Say what you mean, and mean what you say. This is good advice for being a better human, but terrible advice for writing good characters. Initial drafts often suffer from dialogue in which characters tell each other exactly what they mean, without conflict or subtext.
As you revise and discover what your characters really want in each conversation, what’s frustrating or thwarting them, what they feel they can’t risk revealing or facing at that point in the story—you can craft great dialogue, and better scenes, by holding back a bit of what characters really think and feel. This simple shift adds layers to your characters, and essential subtext to your dialogue.
For our example, we’ll look at the wonderful Writers and Lovers by Lily King.
I recommend Writers & Lovers to anyone who wants to write a book. It's about a struggling writer, Casey, learning to stay true to herself. Casey’s mother has recently died abroad, suddenly, and under mysterious conditions; she’s heartbroken and broke, and her friend has called to pressure Casey to attend her destination wedding.
Casey:
“I would give anything to be there in that beautiful place watching you marry the man of your dreams.” Brian, an oaf with the energy of a hibernating bear. “But I don’t have eighteen hundred and fifty dollars. I don’t even have a hundred and fifty dollars."“Well, I can’t pay your way. We’re already giving a free ride to my sisters.”“That’s not what I was angling for. I would never accept that.”
In this exchange, Casey actually is saying what she means. She’s being honest and straightforward, except for the little internal aside about the groom: Brian, an oaf with the energy of a hibernating bear. It’s funny, it’s visual—from that single sentence I can picture Brian—and it adds subtext. Casey has feelings about her friend’s fiance, she’s annoyed by the conversation, but she’s trying. She’s trying to be a good human by being vulnerable and honest about her financial situation, but her friend does not relent.
The dialogue continues with the friend pressuring Casey to put the cost of the trip on her credit card. Casey responds that she can barely pay the minimum now and the friend escalates the scene by poking Casey in the heart of her story:
“Jeez, Casey. At some point, don’t you think you have to grow up? You can’t expect to be given a pass forever. It’s time to be an adult. You can’t live in your made-up worlds all your life. People get real jobs that make real money so that they can be a real friend at their best friend’s wedding. I flew from my vacation in Bermuda to Arizona for your mother’s funeral. And it wasn’t cheap, buying it three days before.”The underside of my arms begin to burn.“Did your mother have any idea how much trouble you were in?”If she hadn’t said this, it might have been okay.“Did you pay for that ticket, Tara?”“What do you mean?”“Did you, yourself, pay for the ticket from Bermuda to Pheonix?”Silence.“And if we took away Brian’s salary at Schwab and your dad’s little allowance, how much money would you have working part-time at that nonprofit? Would you be able to afford Bermuda or your two-bedroom in SoHo? Are you more of an adult because two men are giving you the illusion of self-sufficiency?"She hangs up on me.I am hemorrhaging friends with these weddings. Murial and Harry are nearly all I have left.
It’s important to note that this dialogue doesn’t work only because of well-placed bits of interiority: Brian, an oaf with the energy of a hibernating bear, and physical response that demonstrates an emotional reaction: The underside of my arms begin to burn.
The dialogue works because there’s a push and pull—one speaker puts pressure on, trying to influence the other. The other, POV Casey, resists. This creates conflict and tension that builds to a defining turning point: If she hadn’t said this, it might have been okay.
After that point, Casey takes action (speaks out) in a way that will produce definitive consequences.
In real life, we’re never certain if people we talk to are saying what they mean and meaning what they say. In fiction and narrative memoir, we get to be deliciously, delightfully certain that they are not, that there’s more going on under the surface. When readers witness characters struggling to be better humans (and failing because of scene circumstances) we’re far more likely to fall in love with them, and follow them to the end of their messy journeys.
Kurt Vonnegut famously said: Every character should want something, even if it’s a glass of water.
It’s a simple concept: Give your character a desire. That advice has been largely translated to goal. Give your character a goal.
This classic writing advice gets lost in translation when it gets associated only with book-level goals. For example: My character is broke, trapped in a loveless marriage in a foreign country and just wants to make it home.
Goal: Get Home. A good, noble, goal! But this is a book-level goal. This is what the character wants to achieve by the end of the book. Catch the killer. Solve the mystery. Get the guy.
Book-level goals are essential, but not the only “goal” a successful character needs.
Read more...This summer (2025) marked the fiftieth anniversary of the release of the movie JAWS. National Geographic released a documentary: Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story.
Anyone can tell you that the iconic movie is about a shark that terrorizes a beachside town.
That’s the central conflict. So, it was fascinating to hear director Steven Spielberg say:
It’s about home. Longing for home, getting home, returning home, already being home.
Read more...In prior posts, I've argued that it can be helpful to think of backstory (past narrative summarized within present scene events) as interiority.
That’s because backstory, along with imagination and future anticipation, are all a part of a POV character’s thought process and rationale.
Thoughts alone don’t create interiority. Interiority is a process.
proc·ess
/ˈpräˌses/
noun
- a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end.
The interiority process is an art, not a formula, but the concept is relatively straightforward:
Read more...Fully dimensional characters have history! They have a unique perspective on the world that they developed from past experiences.
Few modern stories begin with a character’s birth—Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead a recent notable exception. Of course, Kingsolver had clear thematic and structural reasons why to begin at birth, but that’s a post for another time :)
The vast majority of books follow Matt Bird’s advice: Your story isn’t about your character’s life, it’s about their problem.
Plot and story drive focus on a present problem. The point of view (POV) character makes sense of present story circumstances (their developing problem) based on their unique history of past events.
Compelling story characters make things worse for themselves based on a false or self-protective belief they’ve developed because of past events—often referred to as the “lie,” stemming from the “wound.”
Modern books tend not to start with the development of the character’s wound(s) and subsequent lie, but with the effect the lie has on the character as the story opens.
As the story progresses, backstory that pertains to a character's lie develops.
The question of how to incorporate past events into a present timeline is a question that confounds most writers—at first.
Read more...Time to talk interiority! So much energy in early drafts goes into external events, i.e. what happens in a novel or memoir.
External events = things that could be acted out on stage, like dialogue, and action.
It’s an incredible amount of work to get down the external flow of events in your book. External events are the perfect thing to focus on in beginning drafts.
But when you go to revise, don’t fall into the common trap of polishing sentences that only add to the external story.
What happens only matters as much as the context and meaning a character (or former self in memoir) gives to those story events. Interiority provides that context and meaning.
Read more...In my last post, I wrote about how a PET Sentence Journal can help get a broader sense of writing that strikes you as Persuasive, Evocative, or True.
Someone pointed out that the “E” could stand for “Entertaining.”
Absolutely! Any sentence that delights you, any writing that grips your breath with admiration and envy, that makes you think: I want to do that.
In our favorite books, sentences that strike us generally gain power from context – where and how the sentence is placed, how it relates to the character, their story arc, and the book’s theme.
In this post, I want to talk nuts and bolts of building context at the scene level.
I’m a big proponent of keeping a “PET Sentence Journal,” a simple practice you can do as a reader to become a better writer.
PET stands for: Persuasive, Emotive, True.
All you have to do is jot down published sentences that move you.
You might already underline in books or highlight in Kindle, but I suggest going a step further to write out sentences you admire in a dedicated journal/document.
I’ll explain how this practice helps deepen your craft with a couple of PET Sentences I pulled from All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker.
Read more...When I read, I’m always on the lookout for craft, narrative technique, and story fundamental examples I can share with writers.
So, I was delighted during a recent breakfast chat with author Suzette Mullen, when she articulated a beautiful example of her books’ Take Aways.
Naming your book’s Take Away aka Point aka Controlling Idea aka Main Theme aka Story Guiding Principle can act as a lighthouse-in-the-fog as you write and revise, but this enormously helpful story fundamental is often misunderstood or overlooked.
No wonder, with so much confusing terminology! But it all boils down to one powerful tool for the author.
Read more...Every genre needs "stakes."
The term often brings action and thriller books to mind, so developing the stakes in "quieter" genres such as literary fiction and memoir can get overlooked.
Stakes simply refer to what is at risk for the protagonist. Any story event immediately becomes more riveting to readers when the stakes are on the page.
So how do writers develop literary stakes on the page?
