be transformed rather than deleted. The coffee scene doesn't always have to go. It just has to earn its place.

Matty's own in-progress solution was characteristic: instead of opening with Ann at home, she plans to move the home setting into a later scene, where Ann has her brother and his husband over for dinner outside, looking across the vineyard. The sense of place is preserved—but it's placed where it serves the story, not where it's simply convenient.

PLOTTERS AND PANTSERS BOTH TAKE NOTE

Rene closed with a note for seat-of-the-pants writers: the choreography approach doesn't require you to outline before you write. But it does require serious analysis on the back end. Writers who let the story carry them will need to work harder in revision to shape their scenes into something intentional. That work is completely doable—Rene herself wrote seven or eight books as a pure pantser before shifting—but it has to happen.

Whether you design your scenes before writing them or after, the goal is the same: scenes that know why they're there, enter at the right moment, make every element pull its weight, and leave readers with no reason to skim.

---

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 Rene Gutteridge. Hey, Rene, how are you doing?

[00:00:05] Rene: Hey, doing good.

[00:00:07] Matty: Rene is a multi-visit guest. This is her fourth appearance on the podcast. She was on pretty recently on episode 330, Writing Moments That Matter. That came about because, since Rene is a repeat guest, I had asked her if there was a fun fact that I and my listeners might not know, and that ended up taking the entire episode in a direction that we didn’t even anticipate.

We did absolutely tie it into writing. It was a fantastic conversation — really honestly one of my favorite conversations on the podcast recently — and it made me think I want to invite people that I love talking to and just say, “Hey, what do you want to talk about today?” and not plan anything. But we had a lovely topic planned for that recording, which we’re going to get to today.

For anyone who has missed those earlier episodes, just a quick bio. Rene Gutteridge is the multi-genre author of 24 novels and several nonfiction titles. She’s a writing conference director and an award-winning indie film producer, and one of her novels was adapted into a Hallmark movie. She’s a co-writer on the film Family Camp, which was a Movie Guide Award winner, and she’s also a ScreenCraft finalist in true crime. And if you want to see Rene’s entire very impressive bio, pop over to one of her many episodes.

What Scene Choreography Means

[00:01:26] Matty: So today we’re finally getting to the choreography of a scene, which I think — I think all our conversations come about because of something that pops up in a conversation. The choreography of a scene was something we had talked about in our next-to-last appearance that we wanted to dive into in more detail.

So Rene, let’s just start out — when you say the choreography of a scene, when you think about the choreography of a scene, what are you thinking of?

[00:01:53] Rene: What I’m talking about is that you as the writer are driving the scene rather than the scene driving you. You are designing a scene rather than just letting the story carry you along, because that’s when we get into meandering. We’re meandering through a scene, and we don’t really know why it’s there, and we know we don’t know why it’s there, so then we try to make it memorable or important, but we don’t really know what to do with it. So when I’m teaching scene writing, I like to teach it as designing scenes.

That means you have to plan it, you have to construct it. You’re looking at it logically first before you go into the creative parts of it. And when you approach it that way, then you are truly in the driver’s seat. One of the questions that I often ask writers when I’m working with them is a very simple question: what’s the purpose of this scene?

And sometimes they don’t know. You should be able to instantly answer that question. This scene does this for the plot, or does this for the character arc, or it’s there for this purpose and this purpose. If you don’t know and you can’t answer that question immediately, then you’ve got to go back and look at it.

[00:03:32] Matty: I think choreography might suggest to some people the idea of the physical movement of the scene — the physical movement of characters in the scene — but you’re thinking of it more as the thematic or the arc of the scene?

[00:03:48] Rene: I think it includes all of it. You’ve got to know why the scene is there. What purpose does it serve your story? And I ask writers often: if I think I could take this scene out and we wouldn’t miss it —

[00:04:03] Matty: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:03] Rene: If you can take the scene out of the book and nobody would know the difference, then it doesn’t belong. If you take that scene out and the whole book crumbles, then you know you’ve got an exquisite scene. And the goal is to try to make every scene important. It doesn’t have to be bombs, explosions, and dead bodies, but it should be a mix of plot movement and character movement. In there also is information — you should never have a scene just for informational purposes, but if you do, make it clever.

[00:04:44] Matty: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:45] Rene: Make it entertaining. So there’s that, and then there’s how we design it — if we’re thinking in terms of architecture metaphorically. You’ve got the cookie-cutter houses that all look the same, all designed the same. They flip the door from left to right or something. Or you get into a neighborhood where the houses are each unique. The thing you want to do is you want your story to look like one of those neighborhoods, where every scene has its own moment and character to it.

Purposeful Scenes and Variety

[00:05:30] Rene: And then we’re looking at where do we start the scene? That’s probably the thing that I work on most with writers — each scene should have an important moment, the reason that scene exists. Where do I start? I believe that’s where we were going in our last podcast when I brought up the thing that we ended up chasing.

But that’s the real question as you’re designing it: where do I start this scene? Most often, writers — who are just beginning, or even writers who’ve done a few books — seem to start too early. And then they’ve got a lot of stuff to wade through to get to the actual moment, and they try to make it really interesting with snappy dialogue and great description. So knowing where to start is a big key.

[00:06:40] Matty: I think the interesting thing here is that if you said all that and the word you were using was “story” or “book,” people are used to thinking about that. They might not have perfected it, but they’re used to thinking about that. But the idea of the choreography of a scene — I can’t remember what it’s called when you have a cauliflower and a little piece of cauliflower looks exactly like the whole cauliflower. Whatever that word is, it’ll come to me at three AM. But everything is like a macrocosm or a microcosm of the same thing — all the rules you have to think about for the success of a story are also the rules you have to think about for the success of a scene.

[00:07:25] Rene: Yeah, it’s true. And you do want variety — each scene serves something different, so each scene will look different. We’ve all read books where it’s four chapters of rumination in different locations, and you’re just flipping through trying to get to some action. So you want to try to put some variety in there, because that creates momentum. It keeps the readers on their toes. They don’t know what’s going to happen next. It’s the ebb and flow of a book. But each scene’s construction should be designed.

And what I find is that writers start at chapter one — especially seat-of-the-pants writers who just kind of start and go, “Where’s this journey going?” and let the story carry them. I think that’s the last thing you want to do if you want a page-turner.

[00:08:33] Matty: Yeah.

Propulsive Openings Example

[00:08:42] Matty: This is interesting in the context of the book I’m working on. I just finished the first shareable draft of my seventh Ann Kinnear novel — yesterday was a big day because I sent it off to my first valued reader. When I was working on that book at first, most of my books have several points of view, but as I was working on that one, it was all the protagonist’s point of view, which would have been the first book I had written entirely from the protagonist’s point of view.

And then I realized that there was a sort of secondary storyline that made sense. I added another character’s point of view. And then when I was nearing getting my first shareable draft ready, I realized that for people who are coming to book seven right from book six, the way it started might be fine — which is Ann Kinnear, who has a business consulting with people who want her to communicate with dead people, going to meet her client. I think that would be fine for someone who’s coming right from book six, but for someone who doesn’t know the character and isn’t getting any satisfaction from saying, “Oh yeah, I love her house, I love the place where she lives, oh we’re getting to see her brother again” — I don’t think it would have been that gripping.

And so I ended up adding — and I love this when a change you make actually addresses a couple of issues you know you have — I ended up adding a couple of scenes from one of the bad guys’ points of view, where you don’t know who the person is whose point of view it’s being told from. But rather than Ann meeting her client and the client talking about how he wants her to communicate with his dead father who died on a cruise ship, you actually see the death happening on the cruise ship.

And then when Ann’s talking about it, it’s not that the reader has more information than Ann, because it’s not an overt murder or something like that. But at least it’s more propulsive — especially for a new reader — than it would be if we were just seeing Ann going to the office, basically.

[00:10:32] Rene: It’s a great move. I think you used a perfect word: propulsive. We always want to look for propulsive moments, as many as you can put in. You’ll have those chapters — there are lots of names for them — where you let your reader breathe a little bit, especially if you’re writing suspense. You just need that deep breath chapter, which should also be significant in one way or the other. But that propulsion is something that you want to continually look for, and you made the right move there — you took something that was informational and put it into an actionable scene that we get to see, we get to experience.

Part of the beauty of books is that movies you are watching — you watch it — but books you experience. You’re in the moment with the character. And because of how much media we consume, as writers we tend to start writing our books like movies, where we can see the scene so we’re writing the scene, rather than sinking deep into the scene and letting our readers experience it.

So I would say great move, and congratulations on finishing the book.

[00:12:18] Matty: Oh, yeah. Well, I got it to my first reader, who always has some great input. This is interesting — I’ll probably do a podcast episode about this — I can tell exactly when I started the book because it was the first day of a cruise my husband and I went on in January. This is by far the fastest time it has taken me to get to a shareable draft, and I may share some thoughts about why that might be in a later episode.

Riding on a cruise is fantastic. I highly recommend it at least once for everybody. It was also fun because I based the ship in the book on the cruise ship we were on — changing many names to protect the innocent, since nefarious things happened on the ship. I would pull up the deck plans of the ship we were on and say, “Oh yeah, I’m going to call this bar something else.”

Deep Breath Chapters Done Right

[00:13:18] Matty: I like what you said about the rest scene — after action — because I think that when writers hear the advice to make your story propulsive, the tendency is to put a car chase in every scene, to have the volume at eleven for every scene. So can you talk a little bit about those scenes where on their own they may not seem propulsive, but they are necessary to the story? What are things that would make one of those more restful scenes — the deep breath scenes — intrinsic to the story?

[00:13:55] Rene: Those scenes are typically character development scenes. If you don’t actually have the plot moving things forward, it’s often where the character is discovering something about himself or herself, or is in denial — that’s always a fun one. We the reader understand; the character doesn’t yet understand. And character development really is propulsion too. You’re propelling the character forward, working on that arc.

If you’re in the first part of act two, typically your character is causing problems for himself or others around them. That’s where you want your character to be. If your character has all the answers in the first part of act two, you’ve got to figure that out. But the worse off your character is as a person, the more exciting the first part of act two will be. So if you’re in the first part of act two and what’s happening with your character is turmoil or second-guessing or whatever the issue is, those are the deep breath chapters where we’re not gripping the book, but we are still highly emotionally involved in it.

Sometimes you just have to have informational scenes — it’s just true. I’d be lying if I said it has to be sprinkled everywhere. You try to, but if you have to have an informational scene, then your number one goal is to make it entertaining, however you need to do it.

You’ll see it in different ways in movies and books. Here’s an example from a movie: you have to show the character getting from California to New York, and it would be strange not to show part of that road trip. Your character is in turmoil. They’re driving their old beat-up car. You could just show the car driving for a couple of minutes in the movie, or the character could have a blowout and have to stop at an old gas station where a cranky mechanic offers some sort of sage advice, and we get a little bit of insight into the character.

So in a book, the temptation would be for the character to ruminate the entire way from California to New York. If we were driving all that way, we would just be ruminating — especially as writers. But as you were saying about your book, what is the thing I can do to bring some sort of action into this that gives me what I want? The character could be thinking all these things, or the tire could blow out and the grumpy mechanic could somehow offer some sage advice. So when you’re looking at your chapters — especially on a second draft — and you’re thinking, “This is just one full chapter, 2,500 words of being in this guy’s head,” you maybe examine that and see what you can do.

[00:18:02] Matty: One way I can see that playing out in the book I’m working on is that Ann is sort of the only person on the cruise ship she knows — she doesn’t have allies. She’s alone on the cruise ship with 2,500 other people but a client who’s turning out to be maybe not as reliable as she thought.

There was a lot of rumination in an early draft, and then I realized that if I had her texting with her brother — who is also her business manager, and who is on land — that was fun because not only did it give her a chance to express the things she would otherwise be ruminating about, it also gave more opportunity for her to hear counter ideas, have some arguments, and think things through with him.

And it also introduced some good suspense, because the brother on land might be concerned about her, but there’s nothing he can do. Calling the cruise ship line and saying “I’m worried about my sister” would be overreacting. But it was another one of those cases where you solve several problems when you finally figure out the answer to one problem — it enabled me to create suspense where there wouldn’t have been any, and also got away from 2,500 words in the person’s head.

[00:19:21] Rene: Yes. Exactly.

Modern Communication and Scene Entry

[00:19:24] Rene: I always ask, when I’m reading somebody’s chapter and there’s a phone call between two characters, are they in the same city? Because if they’re in the same city, they need to be in the same room. You’ve got to get them knocking on that front door. Think about how often we see in movies — especially because they’re visual — somebody showing up at somebody’s front door unexpectedly. How often does that happen in real life?

[00:20:00] Matty: Yeah.

[00:20:00] Rene: Never. Nobody shows up at anybody’s door unexpectedly. But the reason for that in fiction is exactly what you said: if they’re not in the same city, texting is great because that’s a very modern form of communication. You can show that, and then it’s not ruminating. But if they’re in the same city, try to get them into the same room, because that’s really interesting if they’re arguing or whatever in the same room.

We like to experience that. It’s not always possible to get people in the same room. And I love the form of communication we get to show in writing through texting — it’s really fun, and it’s a different form of language. We write differently in texts. Writers know — we’re very proper.

[00:20:58] Matty: Yeah.

[00:21:00] Rene: We still put the periods on the end of our texts. But it’s a very fun form of communication that you get to explore, and it can really add some pizzazz into your story.

[00:21:13] Matty: It’s interesting — in an early book, let’s say a book that came out in 2015 or so, I had people texting and they were using a lot of abbreviations, like the letter U instead of “you” — all those abbreviations we used before the text app would provide the anticipated word. And now I’m always struggling with: to what extent are people using those kinds of abbreviations? To what extent are people putting or not putting periods on the end of sentences? Anything involving tech is always tricky because ten years later you might have to go back and fix it a little bit.

[00:21:54] Rene: You do, yeah. You’re absolutely right. Texting has evolved as well. I think the novelty of not spelling out your words is over because the phone spells it out for you. But it’s fun, and it’ll continue to evolve. Virtual conversations are going to be something we’ll be addressing — where characters look like they’re in the room. So all those things are going to be evolving, and we’ve got to figure out as writers how we best use them in our scenes to make them interesting.

And one point I wanted to add about writing scenes: I talked about earlier making sure to enter the scene in the right place. The question you need to ask yourself there is, what’s the big moment in my scene? And then you want to start as close to that as you can. So you find your big moment, and then you back it up just a little bit and get rid of what we sometimes call the warm-up. The warm-up is waking up, getting the cup of coffee, observing the clouds and the weather — those kinds of things — because we’re always wanting to start at the beginning.

[00:23:22] Matty: Yeah.

[00:23:23] Rene: But a well-constructed scene does not start at the beginning. You find your main moment and you back it up just a little bit, so that we have the information we need to understand the big moment.

[00:23:39] Matty: I think a way that people might interpret that — which I don’t think is what you intend — is: let’s say there’s going to be a long conversation that ends in a big blowup, and people might interpret your advice to mean just cut the buildup and show the blowup. But I think it’s about what’s the big moment and all the things that are attached to it. So you could have quite a long scene that’s going to end in a blowup, a long conversation that’s going to end in a blowup, and as long as that conversation is building to the blowup and not extraneous to it —

[00:24:18] Rene: That’s exactly right. A chapter is anywhere from 1,500 to 2,500 or 3,000 words, whatever. Obviously there’s got to be something in there.

[00:24:31] Matty: Yeah.

[00:24:32] Rene: It can’t all be the blowup. The point is that you don’t want to start at the beginning of the day, and then go find the conversation, and then go have the blowup. And that’s where the analysis comes in. If you have a long conversation that’s important, obviously that needs to be in there. Now, if you have a long conversation that is running 2,000 words, you may want to analyze that. That’s a long conversation

[00:25:07] Matty: Yeah.

[00:25:08] Rene: for two people, right? That becomes a talking-head moment. So analyze that. But sometimes you need it — you’ll see that a lot in legal dramas and that kind of thing. The best-constructed scene that I’ve noticed, and the one that I try to hit myself, is understanding your big moment and backing it up a little bit, because that’s usually character development right there, or informational development.

But you want to just sprinkle it all. You just want that fabric to be so tight that it’s hard to discern what’s plot development and what’s character development, what’s information sprinkled in — all of it. It’s just so tightly woven into the narrative that you can’t even see what the information is because it’s sprinkled and it’s gone. And the character development is there and it’s gone. And there’s dialogue and then there’s rumination, and then there’s information, then there’s a plot twist, and then there’s all the rest. And all of that is happening — in the best books I’ve ever read — as if it’s one thing.

Whereas when I first started writing, I wrote in segments. Okay, my information — I need to make sure I get that in. And then I need to make sure I get my dialogue in, and then my plot point, and then whatever else. I was thinking very compartmentally, rather than seeing it as one piece of fabric with all these threads. So now I really try to get it to flow — just so that it’s one piece. And the more you do it, the more you realize it.

I don’t know if you ever have this mental picture when you’re writing, but the sprinkling of the salt, the seasoning as you go through the description — it’s just that little bit of sprinkle of each thing that makes it really fun to read. So if you do have long pieces of dialogue, then you’re sprinkling in character development with inner monologue, or description that is symbolic and is going to come back later, whatever theme you get to see through description. There are a bazillion combinations of that.

But really, the point is that the target — the thing you’re going for — is that big moment. And then it should end there, because that’s your hook. You don’t answer it and you don’t tie it up. And then whatever you need leading up to that.

Make Every Element Work

[00:28:03] Matty: I’m always a big fan of any element that’s doing multiple jobs. I’m thinking of something like: if you are having a conversation between two people and the goal of the conversation is to share information with the reader and also for the characters to share information with each other, an example of what you’re talking about would be that the way those characters interact with each other says something about their character, their personalities. And the rhythm of their conversation suggests something about the rhythm of the story. Are they speaking in a way that indicates building tension? Are they speaking in a way that makes it seem like they think they have a lot of time that they don’t have?

I like doing this especially with characters — saying every character has to serve multiple purposes. For example, on the cruise ship I had Ann — let me see if I can make this make sense in the context of our conversation. She has to be let into the theater after hours, and so she meets up with a crew member outside the theater after hours, and he unlocks the door and lets her in. And for a while, that was just an anonymous crew member, but then later I had a scene where I had another crew member who needed to provide assistance of some kind, and I thought, “Ooh, is there an opportunity to have the person who provides the assistance be the same person who let Ann into the theater, without it seeming bizarrely coincidental?”

And it was. The fact of being able to have that be one person instead of two served another story need for me. So I think that idea of compartmentalization is: don’t think of each of those things as separate goals to pursue, but see how one of those things can support one of the other goals that might not immediately appear on the surface to be related.

[00:30:09] Rene: Brilliantly put. That’s exactly it. I always say demand a lot from the people working for you. So you don’t just get to be information — you also have to serve as character development. You don’t just get to be a character; you’re also going to deliver some information or some conflict.

If you have a 1,500-word conversation, you’ve got to make at least one of those characters difficult or weird or doing something. You’ve got to be entertaining, Cheryl. You don’t get to just sit there and be the secretary. You have got to do something weird, something uncomfortable. If Cheryl is an ancillary character and Bob is your main character, the only job of Cheryl is to bring out the character of Bob. You’ve either got to push his buttons, show his flaws, give him reason to explode, bring out his worst fears or insecurities. Whatever it is, Cheryl better be a workhorse or Cheryl doesn’t get to be in the book.

If you’re going to be in my book, you are going to work harder than you’ve ever worked in your life. Setting — if you’re going to be there, you’re going to do more than be a sunset. You are going to add to theme, you are going to add to context. Whatever you’re doing, you don’t get to just be setting. That’s really how I think about it — I look at all the components and I make them work very hard for me. And if they’re not working hard, they don’t get to be involved.

I probably sound like a harsh boss, but it does make everything very cohesive, and that’s really how you get a page-turner — when you’ve got things doing multiple jobs, because that keeps the reader on their toes. They’re not just reading a conversation; they’re reading subtext. They’re reading possible clues to something. They’re wondering what Cheryl’s deal is. So you always want to keep your reader on their toes so they’re never just skimming. You never want your reader skimming, ever. And once your reader skims, you’ve lost them, because what they’re doing when they’re skimming is looking for the big moment. And so if you need them to have this information beforehand, before the big moment, then you’ve got to make that highly entertaining.

[00:33:22] Matty: A scene from my book is popping into my head for each of these pieces of conversation. There’s a scene in the book where I need to introduce Ann’s brother’s husband. Ann has already been introduced, her brother has been introduced, but I needed to introduce his husband. So I had Ann invite her brother and his husband over for dinner, and they’re making dinner, and I had a sentence about the preparation of dinner: Mike grilled the steak, Scott made the salad, and Ann monitored the time that the baked potatoes were in the oven. Because I wanted to convey that Ann is not the person who is going to be making anything — the assignment she gets in her own home is to monitor how long the baked potatoes have been in the oven. I thought that was a fun way to drop in another hint about what she does and doesn’t do.

[00:34:09] Rene: Yeah.

Coffee Scenes and Final Takeaways

[00:34:10] Matty: But against that, I’m realizing that I violated the “don’t start at the beginning of the day” rule, because I did want to give something to return readers. The place where Ann lives has kind of become a character. And so for return readers, I wanted to give them a revisit of where she lives, and I’m realizing I’m doing that basically at the beginning of the first scene where she appears. She gets up, she drinks her coffee, she goes to the office.

[00:34:44] Rene: Yeah.

[00:34:46] Matty: If I just have her show up at the office but then leave the office and go back to her home — so I’m giving the reader that glimpse of her home but not starting with it — that’s probably a better way to construct that.

[00:34:58] Rene: Yeah. It’s so funny how I read lots and lots of manuscripts, and the number of times — I think we all learned that characters can’t start in bed. We all know that rule. And so now we’re all starting in the kitchen with coffee. We’ve actually gotten out of bed, but the number of manuscripts I read with the coffee drinking is just amazing. I think it’s because that’s how we start our day, and the one rule we’ve got to remember when we’re writing is: we are not writing a reflection of real life. Nobody wants to read about real life. We all live real life. I didn’t pay $12.99 for somebody’s book to read about my life. I know how to drink coffee. I know what it tastes like, and I don’t want to watch you drink your coffee.

So those are the things you catch on your second draft as you’re analyzing. It’s hard to recognize when you’re in the moment, because it makes sense and you have an idea of why it’s there. But when you go back and read and ask, “If I cut this, would this matter? Would anybody miss this?” — you might say no, or you might say, “Well, there’s this piece of information.” And I think that’s what you’re doing: there’s something important here, but I can place it 15 or 20 pages down the road just fine, and it makes everything move more swiftly. My first drafts are just full of all the mistakes I’m speaking of.

[00:36:50] Matty: Yeah. Our assignment is: everybody go search your manuscript and find the first reference to coffee, and hope that it’s not in chapter one.

[00:36:58] Rene: Absolutely. Here’s what I would challenge everybody with: sometimes, instead of just deciding to cut everything, the first question I ask myself is, what can I do with it? I teach a class where I actually use the coffee example, and I show it just as a normal coffee scene everybody’s written in their book. And then I show it again transformed — and maybe if you have me back, we might examine this, because it’s a very stark example of how you could do a coffee scene or what you could do with a coffee scene. I would always look, before you cut — unless it’s very obvious you don’t need it — and ask yourself, “Is there anything I can do with this scene that would be interesting?”

Because sometimes we want to start at the beginning of the day. This is how we want to introduce our character. So it’s not that it always has to be cut. You just want to see if you can make it a workhorse. You don’t get to just exist. If you’re going to drink coffee in my kitchen, you’re going to have to work for it.

[00:38:27] Matty: The reason I want a reference in there in some way is that Ann lives in a guest house in a winery next to a vineyard. I think people who are reading through the series will want some reference to that. I think it would be quite easy just to move the dinner she has with her brother and his husband to outside, and they can look across the vineyard. I only need a couple of sentences to accommodate what I think returning readers will want to hear. And I can drop that in. Unfortunately she’s on a ship for most of the time, so I only have a few opportunities to make a reference to where she lives. But I think it would be quite easy to just take that description and pop it quickly into another scene.

[00:39:12] Rene: You’re a great example, as we’re talking, of what kind of analysis it takes to build a scene. That’s where we want to be — analyzing before and after we write the scene. You really have to look at it from a good 30,000-foot view to see what it’s doing for you.

For the seat-of-the-pants writers that are listening, I don’t want to take your seat-of-the-pants writing away from you by any means, but just be aware that seat-of-the-pants writers will have to really work on the back end to get it all shaped up. It’s completely fine — I was a 100% seat-of-the-pants writer for many years, at least seven or eight books before I finally switched over. I’m about in the middle now. I do a fair amount of outlining, and part of that reason is that in movies you have to do it with your team. But just be aware that you are at great risk of letting the story drive you. So you will want to take that time for analysis at the back end.

[00:40:54] Matty: So Rene, as always, it is so lovely to talk to you. Please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.

[00:41:01] Rene: I always enjoy people dropping by my website, renegutteridge.com. I can be found on Facebook at Rene Gutteridge Author. My Instagram is my personal Instagram that I don’t use much for writing, although my stories are pretty funny, so if you want to follow me on Instagram I put up some fun stories. Happy to hear from you anytime.

[00:41:26] Matty: Great. Thank you so much.

Episode 326 - Story First, Genre Second: Lessons from Romantasy for Every Writer with Brenna Bailey-Davies

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!

Brenna Bailey-Davies discusses STORY FIRST, GENRE SECOND: LESSONS FROM ROMANTASY FOR EVERY WRITER, including why genre works best as a marketing tool rather than a creative constraint, how to signal genre in your first chapter without over-promising on tropes, the danger of trope-stuffing and why narrative should drive genre decisions, what genre-bending fiction offers in the age of AI-generated content, the pros and cons of writing to a hot genre trend, and how editors bring a unique perspective to publishing strategy.

Brenna Bailey-Davies is an editor and writer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Alberta, Canada. Through her company Bookmarten Editorial, she specializes in editing science fiction, fantasy, and romance, focusing on stories with queer representation. She also writes SFF and contemporary romance novels under the pen name Brenna Bailey.

Episode Links

www.bookmarteneditorial.com

www.brennabailey.com

Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast interview: The Creative Process Through an Editor’s Eyes - https://selfpublishingadvice.org/podcast-the-creative-process/

Jane Friedman article quote in the interview:  https://janefriedman.substack.com/p/stop-obsessing-about-your-genre-subgenre 

Summary & Transcript

Brenna Bailey-Davies is an editor and writer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Alberta, Canada. Through her company Bookmarten Editorial, she specializes in editing science fiction, fantasy, and romance, focusing on stories with queer representation. She also writes SFF and contemporary romance novels under the pen name Brenna Bailey. In her conversation with Matty, Brenna drew on her experience as both editor and author to explore what writers in any genre can learn from the rise of romantasy and the broader trend toward genre-blending fiction.

GENRE AS MARKETING TOOL, NOT CREATIVE CONSTRAINT

The conversation opened with a timely reference to a Jane Friedman Substack post titled "Stop Obsessing about Your Genre, Sub Genre and Sub Sub Genre," which Matty had received just ninety minutes before the interview. Friedman argued that industry professionals routinely disagree about genre classifications, that boundaries between genres remain fundamentally fuzzy, and that great writers focus on producing great work rather than complying with labels. Brenna agreed and noted that genre functions best as a marketing tool—a way to help readers find books they will enjoy—rather than as a set of creative rules an author must obey.

Brenna observed that even a label as seemingly straightforward as "romantasy" conceals enormous nuance: what counts as the romance component versus the fantasy component, which books qualify as true romantasy versus fantasy with a romantic subplot, and why some books get labeled romantasy for reasons that have more to do with the author's gender than with the actual content. She cited N.K. Jemisin's BROKEN EARTH trilogy as an example of a work that contains a small romantic plotline but follows none of the structural beats of a romance—and yet has been labeled romantasy, a classification Brenna attributed in part to the fact that it was written by a woman.

THE FIRST CHAPTER AS GENRE SIGNAL

As an editor, Brenna said she asks authors about their genre during intake, but the answer matters less for how she approaches the editing than as a signal of whether the manuscript is something she wants to work on. More importantly, she argued that if a reader cannot identify the genre from the first chapter, there may be a structural problem. The opening pages should communicate tone, plot direction, and character orientation clearly enough that a reader can decide whether to continue. Editors, she said, function as reader advocates—stepping into the reader's position to assess clarity, comprehension, and whether the book delivers on its implicit promises.

TROPES VERSUS STORY

Matty asked whether authors who write across genres risk falling into a checklist mentality—feeling obligated to hit every beat of every genre they are blending. Brenna said she had not encountered this with her own clients, but she could identify it in published books: works that felt overstuffed with popular tropes, where the author appeared to be checking boxes rather than serving the narrative. She compared this to the pitfall of rigidly following any story structure framework—whether Save the Cat, Story Grid, or three-act structure—to the point where the story gets shoehorned into beats that do not suit it.

The antidote, Brenna suggested, was to put marketing considerations out of mind during the writing phase and focus on whether the story works at a fundamental narrative level: whether events happen at the right time, whether character actions make sense, and whether the arc feels organic. Tropes can be incorporated, but they should serve the story rather than dominate it.

WRITING FRESH IN THE AI ERA

Both host and guest noted that the ability to blend genres in unexpected ways may become one of the qualities that most clearly distinguishes human-written fiction from AI-generated content. Matty suggested that an AI system trained to write novels would likely be fed established story structures and genre rules and told to follow them—producing formulaic results. Brenna agreed and pointed to Matthew Salesses's work on how Western narrative conventions represent only one storytelling tradition among many, arguing that embracing flexibility and resisting rigid formulas is part of what makes fiction feel genuinely human.

THE RISKS OF CHASING A HOT GENRE

The conversation turned to the practical question of whether authors should write to a trending genre mashup. Brenna acknowledged the appeal: if a genre is selling, getting in early can pay off, and trending tropes are relatively easy to identify. But she cautioned that slower writers risk finishing their manuscripts after the market has become oversaturated, at which point standing out becomes far harder. Her advice was to think about what gives a narrative staying power—what will appeal to readers not just during a trend's peak but after the trend has cooled—and to build a story that functions as an evergreen work rather than a topical one.

She also noted that authors whose genre mashup books are no longer riding a trend can revisit their marketing to emphasize different aspects of the work, potentially reaching new reader pools. The key caveat, she stressed, was honesty: shifting the marketing spotlight is fine, but misleading readers about the book's actual content will backfire.

BRIDGING EDITING AND PUBLISHING STRATEGY

Brenna closed by describing her VIP Publishing Guidance service, a five-hour intensive in which she works one-on-one with authors on tasks ranging from keyword selection and category placement to marketing plans and the mechanics of uploading a book. She emphasized that her dual perspective as both editor and self-published author gives her an understanding of what a manuscript actually delivers to a reader—an understanding that pure marketing consultants may lack. For authors at any stage of the publishing process, that combination of editorial depth and practical publishing experience represents a distinctive and valuable resource.

---

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 Brenna Brenna. Hey Brenna, how are you doing?

[00:00:06] Brenna: I’m doing great. Happy to be here.

[00:00:08] Matty: I am happy to have you here, and to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you. Brenna Brenna is an editor and writer based in Mohkínstsis, or Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

And through her company Bookmarten Editorial, she specializes in editing science fiction, fantasy, and romance, focusing on stories with queer representation. And she writes SFF and contemporary romance novels under the pen name Brenna Bailey. And I met Brenna when I got a chance to talk with her for the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, talking about the creative process through an editor’s eyes.

And we had so much fun in that—at least I did—we had so much fun in that conversation that I wanted to invite her onto The Indy Author Podcast. And we’re going to be talking about blending genres on purpose, lessons from romantasy for every writer. So, as is always the case, whenever I have someone I’m talking about a particular genre, I like to say that we’re going to be looking for opportunities to make this applicable, regardless of what genre you write in.

[00:01:03] Matty: And to sort of tee that up, I’m going to share just a very brief excerpt from a newsletter I just got. Actually, this is on Jane Friedman’s Substack, and I got this literally an hour and a half before the conversation with Brenna. And Jane prefaces this newsletter saying this is Jane’s rather infrequent and more personal newsletter about her career-long ambivalence about being a professional advice giver.

And the title of this email is “Stop Obsessing about Your Genre, Sub Genre and Sub Sub Genre.” And Jane writes, new writers in particular worry about genre too much. Industry professionals disagree all the time about genres and what constitutes a genre or sub genre or category. Genre boundaries are fuzzy, new genres and sub genres emerge over time.

“Hello, romantasy.” And that is actually from Jane’s article, not an editorial comment from me. But Jane goes on to say, what do you often hear from agents and editors alike? We want genre-bending stories. We want things that defy categorization, upend our expectations. And then Jane goes on to say, because that’s what great writers do—they frankly do not give a damn about these labels because they’re trying to get to great.

They’re trying to do great work that transcends labels. And so Brenna, I think this is such a fun background for our conversation. And so I wanted to start out—like, any comments that you have about Jane’s thoughts on that and how, if you look back when you were entering into a more genre-bending category, how does that track with what your experience was?

[00:02:29] Brenna: Yeah, I totally agree with what Jane says there. I think genre is really useful as a marketing tool, but we can definitely get too caught up in it. Especially what she said about genres not having really clear boundaries. Like, if you think of something about romantasy—well, sure, it’s romance and fantasy put together, but there’s so much nuance there.

Like, what counts as the romance aspects? What counts as the fantasy aspects? What books actually count as romantasy, and which ones are fantasy with romance in them? And it gets really messy. So yeah, I mean, when I was writing my own work, which is romance—you have to think about what’s going to reach your readers.

And I think nowadays we rely a lot on tropes and genre conventions to do that. But the story is at the heart of it, right? That’s the important part, not the category label.

I don’t write romantasy—I just edit a lot of it. So I’m really familiar with romantasy from an editor’s perspective and a reader’s perspective, because I read a ton of it as well. But from an editor’s perspective, kind of reading romantasy and seeing how authors blend the genres and what different aspects they bring in has been really interesting and informative for my own writing as well.

[00:03:47] Matty: And when you are taking a look—do you normally have the author tell you in advance what they think their genre is? Are they coming to you because they know you specialize in that? Like, what’s the connection between how you connect with authors and the genre they perceive they’re writing in?

[00:04:06] Brenna: So I do ask as part of my onboarding—like, I have an intake form. And one of the questions that I ask is, what genre is your work? But honestly, it doesn’t really matter to me so much as it’s kind of just an indication of whether I want to work on this or not.

And oftentimes once I start looking through something, I’ll go, okay, so maybe you’re not quite sure what your genre is, or you’re not quite sure who your target audience is. And then that’s something that we end up having to kind of parse through as I edit.

[00:04:37] Matty: Yeah, I think that—I’m going to include a link to that Substack article from Jane in the show notes for this episode. And I think she is agreeing with what you’re saying about it’s more of a marketing consideration than a creative consideration. And I think that there are two ways people could get into the more genre-crossing or genre-bending sub sub genres. And that would be either because they see something going on in the market and they’re following that because they think there’s a demonstrated interest in this, or they’re just writing the book that interests them. And then in the end they step back and say, what do I have here?

Oh, it has some romance and it has some fantasy. So I guess it’s romantasy. Are you seeing one of those approaches more in your client base?

[00:05:24] Brenna: I think I mostly see the more writing-to-market type of thing. Or people know the kind of niche that they want to fit in and they go that way. But I do have people come to me, especially for—like, I offer first chapter assessments. So I’ll go through and give feedback on the first chapter.

Usually with services like that, that are more high level, authors will be like, I’m struggling with where to place this. I don’t know who my target audience is. So in that case, it’s like they’ve written the story of their heart, they don’t know how to market it, and they want some feedback on who they think their audience is, who’s going to buy the book.

[00:06:01] Matty: That’s interesting—as an editor being in the position of being kind of a marketing consultant as well as a creative consultant. And I suppose it’s the kind of thing where at the end, after the editorial process, you can step back and maybe advise them on that, or is it clear right off the bat? Like, could you provide that kind of marketing input just based on a first chapter?

[00:06:21] Brenna: Based on a first chapter, I can kind of have an idea of it generally. So from my perspective, if you can’t tell the genre in the first chapter, there might be a problem—just because in a first chapter you’re trying to indicate to readers, this is the type of book you’re getting into. So whether that’s tone, plot, character—you want to indicate something that’s going to say, this is the type of book you’re reading.

So readers can go, yes, I want to keep reading, or no I don’t.

I like to think of myself—I think editors in general are reader advocates, right? So we’re trying to step in in the place of a reader in some ways to say, can I understand this? Do I know what’s happening? Is it clear? And I think genre is part of that—just because, as much as we say labels don’t matter, they do when it comes to marketing, right?

That’s how readers find books—they look in the genre that they like because they want more of that. So it is really important in a lot of ways, even if the story is more important and more key than the genre itself.

[00:07:26] Matty: You had said about there being—like, true, I’ll say “true” in air quotes, romantasy, and then fantasy that has a romance aspect or romance that has a fantasy aspect. Can you talk a little bit more about how you make that assessment? And are those second and third things—are those problematic, or are they just another approach?

[00:07:46] Brenna: Yeah, so this is really interesting. I personally don’t like the label romantasy. And this is part of why—because it is so messy and unclear what it actually means. Sometimes I think that romantasy as a label is sometimes used to disparage fantasy written by women specifically because there is romance in it.

So some people will use the label romantasy to say, oh, this is not “real” fantasy, in air quotes, because it has romance in it. Because I mean, romance in general as a genre has kind of been belittled over time, like throughout history. So sometimes that label is applied to books that it shouldn’t be applied to.

So for example, N.K. Jemisin’s BROKEN EARTH trilogy—it has some romance in it, like it has a really small romantic plotline, but it does not follow romance beats. It is not a happy ending. It should not be considered romance at all in terms of genre, and yet I’ve seen it labeled romantasy, and I think that’s because it’s written by a woman.

So yeah, it’s really difficult to parse what counts and what doesn’t, and also why people are putting the label on something.

[00:09:03] Matty: I’m realizing that when you’re talking about the beats one expects from a romance, or the tropes, the happy ending—I can imagine that if you’re trying to layer on romance and fantasy, for example, and you’re now trying to hit every trope in both of those within a story that holds together, that would either take a great deal of editorial skill on the part of the editor and the writer, or it could just be a big mess.

[00:09:32] Matty: Do you find that you have clients or speak with authors who have kind of a checklist mentality and say, there are these ten beats that have to be in romance and there are these ten beats that have to be in fantasy, and so now I have to have twenty beats that I make sure I hit? Like, are people approaching it that strictly, and should they?

[00:09:50] Brenna: I haven’t run into it with my own clients, but I can tell that there are some writers who write that way—because, I mean, this kind of gets to whether tropes are important as well, and the role that tropes play. But when you read a book, sometimes you can tell, oh, they’re just stuffing it. You know what I mean?

They’re just stuffing it full of tropes that they think are really popular, that are going to make the book—like you said—check all the boxes. And that, I think, works against books. I think that is when the books become overly tropey, and readers read it and they go, okay, I see what you’re doing here. This isn’t exactly what I wanted. So I think that there is kind of a balance that you need between including the tropes that readers want and the things that readers like.

But the story—and like we’ve been saying this since the beginning with Jane Friedman’s article, right—the story is at the heart of it, not the genre.

So you don’t want to be stuffing your story full of tropes just to check the boxes that you think will make it sell. You need to have a story that works and have maybe a few tropes in there. But too much—like trying to hit every single beat for both fantasy and romance—can do you a disservice. It’s like trying to take any story structure, like Story Grid or Save the Cat or three-act structure, and trying to just shoehorn it into the beats, even if the story doesn’t quite fit. That’s going to do a disservice to your story, right? You need to do what works for you and for the actual narrative itself, rather than trying to make it fit a box that it doesn’t quite fit.

[00:11:30] Matty: Yeah, I was very pleased to see Jane’s article because I think it speaks to not only something that I think a lot of writers who aren’t writing strictly within that kind of market-driven beat format will be glad to hear, but I also think about my experience or my preferences as a reader. And I look at my enormous to-be-read pile on my bedside table.

And if someone were to look at that, I don’t think they would look at the first book in the pile and say, oh, I can guess what all the other books in the pile are. Like, I’m reading across lots of different genres. And I think that’s got to be true of most people. I mean, I know there are people who only read cozy mysteries, and if it’s not a cozy—if they open a book and the murder happens on the page—they’re not going to be happy campers.

And I can also see that every once in a while I get in the mood for—like, I want to see a locked-room mystery. Like, that’s just what I’m in the mood for. There’s like a very specific sort of trope craving I’m trying to satisfy. But that’s not the normal reason I pick a book. That’s kind of the outlier reason.

And I do think about this a lot, because one of my series is sort of supernatural but not real supernatural. And I’m always complaining to my listeners that I don’t think it’s supernatural enough for people who are specifically looking for supernatural, but it’s a little too supernatural for people who want none of it. But I do kind of feel like those readers that have very strict rules about what they’re going to read are the minority, and that there are other ways we can make our work appealing to them without making promises about the beats they’re going to encounter that we then have to shoehorn in order to achieve.

[00:13:13] Brenna: I agree.

[00:13:15] Brenna: I think specifically in romance, people look for tropes more, because that’s probably the most tropey genre. And it’s very easy for people to rule out—like, oh, I don’t like age gaps, so I’m not going to read that. Or I don’t like ice queens, so I’m not going to read that. Or I love enemies to lovers, so I’m going to gravitate towards those.

Those kinds of things I think are super easy to pinpoint in romance. I think other genres are less tied to tropes, so there’s a little bit more freedom in that. But like you said, there are other ways that we can indicate to readers what they will or will not like in something, right? Even something as simple as your book cover design or your blurb, or whatever your hook is—what’s the hook on the back cover?

Or on the Amazon listing that draws readers in. I mean, for me—and this might be a little bit weird—but I only read the hooks. I don’t tend to read the full blurb. I’ll just read the hook and go, yeah, that sounds great. And then I’ll pick it up without even reading the rest of the blurb. Like, if the cover looks good and the hook is good, I’m sold.

So there are other things that readers look at. And you can think about this as like a marketing whole—you want to try to cover as many bases as you can to draw those readers in, because people will be paying attention to different things.

[00:14:32] Matty: So do you have tips—maybe specific to romantasy, but ideally that might be generalizable to other genre-crossing books—about some characteristics of when an author is doing it right and they’re blending them in the best possible way?

[00:14:51] Brenna: Yeah, so I think this just comes back to what serves the narrative versus trying to trope-stuff a book, right? Think about—basically put the marketing stuff out of your mind while you’re actually writing and see if the story is working just on a basic story level. Like, does it make sense for things to happen when they happen?

Does it make sense for characters to act the way that they’re acting? And make sure you get that feedback from your beta readers and your editor. And make sure that the story is following the narrative arc that you want it to follow. And then you can think about—I mean, some people do it the opposite way. They’ll think about tropes first and then plan the story based on it. But don’t get too in the weeds with it, would be my advice, because that’s when you start to hit walls.

[00:15:42] Matty: Yeah, I can imagine that this sort of “don’t pay too much attention to the genres” is also well-timed because of the whole concern about AI going to be writing all the books. And I think that if I were developing an AI system to write books, then I would first load in Save the Cat and Story Grid and all the—my friend Jennie Trop and say, okay, here are the rules you have to follow.

Go follow them. And I’m not suggesting that any of those people are asking for their works to be used, even outside the AI world, as a strict rule. But I do think that the idea of combining different genres in this way, in unexpected ways or fresh ways, is going to be one of the last bastions that an AI can’t do.

And it makes that idea of not complying with rules and coming up with something fresh and new even more important than it might have been a couple of years ago.

[00:16:42] Brenna: That’s a really good point. I think it’s really easy for new writers to kind of fall into, oh, I have to follow this exactly to a T—like, this story structure, or Save the Cat gives like percentages, and they’ll be like, oh, if this doesn’t fall at exactly 25 percent, like, it’s a failure. Like, no, that’s not true.

There is no one correct way to write a book. Matthew Salesses actually has a book—it’s basically about how in the Western world, we have a specific narrative that we follow generally when we’re storytelling, but in other cultures there are other storytelling narratives that are just as highly lauded, right?

So there is no one correct way to write a book, and we have to kind of embrace that flexibility and not stick too closely—because yeah, we don’t want to sound like robots. We are human. And like you said, that is what differentiates us from something that is written by an AI.

[00:17:44] Matty: I think that a lot of people—there’s a small group of people who are coming up with these combinations of genres that hit really big, like romantasy. And then I think that there are a lot of people who see that in the market and see how popular it is and decide to follow that.

And it seems like the romantasy thing has been going on for quite a while. I mean, long enough so that early in the—like Rebecca Yarros, or whatever—early in her popularity, if someone saw that, they could have cranked out a book sort of in that style. So they might be able to hit that window where it’s still popular.

But I think that the danger is that some other out-of-the-box thinking creative comes up with another combination, and that suddenly romantasy isn’t as popular as it has been. Can you just comment on the pros and cons of jumping on a hot genre-crossing approach?

[00:18:37] Brenna: Yeah, so I mean, you’ve already touched on the pros there, right? Like, if you know that a genre is selling, if you can get in there fast enough and write to market basically fast enough, then you can capitalize on that. And it becomes fairly clear, I think, fairly quickly what tropes are working, what readers are looking for.

And then that makes it easier to write to market. But then the cons of that are, you don’t know how long that genre will stay hot, right? You don’t know how long that’s going to be the most popular thing. So if you’re a slower writer who’s trying to write to market, by the time you get the book out, it might not do as well, or the market’s going to be oversaturated by that time.

And then you have to work harder to make your book stand out and say, this is my book and it’s different from these books because such-and-such. But you’ll still like it because it’s romantasy. Like, that just becomes harder when the market is absolutely flooded. I think if you want to write a romantasy book or another cross-genre book that is popular—or it doesn’t even have to be cross-genre, right? It could be like hockey romance, which is big right now. If you want to write hockey romance or something like that—think about what makes the narrative have staying power and how you can market it that way.

So what will appeal to readers now, but also what is going to appeal about that story to readers in the future? So how can you pull those pieces out and make it kind of an evergreen story rather than just a top-of-the-market thing that’s going to fall off when the genre’s no longer super popular.

[00:20:09] Matty: If a certain combination of genres is sort of losing its pull in the market, but the author is still interested in getting word out about it—is there a way that they can take a look at aspects of it that, you know, now they want to be emphasizing more of one aspect than the other?

Like, if they then start advertising their romantasy book as just romance—what is the danger that somebody who doesn’t like fantasy accidentally picks it up and is disappointed? I mean, I think some of that goes back to what you were saying before about things like blurb and cover design. You need to be signaling those things. But maybe just in marketing copy or the expectations set for readers—any thoughts about that?

[00:20:50] Brenna: I think it’s just dependent on what gets emphasized. But like you said, you don’t want to mislead your readers, because what if they start reading it thinking it’s just purely romance and then suddenly there’s magic? They might be really taken aback by that. So you still have to be honest about what the book is, but what you shine a spotlight on can change.

[00:21:13] Matty: Yeah, that would be an interesting way to sort of reinvigorate a backlist—just look at a different aspect of your work that maybe you haven’t been emphasizing in your marketing materials, and make sure that your book actually meets the new expectation that you may be setting for it. And maybe be able to tap into a new pool of fans.

[00:21:32] Brenna: Exactly. Yeah.

[00:21:35] Matty: Do you see any other cross-genre books coming down the path? Do you see anything that’s kind of like the sports-plus-romance kind of cross?

[00:21:46] Brenna: Yeah, to be honest, I mostly exist in the romance world, so that’s kind of where my view is. But something that I’m seeing more of is science fiction romance. Like, I’ve been seeing more sci-fi romance on the market, which I really enjoy. I would love to see more of that. And also these kind of—I mean, okay, this might not be new, but it’s new to me—but I’m dipping my foot into comedic horror, which I think is really great.

And I’m also seeing more of that. Maybe just because of my own viewpoint widening, but I think that’s a fantastic genre mashup.

[00:22:22] Matty: Yeah, like Grady Hendrix—do I have his name right? I’ve enjoyed his books. But yeah, that is funny. Those are two genres that you wouldn’t think would be easily combined.

[00:22:33] Brenna: Yeah, but they work so well. Like, Rachel Harrison’s CACKLE is one of my favorites. And then T. Kingfisher—just in general—writes so many books that are really creepy and eerie and send tingles up your spine. But they’re also laugh-out-loud funny.

[00:22:48] Matty: I wonder if that’s successful because they’re so different. Like, I can imagine that it would be—I mean, they would all be different kinds of creative challenges. But if you have two genres that have really different beats, then maybe it’s actually easier to combine those than if you have ones that have kind of overlapping beats.

And so you’re not sending the reader a clear message at any point about which of those genres you’re leaning into.

[00:23:18] Brenna: Possibly. I think comedy and horror too work really well together because the comedy works to relieve the fear. So those two, even though they’re complete opposites, they mesh really well.

[00:23:31] Matty: Well, I’ve probably mentioned this example on the podcast before, but it works here. So I remember when I first watched PULP FICTION—and PULP FICTION is not the kind of movie that I would normally watch, but everybody was raving about it. So I thought, oh, I should watch PULP FICTION. And I don’t think I’ve ever laughed as hard as when the guy in the backseat of the car gets shot.

And I don’t like saying that to people who haven’t seen the movie because then they think I’m a freak. But it is true, because you have all this tension built up from the horror and then you have an opportunity to release it in laughter. And it might be kind of manic laughter, but it’s laughter nonetheless.

Like, cathartic.

Yes, yes, exactly. I can see why that would support those being a good combination of genres. Well, I know we’re jumping around a little bit. It probably would have been better if I had been able to read Jane’s article not literally an hour before we hopped on the call, because I did spend the entire ensuing hour trying to sort through my thoughts that were being triggered both by our topic and by Jane’s article.

[00:24:31] Matty: The other thing that I did want to ask you about, because I think this is such a great offering, is that you have a service called VIP Publishing Guidance. And I think this is pretty unique among the people I’ve spoken to who offer services. And I would just love to give you an opportunity to talk a little bit more about what that is and what you do for authors with that service.

[00:24:52] Brenna: Oh sure. So with VIP Publishing Guidance, it’s basically—you get all of my expertise as an editor and an author to yourself for five hours. So I can help you walk through all kinds of things. Like, if you are at the point where you’re ready to upload your book but you kind of need a coworker who knows what they’re doing to help you do that—I can do that. We can look up stuff like what keywords you should be using, what categories you should put your book in, which ties to genre. I can go over marketing plans with you, all kinds of things. It’s called VIP because it is tailored to you as the author and what you need to go through. But it’s kind of an intensive because we will work for those five hours very closely together to basically knock out as much work as we possibly can.

[00:25:40] Matty: That is a great offering, and I think that maybe before our conversation I didn’t fully appreciate the extent to which someone who’s offering editorial services maybe has a unique perspective into the marketing side that someone who’s just focusing on marketing doesn’t necessarily have, because you’re—

I recognize that this is not a requirement of taking advantage of the VIP Publishing Guidance, but for your clients you have this very, very deep understanding of what’s going to be delivered to a reader and can help direct them on how to find those readers that are going to be happiest about it.

[00:26:12] Brenna: Exactly. Yeah. And I think it helps too that I’ve self-published my own books, so I have been through the process. I know how difficult and confusing it can be. So that’s kind of why I made the service—so I could help people who were in the position I was in before I published and felt very clueless.

[00:26:30] Matty: Yeah, I think that—you’re somebody who’s cranking out a book every three months or something like that. Even going back, let’s say once a year—I mean, I’m kind of on, for my fiction, more or less a once-a-year schedule. And even in that year, I can pull up a page on KDP or Draft2Digital or something and say, oh, what’s this? I’ve never seen this before—even though I know I have.

And making notes about those kinds of things can be very helpful. And then having somebody like you to walk authors through that can be even more helpful. So I really like that offering, and I just wanted to give folks a chance to hear a little bit more about that.

[00:27:02] Matty: So thank you so much for joining me, and for being patient with my rambling questions as inspired by our topic and by Jane’s article. It was a great conversation.

[00:27:14] Brenna: Yeah, really fun.

[00:27:14] Matty: Brenna, please let everyone know about the other services you offer and where people can find out more about that online.

[00:27:20] Brenna: Yeah, so I offer copyediting, proofreading, and sensitivity reading services at BookmartenEditorial.com. And if you’re interested in my sci-fi romances, you can go to BrennaBailey.com for those.

[00:27:31] Matty: Great.

[00:27:33] Brenna: Thank you.

Episode 325 - Reveals as the Striptease of Fiction with Tiffany Yates Martin

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!

Tiffany Yates Martin discusses REVEALS AS THE STRIPTEASE OF FICTION, including why reveals are one of the most powerful yet mishandled tools in fiction, techniques for concealing and timing information using POV, structure, and reader assumptions, the dangers of being too cryptic or too obvious, how beta readers can diagnose whether your reveals are working, and a practical checklist for crafting reveals that are intrinsic to the story.

Tiffany Yates Martin has spent more than thirty years as an editor in the publishing industry, working with major publishers and New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling and award-winning authors, as well as indie and newer authors. She is the author of Intuitive Editing: A Creative and Practical Guide to Revising Your Writing and the novel The Fantasy Makers. FoxPrint Editorial has been named one of Writer's Digest's Best Websites for Writers for three years running. She leads seminars and workshops for conferences and writing organizations across the country and contributes craft and publishing articles to numerous industry outlets.

Episode Links

https://foxprinteditorial.com/

https://foxprinteditorial.teachable.com/p/reveals - A self-directed deeper-dive online course on secrets, twists, and reveals

Summary & Transcript

In this episode of The Indy Author Podcast, Matty Dalrymple talks with editor, author, and writing instructor Tiffany Yates Martin about the craft of using secrets and reveals in fiction. Tiffany, returning for her seventh appearance on the podcast, draws on her extensive experience as a developmental editor to explain why reveals are among the most powerful—and most frequently mishandled—tools available to fiction writers.

WHY REVEALS GO WRONG

Tiffany explains that she sees the misuse of reveals frequently in the manuscripts she edits. The instinct to incorporate a reveal is sound, she notes, because reveals are inherently compelling to readers. However, the execution often falls short. Authors may withhold too much information, leaving readers confused rather than intrigued, or they may deploy reveals as a device to generate excitement when the story does not truly require one. Tiffany compares the overly cryptic reveal to the social media post that teases “something big is coming” without providing any context—it aims to create suspense but instead produces irritation. The fix, she says, is to give readers almost all the pieces of the puzzle while withholding a key piece or two, so that the mystery propels the reader forward rather than leaving them adrift.

DEFINING THE REVEAL

The conversation establishes that a reveal is distinct from ordinary suspense or narrative questions. Tiffany defines it as a specific piece of information about the story that, when allowed to become known, has a major impact on the characters, the plot, or the reader. Reveals encompass secrets, twists, withheld information, and unknowns used to create suspense. Importantly, reveals are not limited to mysteries. Tiffany cites examples from literary fiction, upmarket fiction, and thrillers, including Remarkably Bright Creatures, Water for Elephants, and Gone Girl, to demonstrate that the device works across genres. She emphasizes that a reveal should be reserved for something essential and intrinsic to the story, not used simply as a cliffhanger or to inject momentary excitement.

TECHNIQUES FOR CONCEALING AND REVEALING INFORMATION

Tiffany outlines several techniques authors can use to hide or delay information effectively. These include using the premise itself, as in a mystery or in Where’d You Go, Bernadette; using character motivations, as in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, where the protagonist’s literal-mindedness naturally conceals information from the reader; using story structure, as in The Husband’s Secret, where multiple points of view allow the author to delay revelation by shifting to characters who do not yet know the secret; and using reader assumptions, as in The Sixth Sense, where the audience draws incorrect but reasonable conclusions from the information presented. Tiffany notes that a hallmark of a well-executed reveal is that on a second reading, the clues are visible in retrospect—delightful rather than frustrating, because the author did not lie to the reader but simply allowed them to make their own assumptions.

TIMING THE REVEAL FOR MAXIMUM IMPACT

Using Liane Moriarty’s The Husband’s Secret as a detailed case study, Tiffany demonstrates that when a reveal occurs is as important as what is revealed. In that novel, different characters learn the central secret at different points in the story, and each revelation serves a different narrative purpose. The wife’s discovery drives the middle of the story. The reader’s discovery reframes the premise. A final character’s discovery fuels the climax. Tiffany stresses that authors should consider who the reveal is being kept from and when its disclosure will be most profound for both the characters and the story. She contrasts this with novels like A House Without Windows, where the entire narrative is built around withholding the truth until the very end, and Water for Elephants, where reader assumptions carry the concealment naturally.

THE DANGERS OF BEING TOO COY OR TOO OBVIOUS

Matty and Tiffany discuss two common pitfalls. The first is when the reader knows too little—the reveal feels cryptic and the reader disengages. The second is when the reader figures out the secret before the characters do, which can undermine investment in both the character and the story. Tiffany notes that if a reader gets ahead of the author, the story loses its power. She also warns against relying on what Matty calls “magical ignorance,” where a character implausibly fails to recognize something obvious in order to preserve the secret. Tiffany adds that concealing information from readers through a first-person or deep-third point of view only works for so long—at a certain point, the repeated deflection begins to feel like an authorial device rather than an organic character behavior.

HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT AND MISDIRECTION

The discussion turns to advanced techniques for experienced writers, particularly in genres where readers expect a reveal. Tiffany describes how an author she recently worked with made the actual murderer the protagonist’s first and most obvious suspect, then debunked that suspicion with believable evidence—effectively hiding the truth in plain sight. She also discusses Ruta Sepetys’s I Must Betray You, set in Romania under Ceaușescu’s regime, where readers know a family member is a spy but multiple misdirections keep the identity and the true motivations concealed. Matty adds that she values the idea of a double reveal—the reveal of who and then the reveal of why—which requires even greater skill to execute convincingly.

THE ROLE OF BETA READERS IN TESTING REVEALS

Both speakers emphasize the importance of outside feedback when working with reveals. Matty shares a recent experience in which a beta reader suggested repositioning a reveal to the end of a chapter for greater impact and also reported where she had guessed the secret and where she had been misdirected. Tiffany recommends asking beta readers specific questions about whether they felt hooked, whether they were surprised, and where they figured out the secret ahead of time. She notes that authors are especially likely to misjudge the effectiveness of their own reveals because they already know the full story. Tiffany offers a beta reader questionnaire as a free resource on her website and urges authors to invite frank, specific feedback rather than soft-pedaled responses.

A CHECKLIST FOR CRAFTING EFFECTIVE REVEALS

Tiffany closes the craft discussion with a practical framework for authors. She advises writers to identify the specific puzzle piece they want to withhold and from whom, then to confirm that the reveal is intrinsic to the story rather than merely decorative. From there, authors should build in enough context to ground the reader—Tiffany likens this to providing enough puzzle pieces for the picture to be recognizable while withholding a key piece or two. She then recommends planting breadcrumbs so that a second read reveals the clues that were hiding in plain sight and determining the moment when the reveal will have the greatest impact on the characters and the story. The conversation closes with Tiffany noting that even pantsers benefit from thinking through their reveals in advance, since laying the necessary groundwork after the fact is far more difficult than planning it from the start.

---

This transcript was created by Descript and cleaned up by Claude; I don’t review these transcripts in detail, so consider the actual interview to be the authoritative source for this information.

[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Tiffany Yates Martin. Hey, Tiffany, how are you doing?

[00:00:06] Tiffany: Hi, my friend. I’m fine. How are you?

[00:00:08] Matty: I am doing great. And as longtime listeners of the podcast will know, Tiffany is a multi-time visitor. This will be appearance number seven, and previous episodes we have talked about tapping into your author voice, creating character motivation, the three stages of story, being the captain of your author voyage, how to receive and give critique, and X-raying your plot.

And if you want to find any of those, you can go to theindyauthor.com/episodes-all and search for Tiffany. And since I’ve introduced Tiffany so many times on the podcast…

[00:00:39] Matty: My new policy is that repeat guests get to share a fact that our listeners might not know about them instead of hearing the formal bio.

[00:00:47] Tiffany: Okay. I like that. Well, let’s see. I have been an editor for my entire career, I always say, but a lot of people know that I actually started as an actor and I sort of happened into editing at a certain point from that. And when I was an actor, I hosted a game show for a season in Atlanta on the local Fox affiliate network called That’s Atlanta.

That was a trivia game show about Atlanta, and we’d have local celebrities on, we’d have just local citizens on. It was three cameras, mostly improvised, and one of the coolest experiences I ever had as an actor, despite how ridiculous it was.

[00:01:38] Matty: So I have to ask how you got that gig.

[00:01:41] Tiffany: Funny story. I was moving to New York, and it’s sort of a truism, kind of like with writing, that when you suddenly don’t want it as much, you’re way more attractive. And so because I was moving, my agent got me this audition in Atlanta and I was like, eh, whatever. And I just goofed off. I have an improv background, and so I just played, and then I moved, and then they said, by the way, you got the job.

And so every six weeks, because I told them I wasn’t there anymore, I had to fly back and shoot like six episodes in a row.

[00:02:13] Matty: Oh my goodness.

[00:02:17] Matty: Well, I think that that lesson—I have experienced that as well. The story about like, when you don’t want it anymore, it’s so much easier. My experience was my one semester at the graduate English lit program at University of Michigan, and I was surrounded by—everyone else was from like Stanford and Yale and Harvard.

And they had already read all the books that we were studying and I hadn’t. And after like three quarters of a semester, I decided I wasn’t interested. And the last quarter of that semester was the best time.

[00:02:43] Tiffany: Isn’t that funny? It’s like you take the pressure off yourself.

[00:02:48] Matty: Yeah. I think if I could have brought that mindset to the entire semester, I probably maybe would still be there.

[00:02:53] Tiffany: Well, I was just going to say the takeaway from that is if we can get out of our own way as far as expectations, there’s a lot under there we’re probably not allowing to fully flower.

[00:03:04] Matty: Yes, exactly. That is always a good reminder for people to hear, I think.

[00:03:09] Matty: So we agreed that we were going to come back and talk about secrets and reveals in fiction. And whenever I talk with anybody about a topic that they have clearly thought deeply about, as you have about secrets and reveals in fiction, I always like to ask, what did you see in the writing community that made you think this was something that needed some examination?

[00:03:29] Tiffany: So even though I do teach and speak a lot now, I still do a lot of hands-on editing, and I’m always grateful because it’s where I see a lot of the things I wind up teaching about. And this was a big one. I see this a lot in authors’ manuscripts where the instinct to do a reveal is really good because they’re delicious, they’re catnip for readers.

It creates a mystery. It has great impact when you reveal it. But they’re tricky. They’re a really delicate balancing act between offering enough information to ground and orient the reader and make them care—and you can overcorrect, you can offer too much, and then readers are figuring things out and the story feels anticlimactic.

And too often I think I see authors using them because they’re a powerful device when they’re not necessarily the strongest choice for their particular story. And then when they do, there’s all these techniques where it can seem either coy or manipulative or cryptic, or it can be so smooth and seamless that it creates the effect you want, or it just feels so random and unsupported that it feels like a cheat when the reveal comes out.

So I just figured I would try to demystify it.

[00:04:49] Matty: And I think a lot of people think of secrets and reveals especially with regard to mystery. But I’m assuming that this goes beyond mystery, that any kind of genre can have the secret or the reveal that can be powerful if used in the right way, but might not be the kind of whodunit sort of reveal that you would get in a mystery.

[00:05:07] Tiffany: Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely—something like Gillian Flynn, Liane Moriarty, any mystery—it’s the whole premise of the mystery. But a lot of stories use reveals. I’m thinking of things like Water for Elephants, where we think we know what happened in the story, and then at the end we realized there was a piece of information withheld.

And that’s considered, I guess, upmarket, literary. Remarkably Bright Creatures has a reveal in it where we understand the connection between all three characters. So it can be powerful for any genre, but just creating questions and mysteries in your story isn’t necessarily what we mean by reveal. Like when we’re talking about it, it’s used sort of like the HGTV reveal where we use it to both refer to the makeover itself, the device itself, and also to the act of revealing it. So when we use “reveal,” we’re talking about things like what you said—secrets, twists, mysteries, withheld information, unknowns used to create suspense. Plot twists can be considered a reveal.

So it’s not just your basic suspense or questions that you’re going to create all the way through the story. It’s a specific piece of information about the story that when you allow it to be known—and we’ll talk more about who knows it—then it has a great impact on the story and on the reader.

[00:06:37] Matty: And based on either the stories you’ve read or stories you’ve edited, stories you’ve written maybe, do you feel as if it’s—is it easier to approach reveals about what they should accomplish, like the best practices, or the pitfalls? What’s the best way to approach that topic?

[00:06:53] Tiffany: I think both. And it just depends what works for you. I think the best thing to do when trying to incorporate them is to just understand what makes them work. Because if you understand that—like anything, if you understand the principles of it, then you know how to apply them to your own work.

Because there’s a lot of different types of reveal we just talked about, the different, I guess, literal types of reveal you might use. But there’s also—reveals can be something that you are going to reveal can be concealed from a character. It can be concealed from the protagonist. It can be concealed from the reader.

It can be all three. It can be one or the other, like the reader knows something the protagonist doesn’t, or the protagonist knows something another character doesn’t. So there’s all kinds of permutations of it.

[00:07:40] Matty: So I don’t know that I would necessarily break it down by genre because mysteries are built on reveals, but the principles are the same across any genre. So as far as why they don’t work in general, I think one of the reasons I see most often is that they just feel—the reader doesn’t know enough, and so they wind up feeling coy or cryptic or confusing.

[00:08:03] Tiffany: And that would be the example I always give. Everybody has that Facebook friend who posts things like, “Something big is coming, but I can’t talk about it,” or “I can’t believe that just happened to me.” And the idea is the same thing as a reveal like that. It’s trying to create mystery and suspense and expectation, and whoever’s reading it, it’s trying to elicit a reaction.

But really what it does in most of us is annoy us and feel manipulative because we don’t have enough information to know why it matters, and we sense the author’s hand when that happens. In the story, we see that the author is deliberately withholding information.

This is a really clumsy example, it’s off the top of my head, but things like, you know, “When she walked into the store, she couldn’t believe he was there after all these years. How could he have the nerve? What was she going to say to him after all this time?” And it wants to be exciting. Something exciting is happening here, but we don’t know what, so it doesn’t really move the reader.

So what I always just suggest is that the author lays in more context, more pieces of the puzzle. One thing that happens in a coy or cryptic reveal is that the author has tried to leave out too many puzzle pieces. And I always say that if everything is a mystery, then nothing is, because readers just don’t engage.

So it’s best to think of it as giving readers almost all the pieces of the puzzle, or enough for us to understand the picture we’re trying to put together, but withholding a key piece or two. So in an example like that, you might say, “She hadn’t seen him since he walked away from her at the altar.” And just that one piece of information grounds the reader enough that now we don’t need to know what happened exactly. We don’t need to know what happened afterward. We know enough that we’re hooked and it’s a breadcrumb. We want to know more.

[00:10:07] Matty: I can imagine that one of the pitfalls of reveals is that people might think of them in the same way as like a cliffhanger. And if you’re writing something that’s sort of episodic or you’re writing a thriller where it’s more of a trope that each chapter is going to try to carry you into the next chapter with a bit of a cliffhanger at the end, and dropping the reveals in in that way.

Like, I think about the stories or the movies that I enjoy and it’s not repetitive reveals. There’s usually one big reveal or maybe a couple of relatively major reveals, and the other ones don’t kind of slap you in the face as a reveal. Maybe it is a reveal, but everything isn’t pegged at eleven.

So do you have a sense of what people can watch out for in their own writing that’s saying like, now you’re getting carried away and you shouldn’t be using this as a device to keep the reader engaged? It should be used in either a more subtle way or maybe a couple of big ways.

[00:11:15] Tiffany: Yeah, I think that’s the whole purpose of a reveal. Like, again, it’s not the same thing as just creating questions and suspense in the story. That’s something you should do all the way through, and you do it by giving readers things to wonder about, by baiting a hook and then giving us the answer.

But as you said, if you do that by withholding a bunch of information about what’s actually going on, the whole thing just feels like a mystery. A reveal is best used for something that is essential and intrinsic to the story that has a major impact on either the characters or the trajectory of the plot.

[00:11:55] Tiffany: So, for example, Liane Moriarty’s The Husband’s Secret is about a woman who discovers a sealed envelope, a letter in her attic addressed to her in her husband’s handwriting, to be opened after he dies. Well, he is still alive. It was clearly buried in a box. So much of the first part of the story is about what the hell is in that envelope.

But does it have to be held to the end? No. When you reveal something can help further the story and create a specific effect. So in that story, we actually find out what’s in the letter about a third of the way through. And actually, so at first no one knows what’s in it—the wife doesn’t know, the reader doesn’t know. It’s a three-protagonist story, so none of the protagonists know. And then the wife finds out what’s in it about a third of the way through. A few chapters later, the reader finds out what’s in it. And then another character finds out later in the story, and one doesn’t find out until the very end. So with each of them, when it’s revealed dictates what the story is about.

For the wife, her story is about dealing with the fallout from what she knows is in it. For the reader, at first that’s the delicious hook, but once it’s revealed, the premise of the story is what happens, how that reverberates among all three of these characters and dictates their arcs. And then the character who finds out at the very end—that revelation is key to the climax of the story.

So it has to be revealed there. Doing it mindfully and deliberately is really important for making it effective.

[00:13:40] Matty: And are there specific different approaches you would use when the reveal is to the reader versus the reveal is to a character about something that the reader already knows?

[00:13:49] Tiffany: Well, there’s a lot of different techniques you can use with reveals in general. Some of them are more effective depending on who you’re keeping it from. So for example, you can use the premise itself, and that would be something like a mystery where the whole point of it is to uncover the clues, but also Where’d You Go, Bernadette, which is not a mystery. The whole point of the story is to literally figure out where Bernadette went.

You can use the character motivations or who the character is. Like, there’s a story by Mark Haddon called The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and it’s kind of almost an unreliable narrator device for the reveal, because the information that the—I’m trying not to spoil every story for your listeners.

[00:14:34] Matty: I realize this is a tricky aspect of talking about reveals.

[00:14:37] Tiffany: It is. And when I teach on it, I’m like, okay, I’m just going to spoil these, but let’s try not to if we can help it. So I think I can help it, but if it feels too cryptic, tell me and I’ll fill in more detail. There is a big reveal about the boy’s life, something he doesn’t know and readers don’t know, but the author is able to conceal it from readers because the character is autistic.

And so he takes everything very literally. He believes wholesale things that he is told, and because he does, the reader never really questions it either. In The Husband’s Secret, Moriarty uses the character motivations because at first the wife is dying to tear into it and she doesn’t because she thinks, oh, maybe he doesn’t want me to, maybe it’s something really sappy and he doesn’t want me to open it.

But he forgot it was in there. So then she talks to him and she tells him that she has it and that she’s going to open it. And he begs her not to. He’s like, oh, it was a foolish thing and I really don’t want you to see it. And so she resists because she feels like it’s a breach of his trust if she does it.

But then later, when he comes home, I forget what happens, but something shifts and suddenly she realizes she has to know what’s in it. So in the middle of the night, she sneaks up and opens it. So we’re changing the motivations.

There’s a story by Nadia Hashimi called A House Without Windows. That’s predicated on the idea that a character—at the very beginning in the first scene, we have a first-person prologue of an Afghani woman who’s found in the courtyard of her house next to a bloody knife and the body of her husband. She’s arrested. She’ll be put to death if she doesn’t defend herself, and she refuses to speak on her own behalf.

So that’s the only time we ever see her direct perspective. And the rest of the story is told from two different characters, both of whom are invested in finding out what happened. But the whole point of it is that she deliberately doesn’t want anyone to know what happened. So we’re using the character’s motivations in that one.

You can use the plot itself. That would be any murder mystery, like Lucy Foley’s The Guest List, where we slowly learn different facts about the character and we see things unfolding over the course of the story. You can use the story structure, like I was talking about, The Husband’s Secret with three protagonists. Because of that, she’s able to withhold the secret from the reader for two extra chapters because she just goes to two other different points of view that don’t know it.

Gone Girl does that at the beginning. We’re only getting Nick’s first-person point of view, and we’re seeing Amy’s diaries up until the point of her disappearance. So we don’t know the truth about what happened to Amy until part two of the story, when we get Amy’s direct point of view.

You can use the point of view itself. Like, a first person—obviously anything the character doesn’t know or deep third, the reader can’t know. And omniscient, you can let the reader know things that the characters don’t know.

You can use reader assumptions and expectations. This would be like The Sixth Sense, where we’re just making inferences based on what you’re showing, but you’re sort of using the reader’s—you’re misleading us in a benign way. Like, you’re showing us clues. For example, the scene with Bruce Willis—it’s an older movie, but I’ll just go ahead and spoil it because it’s really old.

The kid sees dead people, and Bruce Willis is a psychologist who’s talking to the kid. And in one scene you see him sitting with the mom in total silence, and the reader’s assumption is, oh, he’s just told her something really difficult about her kid and she’s upset and they’re just having this moment.

And later it’s revealed that he’s dead and the kid sees him and he doesn’t know he’s dead. And you just see how cleverly those little clues were laid in, and it wasn’t that we were lied to. It wasn’t that the author was misleading us. It’s just they gave us information and allowed us to make an assumption.

[00:18:52] Matty: Yeah, one of my favorite movie scenes. I love The Sixth Sense, and one of my favorite scenes is when he’s at dinner with his wife. It’s their anniversary dinner, and it’s kind of set up like—I mean, in reality she has gone to the restaurant that they always went to for their anniversary and she’s having dinner by herself, which is obviously an unhappy situation for her.

And he shows up. But the sense is, I mean, exactly like you’re saying, you assume that she’s not talking to him because she’s pissed off at him for some reason.

[00:19:18] Tiffany: It’s brilliant.

[00:19:19] Matty: Yeah.

[00:19:20] Tiffany: And one thing I love about that movie, if people haven’t seen it or even if you have—when you go back at the very end, Shyamalan shows us the clues that he paved in there. He goes back, like the red doorknob on the basement, and I forget what else he shows. It’s been a while. But one thing about a really well-laid reveal is that it will make readers want to read it again because we want to see how we were—

[00:19:47] Matty: Wait, what?

[00:19:48] Tiffany: Yes. And on that second read, if we see things like where those misdirections were, where our own assumptions led us astray—it’s delightful because it wasn’t artificial, because it wasn’t manipulative. We clearly see how skillfully the author simply led, or allowed, or encouraged us to make assumptions that were wrong.

[00:20:13] Matty: Yeah.

[00:20:21] Matty: Yeah, I think the two pitfalls I can imagine—one of them harks back to our conversation about what did we call it, the fallacy of magical knowing. And then we sort of started talking about the fallacy of magical ignorance, and the idea that if the reader knows something that a character doesn’t, at some point you get to the point where you’re like, there’s no way that person doesn’t know that. Like, that’s such a frustrating reading experience where you feel like the author is relying on someone being unusually dense in order not to recognize the secret.

[00:20:51] Tiffany: To build on that, we were talking earlier about ways reveals can go wrong, and I said with the reader doesn’t know enough. The other one is that readers know too much. And you’re right, if we get ahead of the author or we get ahead of the characters, we may be very satisfied with ourselves, but it also takes the fun away from the story because we’ve outwitted the character or we’ve outwitted the author, so we feel like we’re a step ahead of them.

And like you said, it’s hard to justify how something that we see so clearly the character is not seeing, and it can undermine our investment in the character.

[00:21:32] Matty: Yeah, I think there’s the reader knows more, and then when the character knows more, I think this gets to what you were saying before about the coy reveal—that if you’re not given enough information or the buildup is too long, or you see it coming but you’re not getting the payoff. Can you talk a little bit about the dangers of being too coy with the reveal?

[00:21:56] Tiffany: Yeah, you have to find ways to do it that feel organic.

[00:22:01] Tiffany: So, we talked about Water for Elephants a minute ago, and I think I have to spoil this one. So at the very beginning—it’s Sara Gruen, I’m not sure how she pronounces her name—at the very beginning, the story opens on what is kind of the climax of the story, where we see the—I think it’s the ringleader of the circus is murdered, and the protagonist of the story, who’s a much younger man in this prologue, sees it happening.

And that’s sort of the setup for everything we see. And then it’s a dual-timeline story where we partly follow what led up to that in the past, and then we also see the man who’s now living in an assisted living home, and we’re recalling all these events from his perspective.

And then later in the story, we find out that the author allowed us to use our own assumptions to believe that it was the man’s love interest, the woman who was the elephant trainer, who killed the ringleader, when it was actually the elephant. So because we think we know what happened, it never occurs to us to feel strung along throughout the course of the story.

[00:23:21] Tiffany: Now, let’s say you have a reveal like the one I just talked about, A House Without Windows, Nadia Hashimi, where we know what happened at the beginning, or at least we know what is found at the beginning, but we don’t know what the woman actually did, whether she killed her husband or not.

The device that makes that work is the fact that, as I said in the prologue, we have her first-person point of view, and then the two main character points of view are her mother and the lawyer who’s defending her. If we had her first-person point of view throughout the story and we still never knew what that motivation was or what actually happened, that would quickly begin to feel manipulative, because you can conceal to a degree for a certain amount of time.

You can conceal from readers what a character herself knows, even if you’re in a direct point of view like first person or deep third, with clever little devices. Like, we’re not always fully honest with ourselves. So you could have an unreliable narrator. You could have someone who’s in denial or suppressing it. But again, that only works for so long unless you had actual amnesia or memory loss, and that’s a main premise of the story. Then that can work. But at a certain point, you’re going to run out of ways to say “she wouldn’t let herself think of that now,” because if you do that enough times, it does start to feel like a device, and anything that calls attention to the author’s hand pulls the reader out of the story. That’s why these are so tricky.

[00:24:58] Tiffany: I call them the striptease of literature, because like a striptease, if you just walk out and put it all out there, it’s not very exciting. But if you walk out and you don’t take anything off but a sock and a glove, that’s also not very exciting. You really have to balance how much and when and what you’re choosing to reveal and use it really judiciously. Like I said, and as you said, if everything is a reveal or some kind of mystery, then you really lose the impact of whatever the thing is.

That could be the backbone of the story. That could be the hook for the story. You have to very deliberately decide which thing serves the story by withholding, and from whom and for how long. And then salt in context enough so that readers have their feet planted. Like, that should be a propelling mystery.

[00:26:02] Tiffany: But the reader—I talk about good questions and bad questions. The readers should never have bad questions like, “What’s going on?” or “Why should I care?”

[00:26:13] Matty: “What the hell?”

[00:26:14] Tiffany: Yes. I mean, one example I give is, you have a character walking down the street and she hears footsteps behind her and she’s really nervous, and she turns around and it’s her uncle. Who cares, right?

Like, we don’t know enough context. Even if we know she thought he was dead, that’s still not enough context. We don’t know the stakes. Why does it matter? Like, okay, it’s interesting that a dead guy is back, but did she spend his inheritance and now she’s like, oh, got to reckon with that? Or was he out to get her and she thought she was safe from him?

We need to know why the reveal is germane and important to the story.

[00:26:59] Matty: Yeah, I think sometimes this is so hard for an author to judge themselves. And this conversation was very well timed because I just got back some comments from my first beta reader, my first and favorite beta reader, and I had a reveal—not a huge reveal, but an “Oh, that’s interesting” kind of reveal—in the middle of my book where there were two characters and they were portrayed as two different people. But then it turns out it was the same person. It was a woman who was in disguise, and then somebody who had met her in her other persona sees her and says, “Oh look, it’s so-and-so.”

And I thought it was acceptably—like, this is a fun reveal but it’s not the big reveal. But my beta reader said, you can cash this in a lot more if you have the reveal be the end of a chapter, because it kind of gives it that punch. And then you show the outcome of the one character recognizing that it’s the same person in the next chapter.

And that’s not something—I think it was hard for me to judge whether it was a significant enough reveal that it merited that kind of end-of-the-chapter attention. And the other thing that was useful is she said, “I kind of thought it was the same person”—and these were the parts where she’d get to this part and think, “I think this is the same person.”

And then she said she’d be in these other parts and be thinking, “No, no, it’s not the same person.” And that’s another thing I think is so hard for an author to judge themselves—like, how secretive are you being? Or is this apparent to everybody else, or have you left no breadcrumbs so no one could possibly see that coming? Like the breadcrumbs you were talking about in The Sixth Sense.

[00:28:44] Tiffany: Particularly with reveals, I think it’s important to have beta readers or crit partners, for the reason you say. I mean, in the best of circumstances we are filling in the blanks between all that we know about the story and what’s actually made it on the page, and then that’s sort of times ten with reveals.

Because we may think we’re being appropriately mysterious, but we’re being cryptic. Or we may think we are salting in just enough subtle clues, but it’s very obvious. So I think you need feedback, and that’s actually the advice I always give about diagnosing them. You can do your best, but I think it’s helpful to ask people how hooked they felt by it, and whether they were surprised by the reveals, and whether the payoff felt satisfying, and then dig deeper.

Actually, I always advocate offering questions as guidelines to your beta readers anyway, particularly beta readers more than crit partners, because they’re often not writers themselves, for many people, and it helps elicit the kind of specific, focused feedback on how well your story’s coming across on the page that you need to help you understand whether your intentions are clear and where you might strengthen the story to make sure you get that across more.

So one of the resources I offer on my website is a beta reader questionnaire. But particularly with reveals, ask about were they hooked, were they surprised? And then dig deeper. If they felt like the reveal didn’t quite hold together, where did they figure it out ahead of time and how did they figure it out ahead of time? Or where and why did they feel confused or uninvested by what was clearly being hinted at? What was it specifically about the reveal that didn’t have the impact you hoped it would?

Ask for really frank feedback. Hopefully we always do this with our beta readers and our crit partners, but this is not the time for the soft pedal. You want your readers to very clearly reflect back to you where they saw the man behind the curtain.

[00:30:57] Matty: Yeah.

[00:30:58] Matty: When I—most of my novels are either thriller or suspense, but some of them have mystery aspects, sometimes as sort of a subplot. And I always ask my beta readers at various points in the story, just tell me who you think done it.

[00:31:11] Tiffany: Oh, that’s a good question.

[00:31:12] Matty: Ideally I want it to be spread evenly across all the possible suspects, including the person who actually did it. One thing that I’ve heard mystery writers say is, “Oh, I dropped in this clue and it suggests the actual murderer, so I’m going to take that out.” And I was like, no, you have to implicate everybody at one point or the other. Or the readers are just going to say, well, the only person that they haven’t implicated is this person, so clearly that’s the bad guy. You have to implicate the bad guy as much as everybody else.

[00:31:46] Tiffany: Well, you can take that a step further. That’s one of the techniques you can use, especially in something like a mystery. The more you have the character suspect—I just finished working with an author on one where the murderer was potentially the most obvious suspect, but she had the protagonist immediately think so and think so for quite some time during the story. And then she debunked it. She gave the reasons why it wasn’t plausible and they were believable reasons.

And so we accept it. It’s hiding in plain sight. Do more than drop the clue. Have them really suspect who the murderer might be or who the suspect might be, and then figure out a reason that they would dismiss that suspicion.

There’s this weird psychological thing where you almost carry the reader along with you if you’ve done it well, and they think, “Oh, well, they did their due diligence. It’s not that person.” And they just buy it, and it’s like the magician who’s using sleight of hand—don’t look at this hand, this hand is doing exciting things. And suddenly they don’t look at that hand anymore.

[00:33:01] Matty: Do you think that there’s a difference in approaching a reveal when people are going to a story for a reveal, as they would with a mystery, and where the reveal is—if the reader is expecting a reveal, is the approach different than if you’re applying a reveal in a genre where that’s not necessarily sort of a required trope?

[00:33:27] Tiffany: I don’t know if the approach would be different so much as—because we know there’s a reveal coming, like you said, readers are going to be on the lookout for it. So I think you almost have to be more mindful of using tools of benign manipulation and misdirection.

So for example, Ruta Sepetys has a story called I Must Betray You. That’s all about kids, people living in Romania under Ceaușescu’s regime, which is very oppressive, and everybody is spying on everybody. So we have this reality set up, and early in the story she has one character tell the protagonist, “Spies are everywhere, including within our own walls.” So we know that within this family somebody is a spy, and we’re looking at every single thing.

But she really cleverly misdirects us because there’s more than one. And also the one that we think it is at first, we find out indeed was spying, but for a completely different reason that was much more sympathetic than the one we originally thought. So the character was more of an ally than an antagonist.

She really kind of messes with our expectations. But because we know somebody’s a spy and the family is only like four people big, it requires you to be even more attentive to hiding the clues in plain sight, to leaning into some of the mystery, to misdirecting readers. All the techniques you would use to pull off any reveal, you kind of have to pull off exponentially more skillfully in that kind of story.

[00:35:12] Matty: Well, I like that idea of the double reveal—the reveal of who it is and then the reveal of the why, why they’re doing it. And with each level of reveal, you have to be more and more skilled at handling the story so that it supports the weight of all those reveals.

[00:35:27] Tiffany: So I think when you’re doing it, the first question to ask yourself is, what is the puzzle piece you want to withhold and who do you want to withhold it from? Is it from readers? Is it from your protagonist or another main point-of-view character? Is it from another character? And who is withholding it?

Then ask yourself why. If you’re doing it to just put a little spice into the story, or because you think you need to shock the reader or it will have great impact—that may not always be the strongest reason to do it. It should be something absolutely intrinsic and germane to the telling of the story.

For example, in The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett—Stella and Desiree are twins who run away from their hometown together, and then one of them—they’re incredibly close, but a year later, one of them disappears. We have no idea what happened to her, and neither does her sister, and neither do any of the other characters.

Well, that’s not really the focus of the first part of the story. It’s the effect of what happened to her on the other characters. So we don’t even hear anything about her until maybe midway through the story, when we start to follow her story and we understand why she left. And then the fallout from that converges in the third part of the story, where we see how the fact of her leaving and the fact of her being rediscovered by the family affects the family dynamics.

So that’s intrinsic to the whole story. That reveal is the premise of the story. In a mystery, it’s going to be the premise of the story. In something like Water for Elephants, it makes the reader question what we thought we knew about the story and changes the impact and meaning of it at the end when we learn the truth.

So it’s also intrinsic to the story. In The Kite Runner, the secret about what happened with his childhood best friend—I think we learn maybe a third of the way through, but it’s dictated his entire childhood and his entire adult life, the main character. It was a betrayal that he committed against his best friend. And so in the first part of the story, it’s kept because we’re unspooling that part. The story is sort of bracketed with present and past scenes, and in the first part we see the present at the beginning and how it has affected him, and then we see what leads up to it.

So we don’t actually learn what it is until about a third of the way through. But then after that, the course of the story changes as a result of him facing what he did and then trying to make it right. So that will dictate where you want to put the reveal and what you’re revealing.

Then start building in the necessary context and foundation for it. Remember, if everything’s a piece of the puzzle and we don’t have any of the pieces of the puzzle, imagine trying to put together a puzzle when someone hands you two blue puzzle pieces and goes, “Go.” We have to have at least some idea of the picture that we’re putting together. We need to know a little bit more about what pieces we have so we can start to figure out how they go together.

So we need enough to know for the revelation of the information or the event to reverberate for the characters and the plot and the reader. Or, I say that having enough context is sort of the difference between finding a beautifully wrapped present with a tag on it that says it’s from your best friend under the tree, and finding a plain brown paper–wrapped box on your front doorstep. One is lovely and one is annoying and possibly threatening.

Then start paving in the clues. This is not necessarily how it will unspool in the story—this is maybe your process as an author so that you can figure out what to reveal when. I always talk about the Watergate question: What does the reader need to know and when do they need to know it?

Start dropping your breadcrumbs in a really well-orchestrated reveal. As we said, a second read will let readers see where they are, so figure out how and where you’re going to pave them in and what techniques you’re going to use to keep the information hidden without that coy, cryptic feel or manipulating the reader.

And then, when will the reveal have the most impact? We talked about in The Husband’s Secret it was in the first third. In A House Without Windows, the whole point of the story is whether she killed her husband or not—we don’t find out until the very end. Same with Water for Elephants. Gone Girl comes maybe halfway through.

So for that, you have to consider who the reveal is being kept from and when the impact is most profound on the characters and the story. And then just make sure you get beta readers to look at it and see if it’s effective.

[00:40:37] Matty: Yeah, I realized that one of the reasons I was sort of teeing up the reveal that I used as an example—about the person who’s actually two people who are actually the same person—is that it’s not intrinsic to the story in the sense that, I think we had talked in a previous episode about the fact that I like to keep my cast of characters as small as possible.

And so as I was working through my outline for the story, I had a woman who was doing this one thing and I had a woman who was doing this other thing, and then I just thought logically, she’s one of the bad guys and the bad guys only have a limited number of people to tap into, so they would use the same person for both these tasks.

And so it was more—it wasn’t like, “Ooh, and then it’s going to be a big reveal.” It’s like, no, this is kind of logical and I can have fun with the reveal, as opposed to the story hanging or relying on that reveal being really revelatory to the reader.

[00:41:30] Tiffany: So I think without that logical piece, though, it might have felt contrived, because yes, it’s fun, but if there’s no germane story reason for it, it might have felt like an author manipulation. So I think it was smart of you to pave that in.

That’s why I think thinking them through beforehand is a really good way to approach them. And this applies even if you’re a pantser, just because if you totally pants it, it’s possible, but then you have to go through and lay all this groundwork. Whereas if you’ve thought it out, I think it can help direct how the story builds.

[00:42:06] Matty: Well, I’m realizing that we probably should have done the “What’s one secret about you that nobody knows?” as the end of our conversation instead of the start of our conversation. We’ve already had one reveal from you so far. But Tiffany, it’s always lovely to speak with you. Thank you for coming on for episode seven. So please let everyone know, if they don’t already know, where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.

[00:42:30] Tiffany: Thank you, Matty. Thanks for having me again. It’s always such a delight to talk to you. The best place to find me is FoxPrintEditorial.com. It’s where you can find—I don’t do a lot of social media anymore, but you can find my weekly blog, which is full of craft tips and business tips and writing life insights. And then my online courses are there. There’s a ton of free resources for writers—downloadables, guides, checklists, recommended resources, links to people and organizations that can help writers. So please do check that out.

[00:43:08] Matty: And I am just scanning your actual bio because I know in there—oh, FoxPrint Editorial, named one of Writer’s Digest’s Best Websites for Writers. So that’s why.

[00:43:19] Tiffany: Three years in a row. Thank you for bringing that up.

Episode 324 - Writing Ensemble Casts That Keep Readers Hooked with Jennifer Probst

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!

Jennifer Probst discusses WRITING ENSEMBLE CASTS THAT KEEP READERS HOOKED, including strategies for developing believable character relationships and chemistry, balancing primary and secondary characters in series fiction, keeping relationship arcs consistent across books, and practical craft tips for writing complex casts that keep readers engaged.

Jennifer Probst wrote her first book at twelve years old. She bound it in a folder, read it to her classmates, and hasn’t stopped writing since. She holds a masters in English Literature and lives in the beautiful Hudson Valley in upstate New York. She is the New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of over fifty books in contemporary romance fiction. She was thrilled her book, The Marriage Bargain, spent 26 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Her work has been translated in over a dozen countries, sold over a million copies, and was dubbed a “romance phenom” by Kirkus Reviews.

Episode Links

https://www.jenniferprobst.com

Summary & Transcript

In this episode of The Indy Author Podcast, Matty Dalrymple talks with Jennifer Probst about writing and managing large ensemble casts, with a particular focus on romance fiction, multi-POV storytelling, and long-running series. They discuss how authors can balance multiple characters and relationships without overwhelming readers, and how intentional craft choices help maintain clarity, emotional impact, and reader engagement.

OVERVIEW OF ENSEMBLE CAST STORYTELLING

Jennifer explains that she is frequently drawn to ensemble casts because she enjoys exploring interconnected relationships and the dynamics of communities. Ensemble storytelling allows authors to show how characters influence one another over time, rather than existing in isolation. However, she emphasizes that this approach requires deliberate structure and planning. Without clear focus, large casts can quickly become confusing or dilute the emotional core of the story.

She notes that ensemble casts appear across genres but are especially common in romance series, where readers often enjoy seeing familiar characters reappear and evolve. She adds that romance readers frequently become invested not just in a central couple, but in a broader cast of friends, family members, and future protagonists.

FOCUSING EACH BOOK AROUND A CENTRAL STORY

A key point Jennifer stresses is that even in a large ensemble, each book must have a clear center. One primary relationship or narrative arc should anchor the story. Supporting characters may have subplots, but those elements must serve the main arc rather than compete with it. She cautions against giving secondary characters too much page time before they are ready to carry their own story, as this can weaken pacing and reader satisfaction.

Matty highlights how this approach helps readers feel grounded. Even when many characters appear, readers know whose journey they are following in that specific book. Jennifer adds that clarity of focus also helps authors avoid the temptation to resolve too many storylines at once.

MANAGING MULTIPLE POINTS OF VIEW

The conversation turns to multi-POV writing, which is common in ensemble romance and series fiction. Jennifer explains that she is careful about whose point of view is included and why. Every POV must earn its place by advancing the story or deepening emotional understanding. She avoids including a character’s perspective simply because it is interesting; it must be necessary.

Jennifer also discusses techniques for keeping POV shifts clear, such as maintaining consistent voice, clearly signaling transitions, and ensuring that each POV offers new information rather than repeating what the reader already knows. Matty notes that readers can become frustrated when POVs blur together or feel redundant, especially in long series.

CHARACTER DIFFERENTIATION AND VOICE

Jennifer emphasizes the importance of distinct character voices in ensemble casts. With many characters on the page, authors must work harder to ensure that dialogue, internal thoughts, and emotional reactions are specific to each character. She explains that she often develops a strong sense of a character’s emotional wounds, desires, and worldview before writing, which helps keep voices consistent.

Matty connects this to reader trust, pointing out that when characters feel distinct, readers can follow complex interactions more easily. Jennifer agrees, noting that readers will tolerate large casts if they can immediately recognize who is speaking and why their perspective matters.

PACING AND TIMING IN SERIES FICTION

Another major topic is pacing across a series. Jennifer explains that ensemble casts often work best when characters are introduced gradually. Rather than front-loading a story with too many people, she prefers to layer characters over time, allowing readers to become familiar with them before they take on larger roles.

She also discusses the importance of timing when spinning off secondary characters into their own books. Rushing this process can feel forced, while waiting too long can lead to missed opportunities. Matty observes that successful series often strike a balance between teasing future stories and delivering a complete experience in the current book.

READER EXPECTATIONS AND GENRE CONVENTIONS

Jennifer and Matty talk about how genre expectations shape ensemble storytelling, particularly in romance. Romance readers expect emotional payoff, relationship growth, and satisfying resolutions. Ensemble casts can enhance these elements by showing how relationships evolve within a broader community, but they can also undermine them if the focus becomes scattered.

Jennifer notes that being aware of reader expectations helps guide decisions about which subplots to emphasize and which to hold back. Matty adds that clarity about genre conventions helps authors decide how experimental they can be without alienating readers.

REVISION AND BIG-PICTURE THINKING

In discussing revision, Jennifer explains that she often evaluates ensemble casts at the structural level, asking whether each character’s presence serves the story’s goals. During revision, she may reduce or eliminate scenes that pull attention away from the core narrative. Matty agrees that this kind of big-picture review is especially important in ensemble fiction, where small additions can have outsized effects.

Jennifer also mentions that tracking tools, character lists, and series bibles can help authors maintain continuity, especially across multiple books. However, she emphasizes that tools should support creativity, not replace thoughtful storytelling decisions.

FINAL THOUGHTS ON WRITING ENSEMBLE CASTS

As the conversation wraps up, Jennifer reiterates that ensemble casts are powerful but demanding. They require discipline, clear priorities, and a strong understanding of character motivation. When handled well, they can deepen reader engagement and create a sense of continuity that keeps readers returning to a series.

---

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 Jennifer Probst. Hey, Jennifer, how are you doing?

[00:00:05] Jennifer: Hi, Matty. Good. It’s so good to be back with you again.

[00:00:09] Matty: It is lovely to have you back. Just to give everyone a little reminder of who you are—Jennifer Probst is the New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of over fifty books in contemporary romance fiction, and her book THE MARRIAGE BARGAIN spent 26 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Her work has been translated in over a dozen countries, has sold over a million copies, and was dubbed a “romance phenom” by Kirkus Reviews.

Jennifer was my guest back in Episode 267, “Using Romance to Write Stories with Heart.” We made a passing comment in that episode that I was so interested in that I wanted to return to it, and that is the idea of managing relationships in a cast of characters. We may be using some romance examples, but I think this is going to be a conversation that really applies regardless of what genre our listeners are writing in.

Jennifer, can you start out talking a little bit about what are the special challenges related to managing relationships in a cast of characters versus a one-on-one relationship or a more limited scenario?

[00:01:17] Jennifer: Yes. I was thinking about that, because normally, especially in the romance industry, you will do a romance novel and then you’ll introduce the hero and heroine, and then you’ll have the supporting character. Usually there’s one that you’re seeding for the next book in the series—the best friend or a coworker, somebody that sparks the reader’s interest. We’re told to be very careful writing that character, which is super fun because it’s fun for the reader to be like, “Oh, I think this is going to be the next story.”

And then you go into the next story. So there’s a lead-up, and maybe then you get the shadow of the first couple—in the next book, you’d get a peek in and see how they’re doing. I think that’s the average way to write a series. There’s all sorts of different series, of course, but writing a multiple cast of characters is a totally different breed.

Actually, this conversation couldn’t have come at a better time because I am literally writing book four in this brand new indie series that I wrote just for me, because I happen to absolutely love and am addicted to these big multi-character stories—usually the younger heroes and heroines where it’s a bunch of friends in a cast, and everybody has their own plot and character arc and love interest. A lot of the times in the group, the love interests overlap and coincide. So there are love triangles, it’s done in secret—think of it more like a soap opera but in a romance book form.

That has been probably one of the most challenging and fun things, because I wrote it with no expectations. It was a side project for me, and I did it as a serial novel. It took me about a year to write the 150,000 words. I’m also a pantser, not a plotter, so I never knew—there were seven characters and each one got a point of view. I would have to figure out, okay, this is maybe the main hero and heroine for this book, but all the other ones were just as important. So I was seeding all of these multiple points of view in each chapter.

One of the books that comes to mind is DAISY JONES AND THE SIX, if you remember that—that was in an interview-form book from Taylor Jenkins Reid. She juggled a whole bunch of the characters, not just the main singers of the band but also the other people in the band and the lead singer’s other wife, and all of these relationships that were messy.

I was such a soap opera fan and I love reality TV, and I just love all of those interactions. So I figured I’m going to write my own kind of reality TV soap opera with cliffhangers. I’m writing book four right now and it’s been successful—I really didn’t go into it thinking this was going to be a bestseller or whatever. I did it for me. I did it because I didn’t see that in the market. I was looking for books like that, and since I couldn’t find them, I said, “Let me write one myself,” and put no pressure on it. For the next year or two, I decided to see where it goes and just kept continuing because I liked it.

[00:05:12] Matty: I’m very interested in the idea of seven—well, first of all, I’m interested in the idea of an odd number when it’s a romance. I’m also interested in to what extent you think you could handle that if your intent had just been to write a standalone novel. Does that level of cast of characters require a series so that you can shift your focus over a series of books to different relationships? Or do you think it’s possible to juggle all that within a single book?

[00:05:41] Jennifer: I think you could juggle it in a single book if you’ve got maybe not seven—maybe you’ve got four main characters, like two main couples with a subplot, and maybe you can do a 100,000- to 120,000-word book. The thing is, anything’s possible—that’s what I love about writing. You can’t really say, “Oh, that really can’t be done in a book.” Look, maybe Lucy Score writes it. She writes those big major small-town books with a bunch of characters, and her books are just taking off, so popular. I think anything can be done.

But what I did for the book is it was going to be a one-off. I wasn’t even going into it saying, “Hey, this is going to be a four-book series.” I just wanted to explore where it would take me with the characters. They were young and they work at this hot restaurant in New York City. They want to pursue careers like acting and modeling and the creative arts, and they’re working in this restaurant, and they all become like a family—kind of a found-family setup.

Then what happens is everybody has these different roles. She’s got an enemies-to-lovers thing with her boyfriend’s best friend, and then she finds out that her boyfriend cheated on her, so she kind of goes to the best friend for revenge. And then there’s this musical group—one guy is a DJ, and he’s been in love with one of the good girls in the group secretly, and they’re friends. It’s this interwoven mess. You have to tease out each of the stories.

I think the key here is that in order for it to be a good series or a big, meaty standalone book, each character has to have a growth arc. Because if there’s no growth arc—if where they start and where they end up doesn’t change—it’s just not going to be as much fun. So you’re not just doing the growth arc for one couple; you’re doing it for single characters and couples. That’s a lot to take on.

And then you have to have different conflicts or it’s going to be the same kind of story. Maybe one was enemies to lovers with a love triangle, but then the second one came from a very gentle, slow friends-to-lovers thing. I know I’m talking tropes and it’s not all about tropes, but that’s an easier way to classify it.

And then I had a supporting character that was the villain—nobody knew she was the villain in the group. I’ve also redeemed her in this fourth book, because who doesn’t want a villain redeemed? When you say a villain, there are so many shades of gray. So you have a little bit of everything.

The new big one is TELL ME LIES—have you heard about that one? It was based on a Carola Lovering novel, and they made it into three seasons on Hulu. It’s very messy—it’s about a poisonous love relationship that leaks into everything, but everybody has an arc. All of her friends in college, everybody’s experimenting on their own. That reminds me of DAISY JONES AND THE SIX and FRIENDS—except FRIENDS is a comedy, so it’s not angsty and dark.

[00:09:36] Matty: Some of the things you’re describing in the romance scenario, I enjoy doing too. I’m thinking of my Lizzy Ballard thriller series, because there may be five significant characters in addition to Lizzy. At some point I wanted to make sure that every significant character had a chance to interact with all the other significant characters, because I found that every combination creates interesting dynamics.

A good example: there’s a situation—the only romance that enters into the Lizzy Ballard series is there’s a man who’s dating a woman, and at some point that woman switches her affection to another man. But these two guys have to keep working together, and every time I write a scene with the two of them, it’s so much fun because there is so much to plumb there. They have reasons to resent each other beyond the romantic consideration, but they also have reasons to respect and appreciate each other. Having that large cast of characters gives so many fun opportunities for character development, character revelation—even understanding more deeply, as the creator of the character, what they’re capable of under the surface.

[00:10:45] Jennifer: Yes. I love that—it gives you more playground. And there are more emotions. I love what you just described, because there are so many emotions to plumb there. They care about each other still, but then there’s this cringe feeling and this tension, because life is messy.

That’s what you have to lean into. Yes, I write romance and yes, that comes with an innate happily ever after, but what people don’t realize is it’s still a mess. And that happily ever after is at the present, but any happily ever after—your relationship has ups and downs before you get to the altar. And then the second part happens when you’re married and that’s a whole other basket of drama and emotion. It always changes no matter what stage of life you’re in.

As writers, we need to be very curious and we need to be like armchair therapists—and be open. That’s what I’m always telling my students: pay attention to everything because it’s all fodder for the emotion and conflict and stuff in our books.

[00:11:59] Matty: I was interested to hear that your book was over a hundred thousand words, because I always think of romance as being shorter. You’re giving some great examples of your own and others’ books that are not. Is each of the books that long?

[00:12:14] Jennifer: No. So what I did is I wrote it and it just kept going and going because all of these other characters had a lot to say and they were so messy. When I got to 150,000, I said, “Okay, I’m going to split it into two books.” And there was a perfect way to do a cliffhanger. I don’t do cliffhangers in my books normally—again, this was different. I think every writer has certain times where they go, “I need to write something different.” Something that’s not too market or too calculated to get published traditionally, but something that is exciting and different and cleanses the palette.

I had no expectations for it, but since I was looking for it, I said there’s got to be a space in the market for this, even though it’s not traditionally romance. Because there’s cheating in it and it’s messy, but it is a romance—maybe just not a conventional one.

After the 150,000, I had to keep going because then there was a whole other couple to investigate, and then the villain got paired up with another villain, and now they’re having a romance. I’m like, “This is insane—I didn’t see this coming.” So I’m just having fun. It’s like my own “Guiding Light” from back in the day where I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I think this is going to be the last book in the series, and then we’ll have over 200,000 words total.

Everybody can do it differently. If you’re going in with a cast of characters—like FRIENDS or something more angsty like TELL ME LIES—I think you can see it more clearly. Maybe you plan it: “I want six couples, some secondary characters, maybe a younger couple and an older couple.” I love when the grandmother or grandfather comes in and you can match them up with somebody. I did a three-arc series for an elderly character in one of my trilogies, and they got their happily ever after in the third book. So many people emailed me—I was like, “But don’t you care about the main hero and heroine?” They were like, “What’s happening with the grandmother? Is she going to hook up?” So sometimes those surprises are there in this big cast of characters.

[00:14:34] Matty: At the end of the last Lizzy Ballard book—which I’ve been working on for a ridiculously long period of time—I needed to make sure that every character had the perfect wrap-up. As I was writing, I saw the opportunity for one of the characters to potentially have a romantic interest that gets referred to in a spinoff series.

It made me think about the balance between planning relationships ahead and letting them evolve. I think FRIENDS is a great example, because I’d be curious whether the people who started that show had any idea how the relationships were going to work out over the course of the series.

The other thing I feel is probably related is that sometimes when you talk about a cast of characters, the shorthand becomes “the ditzy one, the snarky one, the smart one, the dumb one.” I always cringe a little as a creator of characters when characters are minimized that way. So I guess I’m asking: do you need to go in having a general sense of the character—like “this is going to be the snarky one, this is going to be the dumb one”—or does that evolve, and as a result do the relationships among the characters evolve?

[00:16:23] Jennifer: I love that, because wouldn’t you love to sit down with the screenwriters? TV is such great fodder for writers. You wonder—when they started with Ross and Rachel, did they have any idea they were sitting on a treasure? And then Monica and Chandler getting together—I know nobody saw that coming. That must have written its way through after season after season when they were experimenting.

Maybe with TV, actors and actresses have certain chemistry that just comes off the screen, and you have to go with it. And don’t you find the same thing with writing sometimes? There are certain characters where you have them together in your mind, and then there are these surprises where you’re like, “Why does this feel like there’s chemistry between these two? Why doesn’t this feel right?” It’s that gut instinct.

So I think it’s a little bit of both—you can plot up to a certain point but then leave room for the surprises. I wonder: if you plotted everything out and it didn’t feel right on the page, you would probably pivot. You would probably go back to your outline and completely change everything. So you’re never written into a corner, I don’t think, if it’s not working.

What you said about cliched characters is so true. You constantly have to push back on that, because with a big cast of characters, it is so easy to fall into the ditzy blonde best friend, the really smart guy, the jock. But what I like to do is take that broad, awful cliche and then twist it.

When I started writing the Red series, I knew I wanted to have the Barbie-and-Ken couple—the gorgeous one who was always captain of the cheerleading team, has a million followers, everything seems easy because she’s beautiful and privileged. They call them the queen and the king of the club. But my whole point was to take that shallow cliche and start fragmenting and dissecting it. You start to see into her past—her father left to have another family, her mom is an alcoholic, she’s really been raising herself. She has all these issues. You start dismantling all of that to get to the real meat of the character.

Then I introduce another character who allows her vulnerability on the page. The hero gets to see it, we get to see it. Start with something that would make us cringe and then surprise us. Those are the best kinds of stories, I think.

[00:19:42] Matty: As you’re describing the idea of pivoting if you’re a plotter—I’m definitely a plotter, or a “framer” as I like to say. But I realize that’s not true for the romantic relationships. Going back to the two guys where the woman shifts her affections—as I was writing her relationship with the first guy, it became clear to me that they were together because there was an expectation among their families that they would be, and they respected each other and liked each other, but it wasn’t a sparky relationship. I kind of felt this was not going to pan out.

Then when the plot threw her in with one of the other characters—someone who on the surface was an even worse match—I thought, “That’s what would happen.” It wasn’t that the plot was dependent on them getting together; it was just going to be a satisfying or dissatisfying thing for the reader. And it was fun to say, “Oh yeah, of course in that situation these two people are going to find an attraction, fall in love, find ways to stay together.” I never thought about it before, but from a plotting point of view, I’m very much a plotter. From a romantic-relationships-developing point of view, I’m totally a discovery writer.

[00:21:11] Jennifer: That’s so cool, because I think in our culture, we just love all-or-nothing labels. “Oh, you’re a plotter or you’re a pantser.” But you just proved that there’s so much more nuance. You pants and feel your way through the romance, but then you plot the plot. That’s a combination.

I think it’s easier to classify—”I’m a morning writer, I’m a plotter”—we start with that, but there are so many surprises within. As we all know, each book is its own challenge. Only writers know that you can write 60 books and the 61st one will feel like you’ve never written a book before. I don’t think there’s any other career like that. That’s what makes it so interesting and challenging yet hard—you feel like you start all over and you’ve got to trust those instincts.

[00:22:25] Matty: It’s also interesting that the experience changes over a series. When I was writing the first book in either of my series, I didn’t know what these people were going to do. But by book three or four, it’s pretty clear what they are or are not going to do. So the further you go along, there’s that sense that the character is telling you what to do. And I think over time that’s true—even from a very practical point of view, if you get to book four, you can’t force a character to do something that’s completely out of character just to serve a plot need, unless you give them that legitimate backstory, like you were saying about the homecoming queen who proves herself to be a more complex person than the reader might first expect.

[00:23:15] Jennifer: Writing a series or a big book with multi characters is the same as binging a series. Readers and viewers will get very upset if suddenly—”I’ve watched this, I’m on season two now, I know who this character is”—and if they do something different, it feels false. So you have to kind of write your way through until you know those characters inside and out.

For me, it comes with the more I write them. When I write a book, I don’t really know—I only have a basic idea of what I want. I figure out exactly who that person is by the end, and then I’m super excited because I go back to the beginning and I know—”Oh, she wouldn’t do that,” or “This scene is wrong”—because now I know everything about them. So for me, the first draft is a discovery, and then I can write it perfectly because I know who they are.

[00:24:11] Matty: So I think the FRIENDS thing came up because when we were talking about writing romance, we had gotten into a conversation about FRIENDS versus MOONLIGHTING.

[00:24:24] Jennifer: Yes, we did. Are we showing our age? I don’t care.

[00:24:29] Matty: I think the context in the first episode was that FRIENDS worked in a way that MOONLIGHTING did not, mainly because once the main characters of MOONLIGHTING got together, nobody really cared anymore.

[00:24:44] Jennifer: It fell flat. I think a lot of those older series—the show would drop every week, and everybody tuned in for the kiss. Even CHEERS—remember Sam and Diane? The kiss, the kiss. How many seasons? And then it’s so delicate—you watch the ones that fall apart and they just can’t salvage it.

That was what we were questioning: what makes one thing work and the other one feel like, “Okay, this is just boring now—they’re together.” I think a couple of things come into play, like growth arcs. They’ve got to go from one set of challenges—which is usually the first book in a romance—to something new. They’re together, they kissed, they’re in a relationship, but now you’ve got to raise the stakes. That relationship has to be threatened.

I felt like with MOONLIGHTING, after they got together, it was the same stuff. When they fought, it didn’t even feel fun anymore because they were together and it felt like they were fighting to stay together. That wasn’t as much fun as trying to get together. So the spark has to continue with more conflict, another growth arc, another challenge. It just has to change. If it doesn’t change—if the leveling up isn’t good—it’s just going to fall flat.

[00:26:30] Matty: And how long can you string them along? At some point you just have to give in. But what I started thinking about was that MOONLIGHTING might have been more successful if it had been more of a cast of characters.

What I was thinking about was SEX AND THE CITY. Probably everyone figured Carrie would get together with Mr. Big at the end—I regretted it, but I may be in the minority. But watching her date all these other people, where everybody in the audience was saying, “Oh no, he’s a jerk” or “No, no, he’s great—don’t dump him for Mr. Big again”—the cast of characters can maintain the interest longer than it was maintained in MOONLIGHTING.

[00:27:18] Jennifer: Oh my gosh, how could I forget about SEX AND THE CITY? There you go—it’s a multiple, you get all the characters. You have these women, and Carrie is maybe the lead, but everybody cares about everyone and they all have their time to shine with different conflicts and coming together.

You are right, because that gives more balance, more conflict, more room to grow. I bet if MOONLIGHTING had another couple or really great supporting characters with their own conflicts, it could have supported another dynamic the way FRIENDS did, because you had Monica and Chandler and everybody had a different couple to root for. When one maybe got a little stale or needed to wait for a while, we were never bored.

[00:28:05] Matty: That’s pointing out something important—you don’t want every relationship pegged at ten all the time. FRIENDS is a great example: while one set of characters’ relationships was being really fraught, somebody else’s relationship was more stable. So the screenwriters could shift the audience’s focus from couple to couple and not have relationship exhaustion the way MOONLIGHTING might have created.

[00:28:37] Jennifer: That is so true. Variety—and that’s why I think it’s really hard for writers doing something like FIFTY SHADES OF GREY or the Crossfire series, where it’s three or four books with one couple. You’ve got them together at the end of book one, and now you’ve got to constantly change the dynamic of the relationship so the reader stays interested enough to be like, “Okay, can they get to marriage? Can they get here?”

When you have more characters to pull from, I think there are more opportunities to pull threads and follow them.

[00:29:29] Matty: Another lesson I’m learning from our conversation that’s applicable to the Lizzy Ballard book in process: this would be the last Lizzy-focused book, and as I was working on the draft, I kept being pulled into the stories of other characters—many of the scenes focused on this character who’s going to become the star of his own spinoff. I kept thinking, “This is a Lizzy Ballard thriller—I have to have Lizzy in every scene.”

But then I thought, maybe not. If I’m easing readers into something else, it makes sense that the drama of Lizzy’s story would tail off because that’s her goal—to have the drama of her life tail off. And the drama can shift to another character. Whether it’s a romance shifting focus to another person’s relationship, or a thriller shifting to another person’s ongoing story—that’s the benefit of having a cast of characters you can shift attention to.

[00:30:39] Jennifer: That’s such a great point. That’s what we were talking about—the plotting versus the instinctual. You were like, “Lizzy has to be in this scene,” because that’s what we’re told. And then your instinct was, “But no, because I’m going to be pulling her back.” And it felt right.

I did that with the Red series. The first 150,000 words—the first two books—were basically this one couple with everybody else, but I started to narrow in on the main pair and feed in everything else. Then they went to L.A. and I got them off the page. Now this other couple comes front and center—the villain and the slow friends-to-lovers love triangle.

In this final one, my first hero and heroine are back in New York and everything has imploded. Everybody slept with everybody else and lied to everybody else—there’s a reckoning. And now I get to decide where these relationships are going to go. I don’t know how it’s going to end, but it’s a lot of fun figuring it out. Sometimes you can pull back and it’s okay, because the other characters can step forward and take center stage.

[00:32:11] Matty: That’s interesting—the benefits of working with a cast of characters through a series, but then as you’re nearing the end, you have to think of a way to wrap it up. You can’t just stop. There has to be that reckoning, the perfect resolution for every character based on their history and personalities. You don’t have to know what that reckoning looks like from the beginning, but you always have to keep in the back of your mind that there has to be that scene where the resolution is achieved for all the characters.

[00:32:53] Jennifer: Yes, and it’s got to be satisfying. I kind of know who I want to stay together and who I don’t, but I tend to sometimes write toward an ending. I had done that with one of my Italy books—the developmental editor read it and said, “Oh my God, Jen, this is terrible. If she chooses A, this is going to happen, and if B...” And she said, “I don’t like it—what’s going to happen?” And I said, “I don’t know.” She said, “No!” But I had to write to the end to figure it out. Some writers have to do it that way, and some writers have the vision from the beginning.

[00:33:43] Matty: The one thing about FRIENDS that I’m very relieved about is I’m glad they didn’t make all the characters couples. I’m glad they didn’t have Phoebe and Joey become a couple, because what felt right for those characters was for them not to become a couple. It would have been too tidy.

[00:34:04] Jennifer: A little forced, right? I totally agree. Sometimes it’s okay—you can get your happy ever after not in a couple, because the happy ever after can be finding yourself, or going to your next challenge, or realizing you’ve healed. There are so many other ways of getting that satisfaction that don’t have to be “we are in love.”

[00:34:31] Matty: I think it was really healthy that they didn’t imply that everybody has to be a couple to be happy. Having a cast of characters gives you the opportunity to break a trope with a particular character in a way that balances out the expectations readers bring because of the genre.

[00:34:54] Jennifer: Definitely. And it’s exactly what you said with the mystery series—each genre has the reader expectations. We can play with edges, we can go past the edges. But I think knowing what you’re getting into—”Okay, this is going to satisfy genre expectations and be a little easy” or “I’m going to challenge things and push”—it’s going to work or it’s not, or maybe it’s going to work for a smaller niche.

I like not being afraid of stepping outside when you need to write something different, even if it’s a risk. I want to be doing this until I’m in my rocking chair to my last day and the pen falls from my hand. You have to find ways to challenge yourself to keep growing.

[00:35:49] Matty: So great. Well, Jen, I can’t think of a nicer way to wrap up our conversation about casts of characters—with that inspirational note. Please let everyone know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you do online.

[00:35:59] Jennifer: Yes, I will direct you straight to my website, jenniferprobst.com. You’ll get a free book if you sign up for my newsletter, and there are lots of freebies and fun things. I also do a whole section for writers—if you’re a writer, new or advanced or in the middle, I’ve got you covered with a lot of stuff there. So go there. And then of course I’m on every social media available, and I do message and respond to everything.

[00:36:24] Matty: Great. Thank you so much.

[00:36:26] Jennifer: Thank you so much, Matty. Good to be here.

Episode 322 - Becoming a Better Writer by Being a Better Reader 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 BECOMING A BETTER WRITER BY BEING A BETTER READER, including how novel study helps authors analyze story structure, scene design, pacing, and sentences; practical strategies for rereading fiction with purpose; learning craft lessons from the books you love and even the books you don't love; balancing reading for pleasure with analytical reading; and using books, book clubs, and intentional reading habits to become a better, more confident fiction writer.

Kristen Tate has been a freelance editor for 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.youtube.com/@BlueGarretBooks

Summary

In this episode of The Indy Author Podcast, Matty Dalrymple talks with Kristen Tate about becoming a better writer by becoming a better reader, with a focus on reading fiction analytically to improve writing craft. Matty and Kristen explore how intentional, thoughtful reading can sharpen skills related to story structure, scene design, pacing, character development, and sentence-level technique, especially for fiction writers.

BECOMING A BETTER WRITER BY BECOMING A BETTER READER

Kristen explains that her interest in reading as a craft tool began with her desire to become a better editor. After spending a year reading and reviewing one craft book per week, she realized that, while formulas and frameworks were helpful, they did not fully explain why certain novels felt masterful. She still found herself unable to clearly articulate what made a particular book work so well. That realization led her to approach novels the way she had been trained in graduate school: by taking them apart piece by piece and analyzing them in depth.

This process evolved into what she calls “novel study,” which later became the basis for a group-based project where writers read bestselling novels together and analyzed them collectively. The emphasis was not on whether participants liked a book, but on understanding how it worked and what techniques the author used to achieve specific effects.

FORMULAS VERSUS HOW NOVELS ACTUALLY WORK

Kristen acknowledges the value of popular craft frameworks such as SAVE THE CAT, STORY GRID, and THE ANATOMY OF STORY, especially for writers who are starting out or facing a blank page. These systems can provide reassurance and direction. However, she notes that once writers move beyond the basics, real novels often diverge significantly from formulas. Each book is unique, and studying completed novels reveals a wide range of successful approaches to structure and storytelling.

Rather than treating novels as templates to copy, Kristen encourages writers to study them as individual solutions to storytelling problems. Looking closely at how different books handle similar challenges—such as multiple points of view or non-linear timelines—can expand a writer’s sense of what is possible.

READING FOR TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES

Matty and Kristen discuss the idea of reading with specific questions in mind. Instead of focusing on general impressions, writers can look for answers to targeted craft questions, such as how an author balances internal thoughts with external action in an action scene, or how they manage pacing across chapters. Kristen suggests that writers can “read for the tool and the technique,” extracting lessons that can later be applied to their own work.

Kristen emphasizes that all reading is valuable, even when it is not analytical. Simply absorbing story structure over time helps build writerly intuition. However, she notes that rereading is where deeper learning often happens. One practical strategy she recommends is shifting formats—for example, listening to an audiobook for the first pass to experience the story as a reader, then rereading in print or on an e-reader to take notes and analyze craft choices.

PRACTICAL STRATEGIES FOR ANALYTICAL READING

Kristen offers concrete suggestions for writers who want to read more analytically without becoming overwhelmed. She recommends leaving “breadcrumbs” for yourself while reading, such as highlights, notes, or sticky tabs that mark moments worth revisiting. These might include a striking sentence, a strong scene ending, or a moment of emotional impact.

She also introduces a three-level framework for analysis: story level, scene level, and sentence level. Writers can reflect on questions such as where the story’s most intense moments occur, where their attention flagged, or how the climax is positioned. On the scene level, Kristen describes an intensive method she uses professionally: tagging every sentence in a scene as dialogue, action, interiority, or backstory, then analyzing the proportions. While she acknowledges this is time-consuming, she suggests simplified versions, such as rereading a single standout scene and underlining everything that is not dialogue or action to reveal the “invisible” craft holding the scene together.

Sentence-level study, she notes, is often the easiest entry point. Writers can copy sentences they admire into a notebook and analyze why they work, looking at verb choice, sentence length, punctuation, and placement within a paragraph.

BALANCING PLEASURE AND ANALYSIS

Matty raises the question of how writers can learn from reading when they are not consciously studying craft. Kristen responds that remembering the reader’s experience is crucial. Readers encounter stories over time, much like watching a film, and writers who focus only on micro-level edits can lose sight of that broader experience. Reading for pleasure helps writers reconnect with how stories feel, not just how they are constructed.

Rereading, especially after finishing a book that made a strong impression, can bridge the gap between pleasure and analysis. Changing reading formats and slowing down after finishing a book—rather than immediately starting the next one—can create space for reflection and learning.

OPENINGS, PROLOGUES, AND READER EXPECTATIONS

The discussion turns to common craft debates, such as whether to eliminate the first chapter or avoid prologues. Kristen cautions against treating any advice as absolute. She points out that every book makes deliberate choices based on its intended audience. For example, she cites THE CITY WE BECAME by N.K. Jemisin, which opens with a prologue that works precisely because of how it frames the story, and THE SEARCHER by Tana French, which begins slowly to attract readers who value character and atmosphere over immediate plot momentum.

Kristen suggests that one useful analytical exercise is to ask, “What if this were opposite?” Imagining alternative choices can clarify why an author’s actual decision works. Ultimately, she emphasizes the importance of understanding and trusting one’s ideal reader rather than trying to please everyone.

LEARNING FROM DISLIKED OR “BAD” BOOKS

Matty and Kristen also address whether there is value in reading books a writer dislikes. Kristen believes there can be significant educational benefit, as long as writers separate personal taste from assumptions about quality. She encourages writers to read across genres and to question cultural judgments about “good” and “trashy” books.

If a writer truly dislikes a book, Kristen suggests alternatives to forcing a full read. One option is to stop after fifty pages and then skim strategically—reading selected chapters and the ending—to see how the story resolves. Reflecting on what triggered a negative reaction can reveal important insights about personal taste, craft preferences, and storytelling priorities.

WRITING REVIEWS AND NOTICING DETAILS

Matty shares that she wants to be more intentional about writing reviews, both to support other authors and to reflect on what she has read. Kristen agrees and suggests a low-pressure approach: listing a few specific things that delighted you about a book, even if they are small details. She notes that these observations can be meaningful to authors and can also help writers identify recurring themes in their own tastes.

Kristen emphasizes the importance of specificity, citing examples where unexpected details or empathetic reframing of seemingly negative character traits made a lasting impression. Asking “why” repeatedly, she suggests, can uncover deeper thematic insights.

OVERCOMING RESISTANCE TO READING

Kristen acknowledges that some writers resist reading closely due to fear—fear of influence, fear of plagiarism, or fear that someone else has already written their idea. She argues that these fears are largely unfounded, especially when writers lean into their own tastes and perspectives. She also recognizes time constraints as a real barrier and recommends audiobooks and group-based reading projects as accessible entry points.

CREATING A CRAFT-FOCUSED BOOK GROUP

Finally, Kristen offers advice for writers interested in forming a craft-oriented book group. She emphasizes the importance of shared goals, clear leadership at the outset, and prepared discussion questions that steer conversation toward how a book works rather than whether participants liked it. She also highlights the value of creating separate spoiler and non-spoiler discussion spaces, allowing participants to engage at different stages of reading.

Throughout the episode, Matty and Kristen reinforce the idea that reading intentionally—whether alone or in community—is one of the most effective ways for writers to improve their craft, deepen their understanding of storytelling, and make more confident, deliberate choices in their own fiction.

Episode 281 - Using Relevance to Save Your Darlings with Liesel Hill

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

Liesel Hill discusses USING RELEVANCE TO SAVE YOUR DARLINGS, including the importance of integrating emotional connection and subconscious storytelling to retain seemingly irrelevant scenes by making them essential. Topics include multi-tasking in scenes, pacing, evoking emotion, character arcs, purposeful character deaths, maintaining continuity in series, and avoiding unnecessary plot elements.
 
Liesel Hill is a USA Today best-selling author of 4 genres. She teaches authors to craft stories using the principles of energetics and transformational human psychology, and by tapping into one's individual subconscious creativity.

Episode Links

https://www.facebook.com/groups/theprolificauthor
https://www.instagram.com/6figurestoryteller/
https://www.tiktok.com/@6figurestoryteller
https://www.youtube.com/@fictionauthorbusinessschool
https://lff.kit.com/10ppsminicourse

Summary

This week on The Indy Author Podcast, Matty Dalrymple talks with Liesel Hill about the often-debated topic among writers: "killing your darlings." Liesel Hill is a USA Today best-selling author who provides a nuanced perspective on this longstanding writing guideline, challenging traditional notions while emphasizing the importance of emotional resonance and story relevance.
 
Matty opens the conversation by recounting how "kill your darlings" is often a “battle cry” for writers, suggesting that authors should remove scenes they are emotionally attached to if they are not advancing the story. Liesel Hill suggests a reevaluation of this advice, advocating that instead of merely discarding these scenes, authors should explore ways to integrate them effectively into their narrative. She argues that scenes dear to the writer often hold an emotional connection that can potentially engage the reader as well.
 
Liesel provides a perspective that involves tapping into one's subconscious creativity. By leveraging the subconscious, authors can generate scenes with intrinsic emotional value, which makes them worth preserving if they can be made relevant to the narrative. "If there's something that is lighting you up about the story that you really love," Liesel says, "there's no reason that the reader would not feel the same way."
 
The discussion also covers how determining the relevance of a scene is crucial. Liesel and Matty agree that scenes should be integral to the main conflict or character arc. Scenes offering a deep dive into character backgrounds or internal dialogue need careful consideration to ensure they serve the overarching plot. Liesel suggests that newer authors often fall into the trap of creating scenes that do not push the narrative forward, resulting in potential fluff that might need cutting.
 
A significant portion of the conversation revolves around multitasking in storytelling. Liesel and Matty both stress the importance of making scenes serve multiple purposes. By weaving several narrative threads into a single scene, authors can maintain pacing and deepen story complexity without overburdening the narrative. Liesel offers insights into maintaining pacing by ensuring that scenes do double duty—advancing the plot while developing character interactions or foreshadowing future events.
 
They delve into specific examples, such as the challenge of writing scenes that were the initial inspiration for a book but may no longer fit as the story evolves. Matty shares her personal struggle with deciding whether to keep or discard scenes that initially stirred her imagination, particularly those that no longer align with the book's direction. Liesel suggests that a high-level understanding of the story's structure can help authors anticipate potential misalignments before they become problematic, allowing them to better manage narrative flow.
 
The pair transitions to discussing character arcs, particularly in series novels where characters grow over time and influence one another's stories. Liesel discusses her approach in her own high fantasy series, which involves juggling multiple point-of-view characters. This approach can be daunting, requiring careful planning to ensure characters influence one another even if they are separated by the narrative distance.
 
Towards the end of the podcast, Matty and Liesel explore the concept of relevance and intentionality in character development. They discuss the pitfalls of keeping characters in a story without purpose, underscoring that every character should contribute to the narrative meaningfully or face "retirement" from the storyline—either metaphorically or literally. Liesel mentions that shock value alone is an insufficient reason to kill off a character, advocating that every significant action, including character deaths, should be deliberate and woven into the narrative fabric to justify its impact.
 
Finally, Liesel speaks to the importance of emotional storytelling and how authors can offer readers an emotional journey that results in catharsis. She suggests that emotion is the core of storytelling and what ultimately hooks readers, leading to a satisfying reading experience. Liesel emphasizes that authors who master this emotional connection will cultivate a dedicated readership. The conversation closes with encouraging authors to draw from their subconscious, allowing the wealth of their experiences and emotions to mold stories into engaging and cohesive narratives that resonate with readers.
 
Overall, this podcast episode provides nuanced insights for authors grappling with the idea of killing their darlings, suggesting that the real focus should be on relevance, emotional impact, and enriching the narrative tapestry. Liesel Hill's perspective offers a refreshing take that could help writers preserve the heart of their stories while ensuring every element serves the greater narrative purpose.

Episode 280 - Insider Tips from Writing Contest Judges with Clay Stafford

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

Clay Stafford discusses INSIDER TIPS FROM WRITING CONTEST JUDGES, including what judges look for in submissions, such as originality, strong voice, and proper pacing. Clay shares insights into the judging process, highlighting the necessity of engaging the reader early, avoiding errors, and understanding the contest’s goals and audience. They discuss the importance of submitting polished work, ensuring the right contest fit, and the potential benefits of feedback from critique groups and editors. Clay also emphasizes the value of leveraging contest wins and placements to build a writer’s career.
 
Clay Stafford is a bestselling and award-winning author, poet, screenwriter, and playwright; film and television producer, director, showrunner, actor; book, film, and stage reviewer as well as public speaker. He has sold nearly four million copies of his books and has had his work distributed in sixteen languages. He is founder and CEO of the annual Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference and a contributor to Writer’s Digest magazine with his online column, “Killer Writer.”

Episode Links

https://claystafford.com/
https://www.facebook.com/ClayStaffordOfficial
https://www.instagram.com/claystafford/
https://x.com/ClayStafford
https://www.linkedin.com/in/claystafford/

Referenced in episode:
Episode 271 - Tapping into Your Author Voice with Tiffany Yates Martin

Summary

This week on The Indy Author Podcast, Matty Dalrymple talks with Clay Stafford about the art of crafting submissions for writing contests and the nuances that come with it. The discussion revolves around the key aspects judges look for across different contest formats, whether short or long fiction, and how writers can effectively prepare their work for submission.
 
Matty kicks off the conversation by highlighting Clay's extensive experience, noting his role as a bestselling author and founder of Killer Nashville, among other accolades. The episode delves into the criteria contest judges seek, such as originality, creativity, and a strong narrative voice. Clay emphasizes the importance of a distinctive voice, one that is authentic and engaging, as a hallmark of great writing.
 
The conversation touches on the importance of matching submissions to the right contest categories and understanding the platform where work will be featured. They explore scenarios where a piece may not align with the contest's core focus, like entering a mystery contest with a non-mystery entry. Clay underscores the necessity of writers thoroughly reading guidelines and selecting the right category for their entries, as misplaced submissions often get disqualified regardless of their quality.
 
Listeners are urged to consider the pacing of their stories, recognizing the difference between rushing through events and rambling without purpose. Clay explains that sometimes works feel compressed when they shouldn't be, and authors should trust in the natural pacing of their stories. Engaging and meaningful pacing helps keep the reader invested in the narrative.
 
Matty and Clay also discuss the value of revisions and feedback before submitting to contests. Clay advises writers to vet their work with friends, writing groups, or even professional editors to ensure the piece is polished to its best potential. He suggests writers should be their harshest critics before sending work to a contest, thus minimizing glaring errors that could easily eliminate an entry early on.
 
The episode further explores the strategic approach to contest entry. Rather than writing specifically for a contest, Clay argues for writers to create authentically and then seek contests that fit their work. This method helps maintain the integrity of the story and potentially increases the chances of finding a natural contest fit.
 
Another key point discussed is the reaction to contest rejections. Both Matty and Clay agree that rejection isn't always a reflection of the work's quality, noting that numerous factors, including subjective judge preferences and contest constraints, play a role. Therefore, receiving a "no" should not discourage writers but instead should be seen as a learning opportunity.
 
Finally, the podcast highlights the importance of making the most of contest wins or placements. Clay encourages authors to leverage contest success in their marketing efforts, using accolades as a tool to separate themselves in the crowded literary marketplace. Authors should celebrate and publicize these achievements, utilizing them as steppingstones to further opportunities.
 
In summary, this episode is rich with insights for writers looking to refine their craft for contest entries. Matty and Clay guide listeners through understanding contest criteria, perfecting narrative voice, ensuring proper category alignment, and the strategic use of contest recognition—all vital elements to succeeding in writing competitions.