So, what do we mean when we say a point-of-view character or a main character is likable? I’ve come to believe that a large part of what we mean by ‘likable’ is that a character’s core values reflect our own. This character serves as a kind of mirror, allowing the reader to slip into their shoes without having to adjust to a point of view whose values don’t align with their own, especially if those values veer away from mainstream morality.

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One reason a lot of crime fiction is so popular is that most of us agree that lying, stealing, and murder are wrong, so we can quickly get behind a point-of-view character whose job or calling is to restore order when these values are violated. When a reader finds a character unlikable, typically, at the heart of the complaint is that the reader’s values fail to align with the character’s. It’s kind of how we pick friends, and especially life partners. While it may not be the only factor or even the most important, it’s high on the list. Some of these objections could be more clearly moral—they’re lying and cheating—or more culturally or psychologically situated: “Character A complains too much” or “Character B is too withholding.” These aren’t values per se, but they imply them: Character A is self-centered or privileged; Character B lacks communication skills. Either way, the reader is responding to a difference in values.

While I understand and appreciate the desire to read likable characters, it’s only one type of reading. You are reading to see your values reflected back and confirmed. I don’t have a problem with this, and I’ve certainly read novels and viewed films that I thought were terrific because they resonated with my values. I think, though, that sometimes it can become a bit like an algorithmic trap, not that different from how social media scoops us into pods of value alignment. So, reading only characters you find likable may limit what fiction can do to expand your perspective.

Author Fran Lebowitz puts it this way: “A book is not supposed to be a mirror. It’s supposed to be a door.” I appreciate this sentiment, but I don’t entirely agree. I think some books are mirrors and others are doors, with different intentions: one affirms, and the other expands, even challenges. I don’t believe a book changes you, exactly, but it can offer you the opportunity to reexamine your views or deepen your understanding. It’s still up to the receiver to change.

This is the moment where I’m sure you expect me to turn up my nose at the mirrors and demand respect for the books that challenge. I don’t feel that way. I’ve loved books that affirmed my values, from Agatha Christie to Dickens, and books that challenged me, like The Talented Mr. Ripley, Alias Grace, or Lolita. I don’t want to declare one better art than the other. But if you’re a writer, it’s important to understand which kind of character—and book—you’re writing and adjust your expectations for public response accordingly.

That distinction affects how I reread, too. Returning to a novel with a likable character at its center, like a Christie novel, is often a nostalgic pursuit, a way of reliving something of the original reading experience. When I return to a novel centered on a character like Tom Ripley, Grace Marks, or Humbert Humbert, though, my pleasure is different: I tend to find something new layered into the character, some complication or nuance I hadn’t fully registered before. One kind of rereading lets me revisit an experience I loved; the other keeps expanding and surprising. Both are instructive for my own writing.

Recently, I’ve heard from a lot of writer friends that publishing professionals are telling them they need to be writing more likable characters and that their stories should be more affirming and hopeful because of the tumultuous political times we’re living through. This has not been my experience, and my characters tend to walk up to the line of likability and extend a hand across (as charming as could be), but they definitely do some transgressive things, some of which are perhaps understandable and others, well, I’ll let the reader decide. My point is that I really think the question is about your book's goal: what kind of experience do you want the reader to have? And, too, it may be a matter of degrees. I want them to align with the character this much, but I want to challenge them here. That’s very much how I think of mine.

One craft note: likable doesn’t mean perfect. To be likable, a character needs flaws, and I mean real emotional flaws, not just wounds dressed up as flaws: “I got hurt in my last relationship, so now I’m afraid to connect with people.” That’s backstory. The flaw is what the character does because of that hurt: maybe they mistrust people, push them away, test them, punish them before they can leave. Those flaws can still leave a character within the bounds of what a reader finds likable. But if the flaw becomes too morally contentious—you sleep around a lot—or too culturally transgressive—you’re rude to people and pick your nose in public—you may be challenging the target reader more than you intend.

Likability does have some real problems, though, especially when it gets applied to historically marginalized characters. If the target market being imagined is middle-class white women from Millennials to Boomers, and you’re crafting a character who is not from that demographic or does not hold the pervasive values that market is assumed to have, then you may find that your characters are not mirror-like enough to be deemed likable and are therefore critiqued as such.

To be honest, I think publishers really underestimate this market’s desire to consume books that aren’t just mirrors. Many—no, most—of my readers fit this demographic, but my characters aren’t necessarily mirrors for them. I trust readers. So when I hear my fellow writers bemoaning that they’ve been told by an agent or editor that their characters need to be more likable, I think the industry professional is underestimating readers. After all, two high-profile books this year, Yesteryear and Fruit Fly, do not deal in traditionally likable characters. I’ve never been asked to make a character more likable, but anecdotally, women writers seem to be the ones more often asked to make their women characters more likable.

The term “likable” becomes truly problematic when it’s code for white, straight, able-bodied, middle-class characters with traditional social and religious norms. That can, although it does not necessarily, mean that likability excludes queer characters, characters of color, characters with disabilities, immigrants, women who are single or prefer careers over family, independent-minded women, etc. When likability is used this way, yeah, it’s a problem, because the value set being appealed to is steeped in unexamined bias.

I want to be clear: just because you are white, straight, able-bodied, middle-class, and hold traditional social and religious values does not mean you read or write this way, and I know many people who fit that description who are voracious and open-minded. But it is a thing, and when publishing is going through a difficult time, as it is now with the emergence of AI and the closure of Baker & Taylor, it can mean that the range of books and characters that get published shrinks. I worry that marginalized authors and content will be the first to be trimmed away.

Earlier, I mentioned another word often used as a synonym for likability: relatability. I think the two have a strong kinship, but they’re different. Relatability suggests there’s something about the character the reader recognizes in themselves. This, to me, is much more powerful. While my heroines, Judy and Philippa, aren’t always likable (after all, they do kill people), I definitely want them to be relatable. I want the reader to see that they share qualities with these characters, like the desire for freedom and agency, even if the characters’ actions are never ones the reader would do.

Essentially, relatability is not exactly a mirror, but perhaps an echo or a rhyme between reader and character—their common humanity linked. After all, why does Tom Ripley continue to engage us? Highsmith’s creation is a sociopath, but still there’s something about him: the fact that he appreciates art and finds the privilege of Dickie Greenleaf, his first victim, unearned and unappreciated. There’s still something of ourselves linking us to him. No, he’s not likable, but he is relatable, and that, to my mind, is Highsmith’s great achievement.

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For this week, the word I’m tackling is “authenticity” as it pertains to writing, especially published creative writing. It will surprise no one why. With the rapid and overwhelming emergence of AI and the publishing scandals of late, including Hachette’s decision to pull Mia Ballard’s Shy Girl over suspected AI use and the collapse of Jerry Falade’s multimillion-dollar deal for Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body after his agents said they could no longer authenticate how the manuscript had evolved, this word is being tossed around a lot.

In response to generative AI writing, we’re yearning to be able to authenticate a work of writing as human-made without question. We want to know if an author—student or a professional—is using their own words. On the one hand, I get it. AI-generated slop is a nightmare: a Frankenstein’s monster shambling toward us, made from the stolen parts of our own writing, arms reaching out to grip us by the throat and squeeze. How happy would the many writers I know and respect—and I—be if AI had never happened, if AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI hadn’t acquired copyrighted books without authors’ permission to build and train their systems, so our words, however bad or good, were at least verifiably our words.

However, as we discuss this as a community—and we should—the idea of what we mean by “authentic” keeps bugging me, chiefly because the word is beginning to carry too many meanings. We use it to mean human-made, ethically written, or increasingly, high-quality. Those things may overlap; authenticity does imply “human-made,” but not necessarily “ethically written” (humans lie even if they aren’t using AI), and it certainly shouldn’t mean “high quality.” Sure, the chance that something human-made is aesthetically good, in my mind, is much higher, but we’ve begun to confuse provenance with artistic worth. It’s understandable: we want to believe that if something was made by hand, its effect on us will be more honest, that it will communicate a truth about living, about humanity, which is what we hope for from great art.

But I disagree that just because something is handmade, it’s better, not because I’m pro AI, but because it cuts out the idea that skilled craftsmanship and hard work have anything to do with it. As a writer and educator, I honor those things in myself and in other professionals. When we’re talking about the artistic value of writing, we should spend less time and expense trying to certify its authenticity and more time asking whether it’s actually good art: is there an expert craftsperson behind this work?

That’s hardly a revolutionary idea, but these days, it’s beginning to feel that way. We need experienced gatekeepers—reviewers, bloggers, influencers, editors, agents, avid readers, and other writers—to resist the temptation to chase the next viral thing or breakthrough hit and instead focus on the quality of the writing: richness of tone, depth of feeling, complex emotion, innovative storytelling, and on and on. We should be cultivating talent and celebrating excellence rather than simply betting that a book will catch fire at a certain moment.

All the industry-level folks I know personally care deeply about excellence, but the system can put economic pressure on underpaid editors and agents to gamble—and it is gambling—on a hot-button topic instead of focusing on quality. When a review that says, “This is beautifully made,” moves fewer copies than one that says, “This book will cause a big stir on the socials,” you can understand why the incentive to find a viral hit outweighs quality. While editors, agents, reviewers, and publishers all play a part in what rises to the top, so do the rest of us. Every time we choose what to buy, read, or recommend, we help decide what gets rewarded. If we’re going to demand excellence, we all need to do it together.

If we keep pressuring writers and industry professional to bet on the next big thing, we’ll continue having scandals like Shy Girl and Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body, and the writing community, from publishers to authors, will continue to try to suss out authenticity and rely on problematic authenticators like the highly touted Pangram—companies that have much to gain financially in our desire to label something human made—or our own ability to sniff out AI in writing. Frankly, I trust a writing expert more than another tech bro with an algorithm. As someone who has written a novel about the Lavender Scare in the McCarthy era, trust me when I say we don’t want a witch hunt. Everyone loses, except the powerful, except the bros.

As an aside: I don’t believe Anthropic’s move toward watermarking is going to help matters for writers or students, but there’s so much that’s unknown and now being misreported about it that it’s difficult to have any clarity. Anthropic says its watermark can indicate that Claude processed the text, not necessarily that Claude authored it, a distinction that seems especially important for writers (and students) who use AI only for editing. Here’s an interesting explainer video about it: Claude Is Hiding Watermarks in Your AI Text (What It Actually Means). Note that at the end, around 15:08, Kyle Balmer points out another potential “benefit” of watermarking: AI companies train models in part on material gathered from the internet, which increasingly includes synthetically generated AI output. Being able to distinguish AI-generated material from human-generated material could help them manage what goes into future training data. In other words, AI still needs human “flesh” to feast on to grow.

And we wonder why horror is having a moment.

Anyway, the fuss about Shy Girl and Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body has raised serious questions about the integrity of their authorship. I don’t wish to defend or critique the use of generative AI in their writing. But I wonder: were these books actually good? Shy Girl was dragged considerably for its tangled metaphors and repetitive, flat prose, but Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body sparked a 14-way auction and a multimillion-dollar offer. Falade’s agent called the manuscript “stunningly good” and, even after withdrawing it, “genius.” None of that proves the book was good, of course, but it does tell us that experienced publishing professionals claimed it was, though they may also have been motivated to say so to save face. Who knows? But it is a question I have.

Which brings me back to the word du jour: authentic.

Wrapped up in this word, authentic, especially for writers, is a kind of romance about the process of writing: the production line that gets a book from the inside of our skulls into readers’ hands. Picture the wizened author—in these fantasies, he’s often white and male, some mythologized version of Hemingway—drinking bourbon, smoking a cigarette, and hammering away at a 1926 Underwood key by key, his muscular prose expressing a rugged individualism, his poet’s open vein bleeding on the page. (There’s that horror imagery again.)

But in this scenario, while authentic and individualistic, is this really what produces excellence?

Which brings me to Simon Armitage’s 2007 New Yorker article, “Rough Crossings: The Cutting of Raymond Carver,” about how aggressively Gordon Lish edited Raymond Carver’s famous story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” If you haven’t read it, I recommend it. I often assign the article, the widely anthologized story, and Carver’s original, pre-Lish version, “Beginners,” to my students.

The version of the story that first became famous was shaped profoundly by Lish’s heavy-handed editing. So, are we getting Carver or Lish in these stories? Where does one begin and the other end? What is authentically Carver, and what’s not? Lish isn’t an algorithm. He read Carver’s sentences and made human judgments about what to cut, informed by his own taste and years of editorial instinct, which, of course, is not the same as using an AI model trained on other people’s sentences and generating text through pattern-matching. I don’t mean to imply it is. Later, in some of his other great stories, like “Cathedral,” we get a more expansive voice, not the Kmart realism associated with Carver’s earlier, more heavily Lish-edited work.

Still, this situation raises the question of authorship: how much of the work on the page came from a single source? Agents, editors, beta readers, copyeditors, and publishers all have influence, not to mention the literary influences of everything a writer has consumed. Frankly, does it ever really come from a single source? No, but we hope that it’s at least the product of human collaboration. So the term authentic remains slippery. It can lead us toward absolutist thinking and a highly individualistic idea of what it means to be a writer and what the writing process is, which makes me wonder whether we really know what we’re talking about when we talk about authenticity.

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But what is true, though, is that the final product of Carver and Lish’s collaboration was excellent, even though Lish’s interventions greatly distressed Carver, who clearly cared deeply about the integrity of his authorship, which is moving to read about in his letters to Lish. I believe the work could only have been created through the convergence of these two men’s creativity. To me, it’s less important that the story was some percentage Carver and some percentage Lish than that what they produced together was excellent.

I guess, at the end of the day, we should take a similar approach to writing now. First, ask whether the writing is any good, and educate people about what good writing looks like. We have a rich literary history to guide those conversations. And in part, that’s what I’m doing in this Substack. Then ask separately whether the writer has been honest about how the work was made, whether sources have been represented accurately, and whether the process meets whatever ethical standards we decide matter. Those are incredibly important questions. But they aren’t the same question. And since so much remains unclear about writing and its relationship to AI, focusing on excellence for now strikes me as a more productive approach.

Forgive the long, discursive article, but here’s what I have to say in a nutshell: I have a hunch that expertise and training still produce something a model can’t, not because of some mystical claim about human souls, but because judgment accumulated over years of failure and revision is a different process from prediction. If we focus on excellence, authenticity may emerge on its own, not as a confusing metric of AI usage, but as the product of something only human beings can achieve. I could be wrong. But I’m going to do something only a human can do: trust my gut.

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A sensitivity reader, if you don’t know, is a professional hired by an author or publisher to check a manuscript for factual errors, worn-out tropes, and false notes tied to a specific community or experience. There’s real value in having those informed eyes on your manuscript.

Sometimes, though, a sensitivity read gets used as a kind of “don’t cancel me” insurance: proof to wave around if someone objects, or a shortcut past the harder labor of research and self-examination this series has already covered. Both uses miss the point and are more a product of fear than a committed effort to improve your craft.

The key is to hire for relevant expertise, not identity alone. Belonging to a group doesn’t automatically qualify someone to evaluate a manuscript about that group, any more than being gay makes me an expert on every gay experience. If you’re writing about a specific era, region, or subculture, look for a reader who knows that territory, not merely the broader identity category it falls under. Hire someone whose lived experience, professional knowledge, or sustained study equips them to evaluate the particular territory your manuscript enters. The goal is accuracy, not the performance of a righteous moral gesture; it’s about substance, not optics. (How I hate the word optics!)

Timing matters too. A full sensitivity read usually works best on a manuscript you’ve already drafted and revised, after you’ve made your hard choices and addressed the problems you already recognize. Send it too early, and they end up doing the homework you should have done yourself, catching things you could have caught on your own with more research or a closer read of your own pages.

Once you’ve found the right reader at the right stage, treat their notes for what they are: one informed perspective, not a ruling handed down by an entire community. No single reader speaks for every member of a group, any more than I speak for every gay man raised in Appalachia. Two readers from the same background can flag different problems in the same manuscript, or disagree with each other entirely. That’s not a weakness in the process. It’s what happens when you ask people who share one trait, and otherwise lead very different lives, to weigh in on the same pages.

Which means the work described in my second article in this series, Research Starts With You, doesn’t end once a professional signs on. You still have to know what you brought to the page before anyone else reads it: your assumptions, your blind spots, the version of a community you inherited long before you sat down to write it. A sensitivity reader can flag the line of dialogue that sounds plausible to an outsider but wrong to anyone who actually knows the territory. They can catch a trope you didn’t realize you were repeating. What they can’t do is the internal accounting that got you to the page in the first place. That work stays yours, no matter who you hire.

Also, they can be wrong. I once had a sensitivity reader ask me to replace “commit suicide” with “unalive themselves” in a novel set in the 1950s. Just no. Whatever one thinks of current terminology, “unalive themselves” is completely anachronistic in that setting.

Eventually, you should trust your own judgment. That might sound like it undercuts everything I’ve said about research and expert feedback, but it doesn’t. Research and feedback are how you earn the right to trust yourself. You do the internal and external work. You build the character with the specificity I wrote about last time. You bring in outside eyes once there’s a finished draft worth their attention. Then the decisions belong to you. A sensitivity reader isn’t a co-author. They tell you what they see. What you do with it is on you—and sometimes your publisher, if they insist. I’ve been lucky not to have had this experience, but I’ve heard stories …

However, using a sensitivity reader to end an argument instead of inform one isn’t right; it’s a deferral of responsibility. A writer gets pushback on a character, and the response is some version of, “My sensitivity reader is gay, and he said I nailed it, so your criticism doesn’t hold.” It doesn’t work that way. One reader’s approval isn’t a verdict issued on behalf of an entire community, and it doesn’t close the conversation for good. If someone else raises a concern later, from inside that community or outside it, the receipt from your sensitivity reader isn’t a reason to stop listening. It’s a chance for dialogue, and you should be open to it, if, in fact, it’s a dialogue and not a social media shouting match.

The obligation to hire one also scales with reach. A writer with a six-figure advance and a national platform has the money and the responsibility to pay for expert review, because a mistake at that scale reaches a lot of people. A debut author publishing with a small press, covering their own copyediting out of pocket, is working with a different set of constraints, and that difference deserves grace. I still think a sensitivity read is worth pursuing when it’s within reach and when you are doing something far outside your experience. Yes, money buys an added safeguard, which is a privilege—a privilege other writers do not always have.

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That’s the last practical piece of this series and a fitting place to end it. I opened by arguing that writing across difference isn’t a special category of risk but simply fiction writing done with care and compassion—and that takes work. Since then, we’ve traced where that work begins: inward, before it ever reaches a library or an interview. We’ve discussed identifying the dominant story a character type carries so that it can be challenged and complicated rather than lazily repeated. We’ve looked at how specific, accumulated details make a character come alive in all their complexity. Hiring a sensitivity reader is the final stage of that process, if you can afford it—not a replacement for any part of it.

None of this eliminates the risk of writing across difference, but frankly, I don’t want to read writing that takes no risks. The gesture of compassion such writing embodies is worth it. Safe writing feels sealed off, airless as a bell jar. It’s boring—or at least it bores me. In our world, especially as it is now, compassion feels radical and dialogue revolutionary. To be a writer of any merit, you must be willing to take the risk, get it wrong, and discuss it honestly. All great art involves risk. If you succeed, wonderful. That’s something to celebrate. If you fail, listen to the feedback, own your mistakes, and grow.

A writer, like any character worth building, isn’t one fixed thing. You’ll sometimes get a character wrong—even a real person, even yourself—and the work is to revise rather than defend, to change your mind, and, at times, even to embrace contradiction. That willingness brings me back to the closing sections of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them,
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

Whitman isn’t posing certainty in these lines. He’s exposed, admitting to contradiction, waiting on the door-slab, asking a stranger to confide in him before he runs out of time. That’s the posture writing across difference asks for too. You don’t arrive certain. You show up aware of your own limits, your own contradictions, and you reach toward the reader anyway, hoping they’ll walk with you a while.

Hall of Mirrors Is Number One—and in Extraordinary Company!

Hall of Mirrors is number one on this incredible list of historical mysteries and thrillers, alongside friends Karen Odden, Cheryl Head, and Mariah Fredericks—and absolute luminaries like Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje.

Who knows what “number one” really means on a list with Atwood, but I’m just thrilled to be included, thrilled that Hall of Mirrors is still getting press, and hopeful that it will find new readers.

I’m so proud of this book—and of its sequel, the third and final novel in the Nightingale Trilogy, Goddess of Love, which arrives next March. I’d love for you to preorder it! Preorders help enormously, especially during these uncertain times in publishing.

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As a writer, your job is to flesh out your characters, even the minor ones, with enough nuance and texture that a reader believes in them as people. To do that, you have to work through several modes of characterization at once. We need to see, hear, and smell a character. We need to feel their presence in a room. We need to watch how they move, whether it’s a muscle working in the jaw or the particular way someone throws a punch. We need to hear them speak: the words they reach for and the order they put them in. We need to know what they think, and whether that thought lines up with what they say and do. When the scene allows it, we should also catch what other characters make of them, and whatever the narrator gives away without saying it directly. All of these choices are details, and their careful selection is what creates verisimilitude: characters and scenes that are multi-dimensional and therefore believable.

A character only comes alive detail by detail. Building a scene means blending these modes of characterization until you get what novelist John Gardner, in his craft book The Art of Fiction, called a “vivid and continuous fictional dream” for the reader. You interrupt that dream the moment a poorly chosen detail or lack of detail makes us question the believability of the character or the events.

Janet Burroway draws a distinction between a concrete detail and a significant one. A detail is concrete if it appeals to one of the five senses. It becomes significant when it also conveys an idea or judgment. Burroway’s example, "The windowsill was green," is concrete: we can see it. The windowsill was shedding flakes of fungus-green paint is both concrete and significant because it conveys the idea that the paint is old and suggests the judgment that the color is ugly.

That judgment may be filtered through a character’s perspective, revealing how the character perceives the world, or it may emerge from the narration itself, creating a tonal shading that more indirectly reveals the consciousness shaping the story. Either way, the selection of details contributes to characterization. Significant details move us beyond the skeletal archetype and toward a more complex dynamic between how a character is perceived and who that character may actually be. This reflects our experience of trying to understand one another in life: an implicit acknowledgment that people are deeper and more complicated than they initially appear. By creating space between perception and reality, the careful selection of significant details—whether in constructing a character or laying out a scene—can help steer a writer away from stereotyping.

A stereotype works by handing readers a category and letting that category do all the communicating. This often happens when a writer relies on familiar clusters of clichéd traits: the fiery, sexually available redhead; the cold, ambitious career woman; the soft-spoken, self-sacrificing mother; the brooding, emotionally unavailable man; the flamboyant, fashion-conscious best friend. Such shorthand encourages readers to substitute a familiar type for an individual character. One way to resist it—and, more generally, flat writing—is to replace clichéd details with fresher, more particular ones. Another is to strip the character back to the underlying archetype or narrative function, then build the character outward again using details that complicate, contradict, or depart from the conventional version of that type. Filtering those details through a particular perspective can further individualize the character by revealing not only who is being observed but also the consciousness doing the observing.

Consider this example, which is largely free of character perspective and judgment: Terry Landon was twenty-two, six feet four inches tall, and broad-shouldered. He had medium-length, thick blond hair, tanned skin, blue eyes, and long eyelashes. Every detail is concrete and clear, but none is significant. Terry could be a romantic lead assembled from familiar shorthand—the specifications are all there: height, build, coloring. Yet the description was shaped neither for one particular person nor by one particular consciousness. It remains an inventory of traits, revealing little about the character being observed or the narrator or character doing the observing.

You can improve a flat characterization that tips toward stereotype not just by adding more detail but by selecting details that reveal something about both the observed and the observer. Take this version of Terry, seen by someone who finds him threatening:

Terry Landon filled the doorway, one broad shoulder nearly grazing the frame. His blond hair was combed neatly across his skull and back from his tanned face, but a muscle worked in his jaw, and his forearm tightened as his hand closed around the doorknob. He did not enter. He simply stood there, blocking the way, his icy eyes fixed on me without blinking.

Now take a version seen by someone in love with him:

Terry always forgot to duck beneath the kitchen doorway until the last second. The sun had lightened his hair at the temples, and when he smiled, one corner of his mouth lifted before the other. I noticed the small scar beneath his chin, the pale line across one knuckle as his hand gripped the doorknob, and the way his sea-blue eyes narrowed when he laughed.

In each version, we learn more about Terry and about the person observing him. The physical facts change only slightly, but the selection of details does, drawing us into something that feels more like an authentic human encounter. By acknowledging the flaws, biases, desires, contradictions, and limitations of both the observer and the observed, this movement toward particularity creates a more complex experience for the reader—one that resists easy categorization, complicates automatic emotional responses, and avoids stereotyping.

Take a scene from Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt. Two women meet for the first time across a department-store counter. Notice how Highsmith uses significant details to create a believable, complex first encounter between two women who will—spoiler alert—become lovers:

Their eyes met at the same instant, Therese glancing up from a box she was opening, and the woman just turning her head so she looked directly at Therese. She was tall and fair, her long figure graceful in the loose fur coat that she held open with a hand on her waist. Her eyes were gray, colorless, yet dominant as light or fire, and, caught by them, Therese could not look away. She heard the customer in front of her repeat a question, and Therese stood there, mute. The woman was looking at Therese, too, with a preoccupied expression, as if half her mind were on whatever it was she meant to buy here, and though there were a number of salesgirls between them, Therese felt sure the woman would come to her. Then Therese saw her walk slowly toward the counter, heard her heart stumble to catch up with the moment it had let pass, and felt her face grow hot as the woman came nearer and nearer.

“May I see one of those valises?” the woman asked, and leaned on the counter, looking down through the glass top.

The damaged valise lay only a yard away. Therese turned around and got a box from the bottom of a stack, a box that had never been opened. When she stood up, the woman was looking at her with the calm gray eyes that Therese could neither quite face nor look away from.

“That’s the one I like, but I don’t suppose I can have it, can I?” she said, nodding toward the brown valise in the show window behind Therese.

Her eyebrows were blonde, curving around the bend of her forehead. Her mouth was as wise as her eyes, Therese thought, and her voice was like her coat, rich and supple, and somehow full of secrets.

Highsmith never tells us that Therese is falling for this woman. She lets the details communicate it: the gray eyes, the loose fur coat held open with one hand, the blonde eyebrows curving around the forehead. Movement carries information, too. The woman doesn’t rush the counter but approaches slowly, prolonging Therese’s anticipation as the distance between them closes. Even an offhand question about a valise acquires tension when followed by: “That’s the one I like, but I don’t suppose I can have it, can I?” Highsmith also lets us into Therese’s body without explanation: a heart stumbling to catch up, a face going hot. By the time the passage arrives at “her voice was like her coat, rich and supple, and somehow full of secrets,” we understand what Therese is feeling, though Highsmith has never stated it.

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Notice how these details belong specifically to this scene. The coat, the valise, the gray eyes “dominant as light or fire,” the stumbling heart, the heated face, and the “rich and supple” voice create a particular woman as Therese perceives her at a particular moment. That specificity keeps the scene from sliding into type. There is no “icy blonde” or “femme fatale”; we get the woman rather than the category.

Next week, in the final installment of this series, I’ll discuss the importance of sensitivity readers and the ways their role is sometimes misunderstood.

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About the new book …

Washington, D.C., September 1964.

Judy Nightingale and Philippa Dolittle, née Watson, were once each other’s whole world. They haven’t spoken in years. Then Judy’s latest novel, The Savage Kind, drags their shared past into public view and forces an uneasy reunion.

Then comes the shock: Judy’s estranged birth mother—the woman who once tried to poison them both—has died, leaving her everything. A house. A fortune. A staff that watches her too closely. Soon after, letters begin arriving, each signed “Mother” and enclosing pages from Judy’s long-lost radio play, “Frankenstein’s Sister.” Warnings of revenge from beyond the grave.

The warnings turn real. After a dinner party thick with old grievances, a guest is dead, and Judy’s Mercedes is found in a ravine, its brake line cut. Judy is the intended victim.

She turns to the only person who ever truly understood her: Philippa, now married with a child, her past buried beneath a life she has worked hard not to examine. Together they follow the letters back toward everything they never resolved and toward a killer who has been patient for a very long time . . . and still writing letters.

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It’s impossible to fully develop every character who walks onto a story’s stage. Fiction often depends on minor or functional characters—and sometimes on recognizable stock types—to advance the plot, keep the momentum going, add texture to a setting, and support the main characters. All writers use them. Stock characters are types repeated across literature for so long that they’ve become shorthand: the reader recognizes the role instantly, and the story doesn’t have to stop and explain.

That shorthand has a history, though, and that history can be problematic. Literary tradition is full of stock characters shaped by whatever the dominant narrative happened to be in a given period, and plenty of those types haven’t been shaken off, more out of habit than intention. That doesn’t mean every stock character is defined by a negative stereotype, but it does mean we need to bring a critical eye to the stock characters we lean on and revise our thinking.

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Imagine three broad categories. In one, you’ve got relatively low-risk shorthand: the family doctor who delivers a diagnosis, the secretary who guards the door, the small-town sheriff who shows up to advance the plot. Even these figures can carry assumptions about gender, race, class, and power, but their primary function is usually narrative rather than ideological. They play a role, then step aside.

In the second category are types built more obviously on stereotype than on function. Some are plainly offensive. The tragic mulatta or mulatto emerged as a recurring figure in nineteenth-century American fiction: a mixed-race character whose ancestry leaves them vulnerable to enslavement or a catastrophic loss of social position. The trope often ends in ruin or death. In some works, racial mixing itself is treated as the tragedy. In abolitionist fiction, the figure could also be used to expose the cruelty and absurdity of slavery and the racial order, but even then, the character was often made more sympathetic to white readers by being light-skinned and, in their minds, closer to whiteness.

The “Yellow Peril” villain turns racial difference into threat rather than pity. Its most notorious embodiment is Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, introduced in magazine stories in 1912 and collected in a novel the following year: a mastermind whose foreignness is presented as evidence of menace, whose intelligence becomes sinister cunning, and whose ambitions are filtered through the assumption that the Asian outsider threatens the West.

Other stereotypes are sneakier. They flatter rather than demean, which makes them harder to catch. The “Magical Negro” is often beloved within the story: wise, patient, gifted with an almost mystical understanding of exactly what the white protagonist needs to learn. He receives warmth, gratitude, sometimes even reverence. What he rarely receives is a story of his own. Spike Lee popularized the term in 2001, naming a pattern that had been running through Hollywood for decades, one that echoes older stereotypes—the mammy, the happy slave, the selfless servant—created to serve white characters’ material and emotional needs. Ask what life Bagger Vance has beyond restoring Junuh’s swing, or what possibilities The Green Mile imagines for John Coffey beyond healing others and accepting death, and the answer is, well, not much. They often function as symbols, not characters, and their gifts exist principally to move someone else’s arc forward.

The gay best friend often runs on a similar mechanism, relocated to a different kind of story. The type became especially prominent in the romantic comedies and television shows of the 1990s and 2000s, a way to include a gay character while keeping him safely outside the central romance. He’s stylish, witty, endlessly supportive, sharper about relationships than anyone else in the room, and all of that reads as flattering on the surface. But the flattery is the trap, as it is with the Magical Negro. Neither character is admired for being fully human. Each is admired for performing a role, and that role exists to help someone else, usually the story’s actual protagonist, along her arc. Dressing a stereotype up as a compliment doesn’t keep it from reinforcing assumptions that further marginalize already marginalized characters.

The fix isn’t complicated: give him goals, relationships, conflicts, and something to lose that have nothing to do with the person he’s there to help.

The third category is the harder one: types that can go either way depending on whether the writer understands what they’ve inherited. The final girl is a clear example.

Psycho offered an important precursor, but the figure emerged more recognizably in 1970s films such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Black Christmas before Halloween codified an enormously influential version of the type in 1978. Laurie Strode is sexually inexperienced, responsible, and resourceful; meanwhile, the friends who neglect their surroundings while pursuing sex are killed.

Whatever John Carpenter and Debra Hill intended—and both rejected the idea that they were deliberately writing a sexual morality play—the pattern hardened across the slasher boom into a familiar equation: the sexually available girl dies, while the restrained and vigilant girl survives. Once repeated often enough, the pattern begins to look less like coincidence and more like a moral argument: purity survives, sexual desire gets punished.

That’s not just shorthand. It’s a kind of patriarchal double standard dressed up as plot structure, inherited from older, fairly Victorian ideas about what makes a woman worthy of survival.

But the type didn’t stay fixed. Sidney in Scream has sex and survives. Jay in It Follows is sexually active and, like Laurie Strode, responsible, resourceful, and physically resilient, although the film complicates the issue by making sex both a source of danger and a possible means of survival. These films preserve the role of the final girl while challenging the assumptions that had become attached to her.

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Where stereotypes flatten stock characters and reduce them, if not outright degrade them, archetypes can give writers a broader pattern of desire, fear, or conflict from which to begin. The distinction is not absolute. An archetype can harden into stereotype when it is applied rigidly. Still, used with care, an archetype can help a writer give a functional character an internal tension that does not depend on social assumptions.

The familiar twelve-archetype system—including figures such as the Lover, Explorer, and Creator—was developed by Carol S. Pearson from Carl Jung’s influential theory of archetypes: recurring patterns and images associated with what he called the collective unconscious.

For writers, such systems can provide provisional patterns of desire and conflict. A Lover may be guided by intimacy but risk losing a sense of self. An Explorer may crave freedom but struggle to commit. A Creator may be visionary but perfectionistic or impractical. For every central desire, there is an emotional obstacle built in. That pairing is what makes an archetype useful rather than merely reductive.

Think of it as a skeleton, not a finished character.

Where a stereotype assigns supposedly fixed characteristics to members of a social group and reduces a character to a single use, whether degrading or flattering them, an archetype provides a broader narrative pattern that can be used to develop either a stock character or a main character. It remains the writer's responsibility to decide how far to flesh out that skeleton and what choices of characterization to make along the way.

The gay best friend can go through the same rebuild as the final girl. Stop constructing him from an idealized surface and start with desire, fear, conflict, and contradiction instead. Write against the type. Suddenly he gives terrible relationship advice, loathes brunch and mimosas, and tells the worst dad jokes. Imagine! His being gay becomes a fact about him rather than a role he performs.

The third post in this series talked about the dominant narrative, the default story a culture already tells about a kind of person, and the counternarrative you write to complicate it. The same move applies here, just at a smaller scale, and it applies whether you’re building a lead or someone who’s on the page for a single scene: learn the history of the type you’re using, and find a way to complicate it.

With all this in mind, next week we’ll focus on modes of characterization: how we see, hear, and inhabit a character on the page.

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Before you write a character from a marginalized group, you need to know what the dominant culture has already been saying about that person. Not because you should repeat it. Because you can’t complicate—or at times push against—something you haven’t identified.

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Novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie lays this out in her now-famous TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story.” Growing up on a university campus in Nigeria, she read almost nothing but British and American children’s books, and by seven she was writing the same kind of story back—white, blue-eyed characters playing in snow she’d never seen, eating apples instead of the mangoes she actually knew. The colonizer’s narrative was so pervasive that she did not initially see her own life as material worth writing about. She had to fight her way toward the truth: that a story about a girl growing up in Nigeria in the 1980s was just as worthy, just as necessary. Purple Hibiscus and Americanah are what she wrote once she stopped repeating the story she’d inherited and started answering it with novels that don’t just add another account to the record, but correct the one that was already there.

That’s what a counternarrative does. It doesn’t pretend the dominant narrative isn’t there. It engages the narrative directly and complicates it.

So your first practical task, when you sit down to write a character from a historically marginalized group, is identification: What’s the default story? Where did it come from? What does it leave out? Then: refuse to reproduce it without thinking. This isn’t about avoiding offense. It’s about accuracy. A stereotype is reductive by design. It flattens a person into a set of attributes, and nobody experiences themselves that way.

I’ll use my own group as the example. Popular culture has a fairly settled list of claims about gay men: we have good taste, we’re neurotic, we’re sassy, we’re promiscuous, we’re better at relationships, we’re not homophobic. And now, apparently, we’re good at hockey. Some of that sounds complimentary. None of it holds up as a universal, and every item on the list trades a person for a trait—or, dare I say, a trope.

At different points in my life, I’ve been self-loathing, self-accepting, chaste, promiscuous, neurotic, healthy, good at relationships, and bad at them. I’ve had good taste, and I’ve had bad taste. Before my first cup of coffee, I am not, under any circumstances, sassy. In the evening, after a glass or two of wine, I’m still not sassy. That’s the point: I contain the whole list and its opposite, sometimes in the same week. A stereotype can only hold one item at a time. A person holds several, often contradictory, all at once—and so does any character worth writing.

That’s a craft principle, not just a personal one. Eric McDowell, in an essay called “Counternarratives: The Power of Narrative” for Michigan Quarterly Review, addresses why this matters on the level of craft, not just ethics.

[W]e must attend to the ways craft itself can create opportunities for constructive and responsible representation. Many misrepresentations, for example, speak to lazy characterization. Characters, after all, are people as far as we’re concerned, and so we must work to ensure our characters, our people, have the richness and complexity readers require in order to care about, inhabit, and empathize with them.

McDowell quotes Tobias Wolff, from a Paris Review interview called “The Art of Fiction No. 183,” on what’s at stake when a writer gets this right:

And the most radical political writing of all is that which makes you aware of the reality of another human being. Self-absorbed as we are, self-imprisoned even, we don’t feel that often enough. Most of the spiritualities we’ve evolved are designed to deliver us from that lockup, and art is another way out. Good stories slip past our defenses—we all want to know what happens next—and then slow time down, and compel our interest and belief in other lives than our own, so that we feel ourselves in another presence. It’s a kind of awakening, a deliverance, it cracks our shell and opens us up to the truth and singularity of others—to their very being. Writers who can make others, even our enemies, real to us have achieved a profound political end, whether or not they would call it that.

That bond between reader and character is exactly what a stereotype destroys. A character built from half-truths gives a reader nothing to hold onto, because no one thinks of themselves as a stereotype, so how could a reader identify with a character who is all stereotype? The bond forms when a writer challenges the reader’s assumptions, most of which come from the same mainstream messaging the writer is supposed to be pushing against, and offers a complete personality in its place. You can’t empathize with a type. You can only empathize with a person.

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So ask those same three questions about the character in front of you right now. Then write toward the gap, not to be contrarian, but to be complete. A counternarrative isn’t a correction imposed from outside the story. It’s what you find when you look closely enough at any actual human being.

Next time: the difference between an archetype and a stereotype, and why one gives you a skeleton to build on while the other gives you a corpse.

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When writers on panels get asked how to build a character different from themselves, especially one from a traditionally marginalized community, I often hear the same advice: do the research. Talk to someone who’s lived it. Read books by writers from inside that community. Learn the history. It’s good advice. It’s just not where you should start.

The first thing you need to research is yourself.

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Author Alexander Chee makes this point in a piece he wrote for Vulture about unlearning the habits that shape how we write the “other,” and he describes the first step in self-research with clarity:

We write what we believe a story is, and so our sense of story is formed by the stories we’ve read. But for most of us, the stories we hear are the first stories that teach us. Stories from family. Stories in the news. Stories we’re taught at school. Gossip, trash talk, and jokes, which are the shortest, complete form of narrative. How you grew up, who you grew up with, how you know them. All of this affects what you think is real, and whom you think counts as human—which, in turn, affects how you write stories.

That’s really the whole argument. Before you write a character from a community you don’t belong to, you need to know what your own community already told you about that community, and just as important, what it never told you at all.

I’ll give you a personal example, the kind of thing I ask my students to dig up about themselves. One of my middle names is Kipling, after Rudyard Kipling, who wrote The Jungle Book and also “The White Man’s Burden,” a poem urging the U.S. toward the same colonial project in the Philippines that Britain had been running elsewhere for decades. My mother loved Kipling’s stories. She actually wanted Kipling as my first name—I could have been Kip Copenhaver, but my father said no. (If I’d been Kip, I’m sure I’d have had a killer forehand, looked sharp in tennis whites, and grown a luscious mane of hair, but I doubt I would’ve written a word.) When she named me, she wasn’t thinking about the violence behind those stories. She’d been protected from ever having to think about it. That’s the inherited blindness Chee is describing, handed down without anyone meaning to hand it down.

My schooling didn’t do much to correct it, either. At my prep school in the early 1990s, I read two books by Black authors and four by women across four years of English class, and every one of those authors was dead except Alice Walker, Tom Stoppard, and Edward Albee. Nobody mentioned that Albee, Walker, and Tennessee Williams were gay. A trans author, a book that dealt seriously with disability—neither was on the syllabus, nor on anyone’s radar that I remember. My imagination formed almost entirely around books written by and about dead straight white men. So it’s no surprise that my MFA thesis—a novel that will stay on the shelf forever, thank God—had no LGBTQ+ characters, at least none who were queer on the surface, and nobody who wasn’t white. I didn’t notice the absence until I went looking for it.

That kind of noticing doesn’t stop once you’re out of school. For several years, I chaired a high school English department outside Washington, DC, and before I could lead that department toward decentering whiteness and straightness in our curriculum, I had to do the same work on myself again, this time as an adult with some actual power to change what students were assigned to read. I had to take a hard look at what my own family and community had reinforced in me. Research starts with you, and apparently it doesn’t stop after one round.

James Baldwin describes the same blindness in The Fire Next Time, in the letter he wrote to his fourteen-year-old nephew:

[White people] have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality.

Baldwin’s writing about race, about people who refuse to know certain things to hold onto their identity. Sometimes that refusal is willful. More often, it’s passive. My mother didn’t know what she was handing me when she named me after Kipling. The English syllabi that shaped me worked the same way. Nobody at my prep school decided to leave out queer writers and living writers of color. The absence didn’t register as a decision. It just looked like literature to them—what they’d always been told were the classics, as if the canon were fixed. Which meant I sat inside that partial picture of myself for years, mistaking what I’d been shown for the whole of it.

That’s what gets me about Baldwin’s image of the stars. There’s a dry joke buried in it: the stars are burning all the time, day and night, whether we’re looking or not. The only thing “out of order” is what people are willing to see. A syllabus works the same way—what’s missing from it doesn’t advertise itself as missing. Those texts are out there, stars burning in daylight. Nobody’s taught to look.

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This kind of research is hardest for people whose upbringing gave them a strong sense of security and belonging. If the world you grew up in made you feel safe and certain of your place in it, then tugging at the edges of that worldview risks real disillusionment, and it will feel like loss before anything else. I can tell you that mine eventually felt less like loss and more like a chance to clean house, to rearrange the furniture and make room for ideas that hadn’t been let in the door before. But you go through the loss first. You can’t write honestly about a community you haven’t first examined your own relationship to.

So before the reading list, before the interviews, before you book a sensitivity reader, sit with a few questions. What stories did you grow up with? Who did they put at the center, and who did they leave out? What did you absorb so early in life that it still feels like a fact rather than an inheritance?

That’s where the research has to start.

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My sympathy goes out to the scary clown in this one.

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In the summer of 2015, Julia Graham and her husband were driving past Rosehill Cemetery in Chicago around 10 p.m. when they saw a figure in a clown costume scale a seven-foot fence to get inside. The clown turned, stared at them, and waved slowly before running off into the dark. Graham caught it on her phone. CBS Chicago ran the footage and nicknamed her the “Clown Sighter,” which still makes me snicker. Her description of the scene stuck with me: “This was somebody putting forth a lot of effort—and being really weird.”

(A perfect description of what a writer does—or at least this writer.)

Anyway, that’s the whole mystery, really. Not what the clown wanted, but the effort behind it. Someone climbed a fence, in costume, alone, at night, for no audience they could count on. I couldn’t stop thinking about who does that, and why.

“Waving Hello, Waving Goodbye” follows a teenage narrator who puts on his dead brother’s clown costume and starts appearing at a cemetery near his high school, waving at kids walking home from basketball games. He’s not trying to hurt anyone. He wants to be seen. The costume gives him a version of attention his house never offers: no fighting, no absent parents, no violence. Just other kids focused on him, first through their phones, then in person, with fascination and awe.

That desire for visibility and belonging is the thread connecting this story to another I published recently, “The Fledgling,” which appears in Crime Ink: Iconic. Both are about boys looking for a place to belong and finding almost nowhere safe to look. The world keeps handing young men violent or hollow models for connection, then acts surprised when that’s what they reach for. The result is the horror of the masked white supremacist group Patriot Front marching on the Mall over the Fourth of July.

The CBS Chicago story raised a question, and short fiction seemed like the right place to start answering it. Both this story and “The Fledgling” go to dark places, especially the ones that cut close to the bone. That’s where short form works best for me. I can get in, make my point, and get out before the material turns unbearable. A novel doesn’t let you leave that fast.

Sometimes a story outgrows its length and wants to become something larger. You never know. When that happens, the trick is finding some lightness. My novels are dark, but I always find something in them that affirms life, affirms the importance of loving who you want to love, and affirms the transformative power of telling the truth. We’ll see where the subjects in my short fiction take me. For now, the short form suits what they have to say.

I hope you’ll check out the issue and check out the other superb writers in this lineup: Nick Antosca, Nico Lou Monheim Carrasquillo, Daisy Cashin, Imogene Mahalia, Jake Maynard, Violet Paley, and Natasha Stagg.

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DC and Richmond, VA friends: Two events this week

If you’re in the DC area, come out Thursday, July 9th at 7 PM. One More Page Books in Arlington is hosting Queer Characters in Crime Fiction, a panel with Aggie Blum Thompson, Diana DiGangi, Stephen Spotswood, and me. We’ll talk about writing queer characters honestly inside a genre with a complicated history of representation.

I’m also moderating Jennifer Squared at Book People in Richmond on Saturday, July 11th from 1–3:30 PM. Jennifer van der Kleut and Jennifer Pashley both write psychological thrillers, but they arrive at the genre from very different directions. I’m looking forward to that conversation about how two writers can work in the same form and land in completely different places.

See you there!

We live in a moment when certain men with large platforms treat empathy as weakness and introspection as a waste of time. Tech billionaires, the lookmaxxing contingent, manosphere podcasters: the whole performative-dominance complex. They’re wrong, but their error is revealing. Empathy requires vulnerability, and vulnerability requires strength. Reading fiction, inhabiting lives unlike your own, is how you build it. The bravado is a tell. They can’t afford empathy because it might crack them open.

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Those of us who stay committed to a reading and writing culture understand, at least instinctively, what the whole enterprise is for. Storytelling is about self-understanding, but self-understanding can’t happen in isolation. We need other people to see ourselves clearly. A mirror that only works when you’re looking at someone else.

The information environment we’re swimming in runs the opposite direction. It’s engineered for extreme reactions—simplification, polarization, and, of course, outrage. A mirror that reflects back only you—a simplified version of you at that. Fiction slows things down. It puts you inside a consciousness that isn’t yours and asks you to take it seriously. Something we need to do to be in touch with our humanity.

Which is why writing a character different from you isn’t a special category of risk. It’s the job of a writer. Empathy is the point. It’s the reason we write characters at all, the reason readers stay up too late turning pages. Get the character wrong, and you’ve failed. Get them right, and you’ve done what fiction is supposed to do: made another human being real enough that readers can see themselves in that person’s experience. For me, it’s what great characters did as a reader that made me want to write them, and in turn, offer that experience to someone else.

There’s a debate in writing and publishing circles about whether writers should cross lines of identity at all. Can a straight writer inhabit a queer character? Can a white writer go inside a Black character’s experience? The debate is worth having, but it tends to get stuck on the wrong question. The question isn’t whether you’re allowed. It’s whether you’re willing to do the work.

Rebecca Makkai, whose novel The Great Believers centers on a group of friends navigating the AIDS crisis in 1980s Chicago, wrote about this in a LitHub essay. “I’m sympathetic to arguments that artists need to stay in their lanes,” she wrote. “I also believe preemptive judgment of work based on its premise, not its merits, is ridiculous. I don’t need to apologize for writing across difference; I need to apologize if I get it wrong.” That’s the right frame. The ethical problem isn’t the attempt. It’s the laziness, the shortcuts, the assumption that good intentions are enough.

I’ve been on enough LGBTQ+ writers’ panels to know what the lazy version looks like. The audience—usually straight readers and writers—asks some version of: “If I want to write a queer character, what pitfalls should I avoid?” Panelists mention research, flag tropes: the “gay best friend” who exists only to serve the straight protagonist’s journey, or “bury your gays,” the habit of killing off queer characters to generate pathos for straight ones. Most of those tropes come from the same root problem: centering straight lives in queer stories.

But sometimes the conversation surfaces something more troubling. A writer once told me she wouldn’t write a queer point-of-view character. She’d include LGBTQ+ characters—she had strong feelings about diversity and inclusion—but she’d never go inside one’s perspective because, she said, “that’s when you get into trouble.” She wasn’t being malicious. She just wasn’t willing to take the risk or do the homework. So her queer characters stood at the edges of her stories, present but never fully seen, useful but never centered.

That’s not inclusion. That’s marginalization.

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The alternative isn’t fearlessness. It’s rigor. Writing across difference requires two kinds of research, and most writers underestimate both. The first is external: reading widely, talking to people, learning history, understanding context. If you’re writing a queer character in 1950s Washington, DC, you read The Lavender Scare by David K. Johnson. You find the oral histories. You don’t just absorb the facts; you absorb the texture of lives lived under a particular set of circumstances.

The second kind is internal, and it’s harder. It means examining the stories your own community handed you, especially the biases baked into your upbringing and the gaps in your imagination you don’t yet know are there. This research changes your writing because it changes your perception.

I grew up in Marion, Virginia, a small Appalachian town, and attended an all-boys prep school where the curriculum was shaped by the perspectives of dead white men. I came out in my thirties, after years of performing a version of myself to fit in and avoid being cast out or, worse, being subject to violence. I know what it costs to stay at the margins of your own story. I also know that doing the internal work, exploring how conditioning influences your imagination (and your tastes), is not comfortable. It’s also not optional if you want to write characters who feel like people rather than placeholders. You have to do the work and keep doing it. I am.

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Over the next few months, I'll be writing here about self-research, counternarratives, character development, sensitivity readers, and what it actually means to write responsibly across difference. Each post draws on a lecture I gave at the University of Nebraska Omaha’s MFA program and expands on an article I wrote for Writer’s Digest called “Writing Across Difference: Responsibly Writing Characters Different From You.”

If you’re in the DC area, we’re starting the conversation in person. On July 9th at 7 PM, One More Page Books in Arlington is hosting Queer Characters in Crime Fiction—a panel with Aggie Blum Thompson, Diana DiGangi, Stephen Spotswood, and me. We’ll be talking about what it takes to write queer characters with honesty and care inside a genre with its own fraught history of representation.

I'll also be moderating Jennifer Squared at Book People in Richmond on July 11th from 1–3:30 PM. Jennifer van der Kleut and Jennifer Pashley both write psychological thrillers, but they come at the genre from very different angles—and that conversation, about how two writers can work in the same form and arrive at completely different places, is one I'm looking forward to.

Come if you can!

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Let me show you what I mean with one of my favorite openings in literature:

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

That’s Shirley Jackson. The Haunting of Hill House. Three sentences, and you already know everything you need to know, not about plot, but about the kind of story this is going to be.

Read the first sentence again. Jackson doesn’t tell you the house is haunted. She tells you that sanity can’t bear the weight of absolute reality. It’s a philosophical position: we’re not talking about ghosts. We’re talking about facing reality and the psychological cost of doing so. By the time she says the house itself is “not sane,” you sense that Hill House has been warped by something that exceeds psychology. Jackson was deeply interested in witchcraft, folklore, and the occult, and the novel brilliantly weaves them together: the cost of facing reality and the possibility that reality itself contains forces we can’t rationally account for.

The second and third sentences offer contrast. The walls are upright, the bricks are neat, the floors are firm. Everything is in its proper place, every sensible door shut. That accumulation of orderliness presents something that looks, at first sight, real and sane, but suggests the opposite. Order and sanity, in this place, will be a mask. The house isn’t at peace. An eerie warning to those who enter its doors and, perhaps, open the pages of this book.

That last clause—“whatever walked there, walked alone”—has a double function. It’s measured, stately, a touch melodramatic; not exactly humorous, but it prepares us for the moments of dark humor to come, a signature trait of Jackson’s writing. It also tells us, before we even meet Eleanor, our main character, the central theme: loneliness, perhaps the source of real madness, is introduced before the story has really begun.

Consider what Jackson accomplishes. She orients us (a house with a history, a name, and power—it will last on); she establishes the central problem (the threat to sanity, the thing walking in darkness); she drops us into a mood and point of view rather than a scene.

Now think about what she doesn’t do. She hasn’t introduced a character yet. She doesn’t begin with dialogue. She doesn’t open with someone arriving at the house on a dark night. She starts farther back, or farther above (narratively speaking), with a claim about the nature of reality, which turns out to be exactly the right place to start this particular novel.

That’s what’s challenging about teaching openings: there are rules, sure, but the best writers know how to break them to great effect, so you can’t say, just do these two or three things, and you’ll have a great opening. It’s never that simple.

When I work with students on their first pages, I give them seven opening lines and ask them to rank from most to least effective. Here they are. I’ll reveal the authors below, so read them cold first:

1. “When the lights went off the accompanist kissed her.”

2. “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.”

3. “The train tore along with an angry, irregular rhythm.”

4. “My husband, Charlie Willett, disappeared from a psychiatric hospital in the Berkshires on January 7, 2012.”

5. “Small trees had attacked my parents’ house at the foundation.”

6. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

7. “It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.”

Here’s what I tell them after they’ve committed to a ranking: every one of these lines opens a celebrated, widely read novel. There are no ringers. The exercise isn’t about separating the good from the bad. It’s about understanding what different kinds of effective openings actually do.

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Students never rank them the same way twice. Every class produces a different order, and the arguments get heated. But two lines win more often than the others: #2 and #6. Let me go through all seven.

#1 is Ann Patchett opening Bel Canto. It’s a single act of desire, an affirmation of life before the plunge into darkness. Notice what Patchett omits: there’s no comma after “When the lights went off.” She refuses the pause, pushing us directly into the action, in medias res. And the plot begins. Why did the lights go out? Who exactly is kissing, and why? What unfolds is far more dramatic: the beginning of a hostage-taking scenario by terrorists, though human connection remains central to the novel’s themes.

#2 is Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, the consistent class favorite and mine. The war has just ended, in this case, the Second World War. The narrator’s sister has driven a car off a bridge. Ten days separate those two facts, raising a question of causality. What did the war have to do with Laura’s death? Was her death an accident or a suicide? A central relationship is established immediately. This will be a book about sisterhood and the grief and guilt bound up in that relationship. Atwood doesn’t explain; she implies a totality.

#3 is Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train. The sentence is technically interesting—its rhythm actually is irregular, which is a nice piece of mimetic craft. But the train being angry doesn’t give us enough to hold in terms of theme or character, though it does set the mood. Highsmith was twenty-nine when she wrote it, still finding her footing. She would get considerably more unsettling and stylistically adept in future novels.

#4 is Paul La Farge, The Night Ocean. The sentence is journalistically precise—a name, a date, a location—and that precision signals a credible narrator. Students often rank this one low because it seems stilted and bland. The psychiatric hospital in the Berkshires on a specific January date isn’t just reportage; it’s documentary specificity. The line suggests narrative distance; a trusted narrator with an objective remove on what is to follow, although soon we’ll realize it’s more an attempt at that distance than an achievement of it.

#5 is Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, and it’s routinely underrated in the exercise. “Small trees had attacked my parents’ house at the foundation.” That verb puts us immediately inside an adolescent’s perception: exaggerated, slightly feral, animating the natural world against the human. The whole novel is about exactly that: what assails the home, and what the home fails to protect.

#6 is George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it shares the top spot with Atwood in most classes. It announces its strangeness with a single word, “thirteen,” placed where you’d least expect it, at the tail of a sentence that seems to promise normalcy. The effect continues to work well. The world is off by exactly one, and you feel the cockeyed slant of Oceania before you can articulate it. (Admittedly, my students often have a familiarity with Nineteen Eighty-Four, which may add to its popularity.)

#7 is Paul Auster, City of Glass, and it’s craftier than it appears. That long, winding clause—the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not—enacts the confusion it describes. The sentence meanders the way a half-asleep person processes a wrong number. Auster is inside his character’s consciousness before the reader has been formally introduced to anyone. Also, it hints at the postmodern detective novel to follow.

All three criteria—hook the reader, raise a question, drop us into the action—are useful guidelines, but not a checklist. Only a few of these first lines accomplish all three: Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, and Paul Auster’s City of Glass. The others are effective through other means, whether that’s dissonance, personification, or a single eye-raising detail, “striking thirteen,” which points to what every example here actually shares: tone and texture. A great opening not only makes a powerful first impression; it also communicates what kind of book the reader is entering, establishes trust, and guides them in their reading.

Here’s the question I ask of my own work and when workshopping students: don’t start by asking how much information the opening line delivers, or even how “hooky” it is. Ask what emotional impression it makes. What chord, or chords, does it strike? Does that feeling prepare the reader for the novel that follows? A great opening doesn’t have to squeeze in every detail. It has to calibrate the reader’s emotional expectations so the first line and the rest of the book feel like they belong to the same world.

Let me know which of the first seven lines above is your favorite and why?

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I’ve never felt that our culture threatens my masculinity, certainly not through the people most often cast as aggressors: women, trans people, queer people, anyone filed under “woke.” Maybe that’s because I’m gay and, in the minds of people who think this way, part of the problem. Or maybe—and I’m going with this one—it’s because the claim simply isn’t true. Either way, I used to greet the whole “masculinity is under attack” argument with a big eye roll. I was too busy worrying about the violence that form of masculinity wishes to visit on the many people I love and on me, and at times has. But lately, in part because of some exceptional television, I’ve come to believe the eye-roll response isn’t particularly helpful. It may be dismissive of something real and complex underneath all the chest-beating.

That’s not to say I’m immediately sympathetic. But I’m curious. What’s behind the bluster? I’m a feminist, and the women in my personal and professional life, from mother figures to teachers to writers, have been my guides. I find the manosphere’s misogyny repellent. But yes, something is eating at men. The statistics on boys struggling in school and the male suicide rate—which, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, far exceeds that of women—are concerning data that can’t be eye-rolled away. How, then, do we move past steroid-pumped grievance to get at the real problem, which more and more seems to be loneliness?

I’ve dealt with my share of loneliness, so I understand it. Most gay men do. It was loneliness that pushed me toward my imagination and, eventually, toward writing. I would not have survived without that imagination. But not everyone has the ability or privilege to turn struggle into something positive. And I suspect many women and other marginalized people, hemmed in by patriarchal systems, have known that kind of loneliness too. Isolation may be one of patriarchy’s central functions: keep people separated, and you can control them.

Could that logic apply to men as well? Especially those without power: young men, underprivileged men, emotionally vulnerable men. I’ve come to think patriarchy isn’t about men versus women. It’s about a handful of powerful men against everyone else, including other men. The trick is to link hands across those divisions.

So I’ve stopped rolling my eyes. Well, usually. I’ve begun wanting to listen: Damn it, let’s figure this out together. Maybe that’s naive, but I don’t know what else to do, because if we don’t do anything, the consequences will be dire.

Part of that listening is reading, and I’ve done plenty of it. But articles and interviews have limits. They inform; they don’t always build empathy. Storytelling does something different. If you’re willing to explore this territory (I’m still very much in exploratory mode), three recent, very well-written limited series are worth your time.

The first is Boots (Netflix), which was canceled after one season, and never should have been. Based on Greg Cope White’s memoir The Pink Marine, the series followed Cameron Cope (Miles Heizer), a closeted gay teen who enlists in the Marine Corps in the early 1990s, shortly before Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, when being openly gay in the military was barred. The Pentagon slammed it as “woke garbage,” at which point it soared up the Netflix charts. What’s remarkable about the show is that, while often funny, it doesn’t treat Cameron’s choice to join the military as a joke. It takes the other men seriously too, refusing to prescribe a single model of masculinity, exploring the full range of male relationships and, especially, vulnerability. Imagine that: an emotionally vulnerable Marine. No wonder Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon had a fit. I loved this show and keep thinking about it. Maybe the universe will find a way to bring us another season.

The second is Half Man (HBO/BBC), created and written by Richard Gadd, who broke through with Baby Reindeer, and starring Gadd as Ruben Pallister alongside Jamie Bell as Niall Kennedy, stepbrothers of a sort whose reunion at Niall’s wedding detonates nearly forty years of their deeply entangled relationship. The bond is sexually charged, tender, and violent by turns, but what makes the show so uncomfortable is its central psychological trap: each man lies to the other about his vulnerabilities while depending, to the point of obsession, on the illusion the other projects back. They don’t just need each other; they need the version of themselves they see reflected in each other’s eyes. When that reflection cracks, and it does, first by small fissures then violently, neither man has anything left to stand on. It’s a study in what happens when you believe in someone else more than you believe in yourself, and when that belief is built not on truth but on mutual fiction. It’s not unlike the relationship so many young men have with the manosphere: they look to influencers to understand themselves and their feelings, while those influencers need their audience to exist and keep making money. Everyone is feeding off an illusion. It’s a parasocial nightmare. So it’s no surprise the show is harrowing and not for everyone. Tearing apart illusions maintained for decades is a visceral affair, and the show doesn’t flinch—mutual self-destruction is its foregone conclusion.

The third is DTF St. Louis (HBO), written and directed by Steven Conrad, which follows a love triangle between three middle-aged adults whose suburban malaise ends with one of them dead. Jason Bateman plays Clark Forrest, David Harbour plays Floyd Smernitch, and Linda Cardellini plays Carol Love-Smernitch. The striking thing about the central relationship, between Clark and Floyd, is that the real romance isn’t between Clark and Floyd’s wife; it’s between the two men. Not sex. Something harder to describe: a mutual, platonic love for which neither man has adequate language.

During a police interrogation, Clark tells the detectives that Floyd was “wonderful,” that he would never hurt him, and that he loved him. When asked to explain, Clark says, “Like you love something. You know, like the sun when you’re cold. Like water when you really need water.” Detective Homer asks, “I don’t understand. Like sex?” Clark responds, “No. Or, um, like … I loved Floyd.”

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These two men are trying to define a love they don’t have clear language for, built on mutual respect and tenderness, outside the framework that either of them was given. Of the three shows, this feels the most radical, because there’s a purity to it: Clark loves Floyd because he loves his goodness. There’s almost something spiritual about it, without the show quite going there. Despite its dark humor and strange warmth, the show was a gut punch, and it gave me a relationship I don’t think I’d ever seen on screen before. It deserves awards for both writing and acting.

Of the three, DTF St. Louis did the most to help me understand the intense loneliness that can live inside straight men, and to root for characters trying to break through, even when nothing in our still-patriarchal culture wants them to. Such tenderness in our soul-crushing world, the show suggests, can only end in tragedy.

I hope that’s not true. But we’ll have to keep finding ways to tell stories about a kind of tenderness between men if any of us hopes to escape the crush of the systems that profit from keeping us apart.

If you’ve seen any of these series, I’d love to hear your thoughts. There’s so much to unpack … and I’m still thinking about them.

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First, the cover and jacket copy:

Washington, D.C., September 1964.

Judy Nightingale and Philippa Dolittle, née Watson, were once each other’s whole world. They haven’t spoken in years. Then Judy’s latest novel, The Savage Kind, drags their shared past into public view and forces an uneasy reunion.

Then comes the shock: Judy’s estranged birth mother—the woman who once tried to poison them both—has died, leaving her everything. A house. A fortune. A staff that watches too closely. Soon after, letters begin arriving, each signed “Mother” and enclosing pages from Judy’s long-lost radio play, “Frankenstein’s Sister.” Warnings of revenge from beyond the grave.

The warnings turn real. After a dinner party thick with old grievances, a guest is dead, and Judy’s Mercedes is found in a ravine, its brake line cut. Judy is the intended victim.

She turns to the only person who ever truly understood her: Philippa, now married with a child, her past buried beneath a life she has worked hard not to examine. Together they follow the letters back toward everything they never resolved and toward a killer who has been patient for a very long time . . . and still writing letters.

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By the time I wrote this book, I knew Judy and Philippa the way you know people you’ve lived alongside for years. It’s 1964 now. They’re grown women, and the distance between who they were and who they’ve become is part of what the novel is about. But sometimes, as we all know, time doesn’t resolve things—it just buries them.

Judy is still circling the trauma of her childhood, unable to understand it fully, even the details of what happened, which means it controls her in ways she can’t fully see. And now someone is using that against her: a killer patient enough to wait, diabolical enough to make sure Judy knows exactly who’s behind it, a ghost of sorts, even as the rest of the world sees only accidents.

Philippa is the more quietly devastating story. She has a husband, a child, and a life that looks like a mature decision. But the novel keeps asking: was her break from Judy—from everything they were to each other—an act of self-preservation, or self-betrayal? Is Judy a dangerous seducer or an eager truth-teller or both? In the end, what we want tells us more about who we are than we like to admit, and Philippa has spent years not looking at that too closely.

Writing the final pages of this trilogy was hard in ways I didn’t anticipate. These are the most fully realized characters I’ve put on the page, and closing their story meant answering the questions readers have been carrying since The Savage Kind: what really happened to Judy when she was a girl, and are she and Philippa fated to be together or apart? Is Judy as guilty as Philippa believes? As you, dear reader, believe? Answering those questions meant accepting that I was done with them. Or almost done. I left one small door open, and it surprised me when I did. You’ll have to read the book to find it.

One practical thing before you go

Pre-orders are important to a book’s success, and it’s worth understanding why. Barnes & Noble uses pre-order data when deciding which titles to stock in stores. Publishers track pre-order momentum when allocating marketing resources. For LGBTQIA+ writers, the stakes are even higher right now: organized book banning has narrowed the market, and the recent Baker & Taylor bankruptcy—the distributor left significant debts unpaid to publishers—means contraction in the Big Five publishers is coming. When publishers cut, marginalized voices go first.

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You don’t need to have read the first two books to start here. Read the trilogy in order and follow the threads forward, or begin with this one and trace them back. Either works.

If the jacket copy pulled you in, or if you’ve been with Judy and Philippa since The Savage Kind, and want to see how it ends.

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First, before I get too deep into this, I want to share two things I have clarity on. 1) The copyright infringement suits against AI, like the $1.5 billion settlement in the Bartz v. Anthropic case, are absolutely justified. Stealing writers’ work—I was one of them—to train AI was wrong, and the requirement that Anthropic pay approximately $3,000 for each of the 482,460 pirated books it used is right. (Thank you, authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson.) And I hope this is the beginning of addressing similar violations. 2) If you’re an author and want a good resource for guidance, you can’t do better than the Authors Guild’s “AI Best Practices for Authors.” It’s balanced, serious, and exhaustive—and, I imagine, will evolve.

I have a lot to say about AI and education, where frankly my anxieties about what it will do to developing minds hover most prominently as an existential threat, especially for a generation of young people who, I’ve observed, aren’t just averse to intellectual struggle but believe they shouldn't have to experience it, a belief their parents and even institutions often reinforce. (Yes, there are many exceptions, so I'm merely commenting on trends.) But that’s another post, perhaps many, so I’m going to focus here on writers and writing and AI.

I believe that AI is here to stay, that we won’t protest it away, and that shaming other writers for using it is a losing battle that may do more harm than good. In time, AI will enter most of our writing practices, if it hasn’t already. The ethics are another matter. I don’t think “there’s no ethical use of AI” is a good argument if it’s used as a finger-pointing campaign—not because it’s wrong, but because it stalls out.

To be clear: I agree, there is no ethical use of AI. But the project of pinning that down and policing it—drawing a clean line, certifying it, or naming an allowable percentage—sounds a bit like trying to define a food as a “whole food.” I have a dear friend who certifies organic food for the USDA, and it’s not as pure or clear a process as you might imagine. Maybe it’s worth a try, but the result will be murkier than anyone would like.

More to the point, though, the ethical argument struggles to compel, not because the wrong isn’t real, but because it can’t get past the hypocrisy in front of it. Much of modern life—from pumping gas to being on social media to using electricity—is, in its purest form, an ethical violation against our environment and our fellow man. We’ve grown so accustomed to these violations that we don’t even think of them as such, or if we do, we don’t change our habits. As a fellow writer friend reminded me: “There’s no ethical consumption in a capitalist economy.” I think she’s right; the only truly ethical way to live is off the grid, which, for most of us, isn’t realistic. The wrong done to writers was real—our words, precious to us, were stolen from us by tech billionaires, against a backdrop of a struggling publishing industry and book banning—and the anger and not a little despair that come with it are understandable, even justified. But anger doesn’t translate cleanly into a moral case against a fellow writer who’s using the tool, because that case has to survive a glance at the rest of our day-to-day complicity. At their best, these arguments make for a wobbly ethical stance; at their worst, they lead to witch-hunting other writers.

Okay, then: If you agree that modern life is essentially an ongoing ethical compromise, why not plunge into using AI, why not write by proxy, harnessing a team of robot workers to write for you? We just need to take the reins and give orders (aka write prompts). We could produce so many more stories so damn fast; we could all be Willy Wonkas, using AI Oompa-Loompas to crank out literary candy bars. After all, it’s all about supply and demand, and if the demand is there, then why not?

Well … the question we must ask ourselves as writers is whether meeting demand is enough to justify writing a book with AI. If you need to publish to put food on the table or pay for insurance, then maybe the answer is yes, but even if that’s true, there’s still a spiritual gamble in using AI, and it has to do with the core of what makes us writers—why we write.

For me, the strongest argument against using AI to write for you—to generate sentences, images, stories, or, most of all, characters—isn’t about writers failing to support one another or feeding the billion-dollar AI machine. It’s about the harm you would do to yourself as a writer. To be clear, this is a claim about a certain kind of writer: the kind for whom writing is an attempt to communicate something singular, human to human, through words. The kind of writer I am, and many of us are. If you experience your writing primarily as a craft for hire or a production-driven process, this argument will mean less to you, and you may think I’m being too precious, or worse, a snob. But struggling with what AI is to me as a writer gets to the core of what writing is, what art is: a gesture of human connection.

I want to draw the line where the Authors Guild draws it: using AI for brainstorming, research, or administration is one thing; letting it generate your prose is another. The first is using a tool. The second is outsourcing the gesture itself, and, to be clear, that's what concerns me most.

That I write and mold the language with my hands, so to speak, is significant because it carries an aura. My husband and I, on our recent 20th anniversary trip to Turkey and Greece, bought a hand-knotted Turkish rug that, because we know it was made by hand, from the ancient tradition of handmade rugs, carries an aura—our feet, by one degree of separation, are connected to the weaver’s hands. There’s something moving about that, even spiritual. (I’m borrowing “aura” from the critic Walter Benjamin, whose essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935) made the term famous, though I’m using it slightly against the grain of his argument—Benjamin was tracking the way aura withers under mechanical reproduction, where I want to insist on what survives in the handmade.)

While fiction is always reproduced in a physical sense, when we know that it was made by hand, not machines, we believe in the aura it carries. That belief is important. The process of one human putting down words for another, or for many others, is a gesture of human connection and essential to the reader’s and writer’s spiritual well-being. This is true whether you’re writing page-turning popular fiction or layered literary experimentation. As readers, we need to feel as though another human is on the other side of the writing for the story’s magic to transfer to us.

Over time, the technology of writing has evolved, from pen and paper to typewriter to computer, but this has largely been about finding more efficient ways to transmit the language that emerges from our minds to the page, not a substitute for that transmission. Until AI, the words were still our own, and if we give that up—the promise of connection—for efficiency, we give up the individual humanity in our writing; our interpretation of human experience is no longer the product of a singular mind, but a blurry amalgamation, all the colors blended together to make gray-brown.

Some readers will be fooled by AI-generated work. They may not be able to identify it as AI on the page. But they’ll sense an absence in it and dismiss it as weak or shallow writing. Like CGI, which has worn out its welcome enough that some of the biggest recent box-office success stories have been small horror films built on practical effects and human presence, the hollowness eventually registers, even when people can’t quite name it.

But, as writers, we can’t fool ourselves at all. When we offer empty work, it takes a toll on our self-esteem, undermining our belief in ourselves and our abilities, because we know what we’re offering readers is empty, that we’re knowingly forfeiting authentic connection. This is where the moral cost is self-reflexive and deeply personal, not as a charge against other writers, but as a description of what handing the work over does to the person who hands it over. If we use AI to replace the substance of our writing, we are undermining our own emotional and spiritual health.

AI will be—is already—playing some part in our writing. The question is whether we treat it as a tool for ideation and administration or as a replacement for the gesture itself. As a practical measure, we must articulate the boundary clearly to ourselves to preserve the unique quality of our voices as writers. The spirit of our writing, if you will. I believe that over time, our tastes will shift away from the gray-brown, trope-driven, algorithm-responsive work that seems omnipresent these days toward writing with texture, irony, and complex psychology, the only kind of work that ever surprises.

Perhaps I’m wrong; perhaps the commercial viability of AI-generated storytelling will crush us all. But I think readers and viewers will eventually demand higher-quality writing because they hunger for the connection it offers. As a culture, we’re already yearning for it; we just haven’t figured out how to demand it yet. That brewing hunger raises the bar for my work as a writer and as a writing teacher. And it’s a source of hope.

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Part 1 introduced pacing as the symphonic interplay of three forces: plot, tension, and time—and established the foundational tool of scene versus summary.

Part 2 dug into tension specifically: what it is, how it differs from suspense, and how to sustain it across a scene and between scenes.

Part 3 explored juxtaposition, the power of what you put next to what, and how adjacency generates meaning and momentum at every level of the text, from the sentence to the chapter break.

Part 4 turned to time itself: how writers slow down and speed up to create emphasis or energy, and how flashback and foreshadowing manipulate the reader’s sense of what’s coming.

All of which brings us to the element that underlies everything else. Language. The sentence. Pacing isn’t only a function of plot structure, chapter length, or the modulation of tension across a narrative arc. It begins at the level of the sentence itself. A writer can have a perfectly constructed outline, a beautifully calibrated tension arc, and a sophisticated use of juxtaposition, yet still produce prose that drags because the sentences themselves work against the story. Conversely, a writer with a shaky plot can carry a reader forward on the strength of language alone and forgive gaps in plot logic. That’s how powerful this is.

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I. The Sentence Is the Smallest Unit of Pacing

Writers often try to solve pacing problems at the chapter level—restructuring, reordering, cutting scenes—when the real problem is in the sentences. A chapter that drags might simply be full of sentences of the same length and structure, creating sonic monotony. Understanding the different types of sentences and the effects each one produces is essential to building the prose skills that make pacing feel instinctive rather than mechanical.

II. Simple vs. Subordinated Sentences

Sometimes simple declarative sentences create speed, a staccato effect — think of Elmore Leonard — but other times they lull us. It depends on how they’re paired with subject matter and situation. And when choosing a stylistic approach, there’s always more than one angle. Consider two examples, one from Hemingway and one from Faulkner, both describing essentially the same kind of circumstance. (I owe this juxtaposition to the Guilford College Writing Manual, which sets the same two passages side by side.) First, Hemingway, from his short story “The Undefeated”:

“Manuel drank his brandy. He felt sleepy himself. It was too hot to go out into the town. Besides there was nothing to do. He wanted to see Zurito. He would go to sleep while he waited.”

That cascade of simple declaratives creates a particular rhythm of consciousness—boredom, heat, inertia—through its very flatness. Each sentence lands like a fact. Nothing is weighted against anything else. The effect is inevitable, like the pull of sleep itself. The pacing is slow.

Subordinated sentences do the opposite: they create depth, interiority, and texture. Faulkner’s long sentence from The Hamlet—the first novel in his Snopes Trilogy—enacts in its syntax and word choice the very experience it describes:

“He did not feel weak, he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutful lassitude of convalescence in which time, hurry, doing, did not exist, the accumulating seconds and minutes and hours to which in its well state the body is slave both waking and sleeping, now reversed and time now the lip-server and mendicant to the body’s pleasure instead of the body thrall to time’s headlong course.”

Read that aloud and feel what happens to time inside the sentence itself. The reader has to slow down, accumulate, and wait. The sentence echoes the body’s languor. Here, Faulkner is slowing the pace way down, perhaps tipping us into the imitative fallacy (I’m asleep by the end of this sentence) — but who am I to critique Faulkner?

These examples, I’ll admit, are extremes, chosen to emphasize the point: sentence structure can have a remarkable emotional effect on the reader and offer a wide variety of approaches to conveying even similar events. In other words, your sentences matter, language matters.

III. Periodic vs. Loose Sentences

In my own writing, I’ve found that awareness of the impact of periodic and loose sentences has been key, and I thank the tried-and-true Elements of Style by Strunk and White for defining these sentence types and helping me understand their effect.

A loose sentence puts the main clause first and trails detail behind it—immediate, natural, the way we actually speak. A periodic sentence does the opposite: it withholds the main clause until the end, building through dependent clauses toward a point—dramatic, suspended, climactic, the dependent clauses functioning almost like a drumroll or a held breath, loading the key idea with emphasis before it finally lands.

Compare these two examples:

Loose—from Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms: “Joel sat scrunched in a corner of the seat, elbow propped on the window frame, chin cupped in hand, trying hard to keep awake.” The main clause gives you the boy; each trailing phrase describes his position and physical state—the elbow, the hand, the effort not to sleep. You feel the boy’s exhaustion accumulate with the words.

Periodic—from Frank Herbert’s Dune: “In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.” Everything before an old crone came is withholding. The sentence makes you wait, then delivers.

Neither is superior. The question is always: where do you want the emphasis to land? Strunk and White warn that a series of loose sentences can make for dull prose, so thinking about how to blend periodic and loose sentences together for effect is worth the effort. The periodic sentence is particularly useful for opening or closing a paragraph. It builds tension, and that tension can be manipulated to your purposes.

And that brings us to the larger point. Periodic and loose—as well as subordinated and simple sentences—these are not separate tools to be used in isolation, but instruments to be used in concert. Mastery lies in moving between them, using their contrast as a pacing instrument.

IV. Simple and Subordinated Working Together

This excerpt from A Place of Execution by Val McDermid shows how carefully using subordinated sentences alongside simple ones can create exciting, engaging prose.

“That night, however, the thought of Anne at home, knitting in front of the television while she waited for him to return, was far more of a temptation than any pint of bitter. George tore a half-sheet of paper off his scratch pad, placed it among the papers he’d been reading to mark his place, and firmly closed the file, slipping it into his desk drawer. He stubbed out his Gold Leaf cigarette then emptied his ashtray into the bin by his desk, always his last act before he reached for his trench coat and, self-consciously, the wide-brimmed trilby that always made him feel faintly silly. Anne loved it; she was always telling him it made him look like James Stewart. He couldn’t see it himself.”

Notice the rhythm. Long subordinated sentences establish character and interiority. Then: Anne loved it; she was always telling him it made him look like James Stewart. He couldn’t see it himself. Short. Punchy. Affectionate. The contrast makes both modes land harder.

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V. Close Reading: Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

This passage is a brilliant use of tension created entirely through syntax, with no external action at all, just reflection. And yet the passage is completely kinetic.

“Sometimes when I am dusting the mirror with the grapes I look at myself in it, although I know it is vanity. In the afternoon light of the parlour my skin is a pale mauve, like a faded bruise, and my teeth are greenish. I think of all the things that have been written about me — that I am an inhuman female demon, that I am an innocent victim of a blackguard forced against my will and in danger of my own life, that I was too ignorant to know how to act and that to hang me would be judicial murder, that I am fond of animals, that I am very handsome with a brilliant complexion, that I have blue eyes, that I have green eyes, that I have auburn and also brown hair, that I am tall and also not above the average height, that I am well and decently dressed, that I robbed a dead woman to appear so, that I am brisk and smart about my work, that I am of a sullen disposition with a quarrelsome temper, that I have the appearance of a person rather above my humble station, that I am a good girl with a pliable nature and no harm is told of me, that I am cunning and devious, that I am soft in the head and little better than an idiot. And I wonder, how can I be all of these different things at once?”

Atwood uses a periodic sentence structure to build toward the great list of contradictory identities, and then releases everything with a final loose sentence — that single haunting question. The syntax enacts Grace’s psychology. The reader feels trapped in the accumulation, in the impossibility of resolution, and then exhales. The sentence-level movement demonstrates the meaning.

VI. A Workshop Example: Growing Up Skipper

Let’s look at this in practice. Here’s a passage in need of revision:

Tina peered up at the ramshackle farmhouse where she’d grown up in the 1970s with her scowling, cigarette-smoking mother and dull-minded twin brothers. She walked to the front stoop where, as a child, she’d sit with her favorite doll, Growing Up Skipper, and rotate her arm, watching as the doll lengthened an inch and her small breasts popped up under her rubber torso. Tina never tired of her magic. She’d crank the arm and Skipper became a sophisticated teenager. She would crank the arm again and Skipper was again her age, ten. She did this as the pesky summer insects spun circles around her, and her Mama chased the twins through the house, their shouts and tears and laughter echoing out across the empty countryside. (123 words)

Most of the sentences here have roughly the same length and/or structure. The energy is a bit flat. Nothing is foregrounded. The moment itself, of course, is compelling and strange—these Skipper dolls feel like something out of a body horror film. Anyway, here’s one possible revision:

Peering up at the ramshackle farmhouse where she’d grown up in the 1970s with her scowling, cigarette-smoking mother and dull-minded twin brothers, Tina recalled sitting on the stoop and playing with her favorite doll, Growing Up Skipper. When she’d rotate her arm, Skipper would lengthen an inch and small breasts would pop up from her rubber torso. Tina never tired of the doll’s magic. As the pesky summer insects spun circles around her and her Mama chased the twins through the house, their shouts and tears and laughter echoing out across the empty countryside, she’d crank Skipper’s arm, and she became a radiant teenager. She’d crank her arm again, and Skipper was again her age, ten. (116 words)

The revision restructures the opening into a long subordinated sentence that gathers context before landing on the doll. It then moves into short, declarative focus—Tina never tired of the doll’s magic—before expanding again into a long periodic sentence that buries the countryside and the chaos of the household inside the clause, making Skipper’s transformation feel like the true center of the whole scene. The energy and emphasis have shifted. Feel the difference?

VII. Reading Your Sentences Aloud

The ear is the best pacing instrument you have. Reading your own prose aloud will catch problems the eye misses—or, as I do, because I’m on the dyslexia spectrum, have it read to you by a loved one or a text-to-speech reader: the paragraph where every sentence ends on a stressed syllable, creating a hammering effect; the long section where every sentence is roughly the same length, creating a drone; the place where you’ve accidentally used a periodic structure and buried the most important information. These are pacing problems in their purest form.

VIII. Diagnostic Questions for Any Passage

• Where is time slowing? Where is it speeding?

• Where does the emotional weight land?

• What’s the ratio of simple to subordinated sentences?

• Are you using periodic structures at your most important moments?

• Are your loose sentences creating the right kind of immediacy, or are they just... loose?

Pacing is not just a macro problem. It’s also a micro issue—it’s about the rhythm of individual sentences, the ratio of short to long, the place where the main clause lands.

IX. Wrap up

Pacing, as I hope this series has made clear, resists any simple formula. It isn’t just speed, and it isn’t something you fix in a single pass at the chapter level. It’s a layered, often stubborn craft problem that asks for attention everywhere all at once: in the architecture of the plot, in the management of tension from scene to scene, in the representation of time passing, in what you place beside what, and even in the rhythm of the sentence itself. The macro and the micro are in constant conversation.

A beautifully structured narrative can stall on the page if the sentences don’t carry energy; a vibrant, propulsive voice can only go so far if the underlying structure wanders or sprawls. Learning to hear and see both at once is key, and something you must train yourself to do by reading, writing, and thinking critically about what you're reading and writing. As I have and continue to do.

If nothing else, I hope this series has given you a vocabulary for diagnosing what’s going wrong in your own work, and a set of tools to begin fixing it, one decision at a time. Happy writing!

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But today, we’re turning to the force that underlies all three: time itself. Specifically, how a writer controls the speed at which a reader moves through a moment—slowing to create emphasis, accelerating to generate energy—and why that dial is essential to creating effective pacing.

The first thing to understand is that fiction is not written how we actually experience life, but rather how we remember our experiences. The way we recall an important event—a marriage, a death, a heartbreak, a moment of sudden understanding—gets greater emphasis, detail, and reflection, while the day-to-day gets less and requires adroit use of summary. And the balance you strike between emphasis and energy will depend, in large part, on the kind of story you’re telling. Thrillers need forward momentum, the breathless sense that the next moment is always arriving. Literary fiction tends to contain more introspection, lingering over specific scenes and moments, to communicate character fully. But the best writing in any genre uses both, deliberately. The mistake is defaulting to one register and staying there—a thriller with no emphasis becomes numbing, a kind of narrative white noise; literary fiction with no energy stalls. The dial has to move.

II. The key tool: scene vs. summary (revisited)

I introduced scene vs. summary in Part 1, but it bears returning to here because it’s the most direct mechanism a writer has for controlling time. Write a scene for every crucial moment—any exchange or event that advances character, raises stakes, or changes the situation. Use summary to move between those scenes, and use as little of it as possible.

Summary compresses time. It tells rather than shows, and it does so efficiently—which is exactly what you want when nothing crucial is happening. Consider this brief passage I wrote:

Ned pulled up to a small diner on the outskirts of the city, the neon sign flickering in the darkness. He hoped a cup of coffee and some time to himself would help clear his thoughts. As he entered the diner, the warm smell of fresh coffee and the hum of quiet conversation greeted him. He slid into a booth by the window, watching the rain start to fall outside. The waitress approached with a tired smile. “What can I get you, hun?”

This is summary doing its job. We move through several minutes of narrative time efficiently, gathering atmosphere and orienting ourselves to a new setting, until the waitress’s question arrives—the moment of potential exchange, the hinge on which the scene might turn. If what happens next matters to the plot, you write it as scene. If it doesn’t, you summarize it. Knowing which is which is an extinct you develop by reading widely and deeply.

III. Foreshadowing: suspense in slow motion

Foreshadowing is one of the most powerful ways a writer manipulates time—specifically, the reader’s sense of what’s coming. Done well, it creates suspense not through withholding (remember from Part 2: withholding frustrates; suspense grips) but through implication. The reader senses a shape in the fog before they can name it.

Consider this passage:

Sheriff Wayne Dilbert tipped his hat back and squinted into the fading light. The cicadas droned a relentless tune, filling the humid Georgia evening with their song. He stood at the edge of Bartlet’s field, staring at the twisted oak tree that loomed ominously near the riverbank. The tree had a dark history, one that the townsfolk whispered about but rarely mentioned out loud.

“Strange things happen ‘round that old oak,” Deputy Harris muttered, joining the sheriff. “Remember when Jimmy Watson went missin’ last summer? Folks say he was last seen wandering near this very spot.”

Wayne nodded, his eyes narrowing. “I remember, Harris. And I remember my granddaddy’s tales about the Bartlet curse. They say anyone who gets too close to that tree at sundown never comes back the same. Nonsense to scare kids.”

That last line—"Nonsense to scare kids"—is doing double duty. On the surface, it's Wayne dismissing the legend. Underneath, it promises us the legend is not nonsense at all. The reader knows Wayne is wrong even before anything has happened to prove it. That gap between what the character believes and what the reader suspects is where suspense lives. Foreshadowing is a slow accumulation of dread—a hand tightening on your shoulder before anything has gone wrong. It gives us a flicker of the future, increasing tension and energy, and driving momentum forward.

IV. Flashbacks: the risk and the reward

A flashback almost always slows the pace. That’s not a flaw; it’s a function. When you move a reader back in time, you are making a deliberate choice to emphasize something: a formative moment, a wound, a relationship that explains the present. The danger is that you pull the reader out of the narrative’s forward momentum at precisely the moment when they most want to keep moving. The reward, when it works, is that the reader understands your character more deeply—and deeper understanding means higher emotional stakes, which means more tension later on.

The rule of thumb: flashbacks should be as brief and as powerful as possible. Every word should count. Often, writers pull us into the past for a fully realized scene, but flashbacks can be brief—a stir of memory—rather than a full, narrative-disrupting shift. For instance:

As Sally Jo walked through the old, abandoned house, memories from her childhood began to surface. She paused at the foot of the grand staircase, the wooden steps now giving noisily under the weight of time and neglect.

The scent of lavender filled the air, pulling her back to a summer afternoon years ago. She was ten years old, sitting on these very steps, watching her mother arrange fresh lavender in a vase.

"SJ, always remember, this house is your birthright, your joy," her mother had said, her voice soft and melodic. "But also a burden. Don't let it break your heart."

Then, with another creak of a floorboard, the lavender evaporated and the house was silent.

Notice the sensory trigger—the scent of lavender—that carries Sally Jo back. Sensory anchors are among the most effective ways to enter and exit a flashback naturally, because they mirror how memory actually works. We’re in and out in four paragraphs, and we’ve learned something essential about Sally Jo, her mother, and the complicated inheritance of this house. The final line snaps us back to the present. The pace dips briefly, then recovers.

V. Putting it together

Time is the writer’s most powerful dial, and like any powerful tool, it rewards conscious use. Ask yourself, scene by scene: Am I slowing down here to create emphasis, or should I be accelerating to build energy? Is this flashback earning its interruption of the forward momentum? Have I positioned it after a strong narrative moment—especially one that raises an essential question? Is this foreshadowing creating genuine suspense, or is it just atmosphere without payoff? These questions don’t have universal answers—they depend on your story, your genre, and what comes just before and just after the moment in question. But asking them, every time, is how pacing stops being something that happens to your manuscript and starts being something you control.

Next week, in Part 5, we’ll bring everything together and look at the relationship between sentence structure and pacing at the macro level—how, while plot shapes pacing on the large scale, it also operates at the micro level, sentence to sentence, word to word.

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As a reader, I’ve found that juxtaposition—whether it’s parallel narrative threads, striking and unexpected imagery, or even the simplest pairing of sentences—can, when deployed with skill, create that velocity I hunger for as a consumer of story. All of which compel me to try to employ those techniques in my writing. First, though, let’s look at why our mind finds these juxtapositions gripping …

I. How our minds work: the basic principle

We are associative creatures. Put two things near each other in time or space, and our minds will find a relationship between them, whether one was intended or not. An entire art form, cinema, is predicated on exactly this: our ability to see two images in quick succession and produce a third meaning from their proximity. Film, after all, is a succession of still images moving over light to create the illusion of movement and meaning. As writers, we can harness this same effect—metonymy—though of course we do it differently.

II. Metonymy as a structural principle

Metonymy is usually taught as a figure of speech—the White House standing in for the executive branch (I used that one in my high school English classroom for years!)—but it's also a structural principle. One thing stands for, or activates the meaning of, something else it's associated with. On the page, metonymic thinking creates powerful forward momentum by establishing tension between narrative fragments. And it can work at any scale: words, sentences, images, chapters, and so on.

III. Close reading: E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime

In Ragtime, Doctorow weaves together historical figures, fictional families, and invented characters across short, fragmentary chapters—and the meaning emerges from the collisions between them, not from any single narrative thread. We can see this use of metonymy at the sentence level in the novel’s opening:

In 1902 Father built a house at the crest of the Broadview Avenue hill in New Rochelle, New York. It was a three-story brown shingle with dormers, bay windows and a screened porch. Striped awnings shaded the windows. The family took possession of this stout manse on a sunny day in June and it seemed for some years thereafter that all their days would be warm and fair. The best part of Father’s income was derived from the manufacture of flags and buntings and other accoutrements of patriotism, including fireworks. Patriotism was a reliable sentiment in the early 1900’s. Teddy Roosevelt was President. The population customarily gathered in great numbers either out of doors for parades, public concerts, fish fries, political picnics, social outings, or indoors in meeting halls, vaudeville theatres, operas, ballrooms. There seemed to be no entertainment that did not involve great swarms of people. Trains and steamers and trolleys moved them from one place to another. That was the style, that was the way people lived. Women were stouter then. They visited the fleet carrying white parasols. Everyone wore white in summer. Tennis racquets were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical. There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants. On Sunday afternoon, after dinner, Father and Mother went upstairs and closed the bedroom door. Grandfather fell asleep on the divan in the parlor. The Little Boy in the sailor blouse sat on the screened porch and waved away the flies. Down at the bottom of the hill Mother’s Younger Brother boarded the streetcar and rode to the end of the line. He was a lonely, withdrawn young man with blond moustaches, and was thought to be having difficulty finding himself. The end of the line was an empty field of tall marsh grasses. The air was salt. Mother’s Younger Brother in his white linen suit and boater rolled his trousers and walked barefoot in the salt marshes. Sea birds started and flew up. This was the time in our history when Winslow Homer was doing his painting. A certain light was still available along the Eastern seaboard. Homer painted the light. It gave the sea a heavy dull menace and shone coldly on the rocks and shoals of the New England coast. …

This excerpt demonstrates, from sentence to sentence, the energy metonymy can create in prose: "Women were stouter then. They visited the fleet carrying white parasols. Everyone wore white in summer. Tennis racquets were hefty." Each sentence is a tiny, precise fragment of an era, yet together they conjure an entire world. We fill in the blanks, and in doing so, we at once gather a picture of the time, but also a sense of mystery. The sentence combinations are both specific and panoramic, zooming from the domestic (Father closing the bedroom door) to the aesthetic (Winslow Homer painting the light itself)—there's something undeniably Whitman-esque about it, except there's a rumbling under the surface. Unlike Whitman's optimism about America, Doctorow is mounting a critique—after all, Ragtime was published in 1975, a fairly disillusioned moment in American life—and that critique emerges as comedy, specifically the comic shock of surprising adjacency: "There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants." The juxtaposition is startling—even funny—the narration taking on the era's provincial attitude. Of course there were immigrants. Of course there were Black Americans. And that friction urges us forward: what was this time period really like? What were its virtues? Its serious pitfalls?

IV. Juxtaposition in Mrs. Bridge

If you recall from Part 2, Evan Connell builds tension in Mrs. Bridge through juxtaposition. 'Children' ends with brisk, devastating efficiency: three children introduced in three short paragraphs, the chapter closing like a door clicking shut on the sentence that the family would have stopped at a third girl because 'there would have been no sense in continuing what would soon become amusing to other people.' It's a line that reveals both Mrs. Bridge's insecurity and her desire to shield her family from judgment—as if power in her world were mostly about perception. Then 'Preliminary Training' opens with her serene confidence in her own child-rearing, only to spring its trap in the swimming pool scene, where Ruth screams hysterically at her mother's face—an incident Mrs. Bridge has 'virtually forgotten an hour after it occurred.' We sense, without being told, that Mrs. Bridge is in the slow, unsettling process of disengaging from her children—perhaps revealing a deeper ambivalence about motherhood itself.

V. Practical application: the chapter-break question

From the sentence to the chapter level, you’re offering the reader a juxtaposition. So it’s worth asking: what are you putting next to what? What does the reader carry from one image or section into the next, and is that carryover intentional? And between those elements, forward energy—a productive friction—in the form of tension needs to exist, whether at the level of a sentence or a chapter.

In a mystery, this can be as direct as one question answered and a new one opened; or, as in the more literary Doctorow and Connell examples, the tension can be more ironic or psychological. And really, that distinction matters less than it might seem—these effects and tools are available to every type of fiction, and the best genre writers use them just as deftly as their literary counterparts. Whatever the type of novel, I’ve found that too little resolution at the end of a scene or chapter means I’m asking the same question in the following one, which flattens momentum. (My WIP horror novel, mentioned in Part 1, has too much of this—and the revision, by gum, will fix it.) Too much resolution means I have no questions moving forward. The trick is to build: always let old questions evolve and new ones emerge, because that forward motion is what keeps the reader turning pages.

VI. White space is not emptiness

As a final note on juxtaposition, white space is information. It tells the reader that time has passed, the setting has shifted, or the perspective has changed—and invites reflection without explanation.

Chapters and sections function as dramatic units; their length signals tempo. A 300-word chapter reads differently from a 3,000-word one. White space also affects perception, creating the illusion of speed, which is why thrillers favor short chapters and frequent breaks. Section breaks, scene breaks, asterisks, or a blank line mark shifts in time, place, or consciousness. Paragraphing controls rhythm at the most granular level: long paragraphs slow the pace; short ones accelerate it.

So it’s not just what’s on the page, but also how it’s arranged—its visual effect—that influences pacing. White space offers breathing room, a brief pause for reflection, and a way to register tension between sections.

One thing—and this may be a little controversial—I don’t buy the idea that short chapters and frequent breaks are the solution to catering to our ever-shortening attention span, as if formatting alone keeps readers engaged. Too often, I read student work chopped into short chapters and frenetic paragraphs that fail to generate momentum. Keep in mind: it’s the careful modulation of pacing that makes stories gripping, and that white space simply helps the reader absorb what’s on the page.

Next week, in Part 4, we’ll turn to how writers manipulate time itself to achieve that control.

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I. A definition that actually helps

Tension is unresolved conflict. Once conflict resolves, the reader exhales and—if you’re not careful—sets the book down. Your job is to keep one strand of conflict unresolved at all times, even as others resolve. No gaps, ever.

II. Suspense is not the same thing as withholding information

This is the mistake writers make most often: they think suspense means keeping secrets from the reader. But readers are smart—they sense withheld information, and it makes them frustrated, not curious. Real suspense lives in the gap between expectation and outcome. The reader knows what’s coming; the tension lies in how it arrives. There have been fabulously successful and gripping novels that tell you the ending at the beginning, such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye or Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold. We don’t care as much about the destination as we do the journey.

III. Modulating tension—the palate cleanser

Unrelenting tension is exhausting and eventually numbing. Too many contemporary thrillers fall into this trap: it’s not about a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter or a bomb going off at the beginning of every chapter. Well-placed breaks in tension function as palate cleansers—they allow the reader to breathe, reset their emotional baseline, and re-engage with renewed sensitivity. The key is that these breaks must feel earned, not accidental. Comedy, domestic detail, a moment of genuine warmth—these are deliberate pauses in tension. They’re also great opportunities to develop character and, in doing so, make the reader more invested in the narrative’s events, which in fact increases the tension overall.

IV. Tension inside a scene vs. tension between scenes

These are two different craft problems. Within a scene, tension comes from blocked desire, conflicting need, or unspoken knowledge. Between scenes, tension comes from what’s left unresolved at the cut—and from what the reader expects to happen next. Both have to be managed consciously.

V. Close reading: Mrs. Bridge (excerpt) Evan Connell

In the excerpt from Dare Me from Part 1, Megan Abbott uses juxtaposition internal to the scene—like cross-cutting in film—to create tension: Beth’s phone call cross-cut with Addy’s arrival at the apartment, the formal tension reinforcing the situational tension of one friend summoning another to the scene of a crime.

Where Abbott builds tension through cross-cutting—the cinematic back-and-forth that keeps a reader breathless—Evan Connell builds it through something more indirect and, in some ways, more unsettling: the gap between chapters. In Chapter 1, Connell introduces India, later Mrs. Bridge, uneasy with herself and her direction. Drawn to Walter’s confidence, she enters a stable marriage, but feels a quiet unease about desire and intimacy, realizing love is uneven despite its structure.

Chapter 2: CHILDREN

The first child, a girl, curiously dark, who seldom cried and who often seemed to want nothing more than to be left alone, was born when they had been married a little more than three years. They named her Ruth. After the delivery Mrs. Bridge’s first coherent words were, “Is she normal?”

Two years later—Mrs. Bridge was then thirty-one—Carolyn appeared, about a month ahead of time, as though she were quite able to take care of herself, and was nicknamed “Corky.” She was a chubby blonde, blue-eyed like her mother, more ebullient than Ruth, and more demanding.

Then, two years after Carolyn, a stern little boy was born, thin and red-haired like his father, and they named him Douglas. They had not wanted more than two children, but because the first two had been girls they had decided to try once more. Even if the third had also been a girl they would have let it go at that; there would have been no sense in continuing what would soon become amusing to other people.

Chapter 3: PRELIMINARY TRAINING

She brought up her children very much as she herself had been brought up, and she hoped that when they were spoken of it would be in connection with their nice manners, their pleasant dispositions, and their cleanliness, for these were qualities she valued above all others.

With Ruth and later with Carolyn, because they were girls, she felt sure of her guidance; but with the boy she was at times obliged to guess and to hope, and as it turned out—not only with Douglas but with his two sisters—what she stressed was not at all what they remembered as they grew older.

What Ruth was to recall most vividly about childhood was an incident which Mrs. Bridge had virtually forgotten an hour after it occurred. One summer afternoon the entire family, with the exception of Mr. Bridge who was working, had gone to the neighborhood swimming pool; Douglas lay on a rubber sheet in the shade of an umbrella, kicking his thin bowed legs and gurgling, and Carolyn was splashing around in the wading pool. The day was exceptionally hot. Ruth took off her bathing suit and began walking across the terrace. This much she could hardly remember, but she was never to forget what happened next. Mrs. Bridge, having suddenly discovered Ruth was naked, snatched up the bathing suit and hurried after her. Ruth began to run, and being wet and slippery she squirmed out of the arms that reached for her from every direction. She thought it was a new game. Then she noticed the expression on her mother’s face. Ruth became bewildered and then alarmed, and when she was finally caught she was screaming hysterically.

Look at how Chapter 2, “Children,” ends. Three children are introduced in three brisk paragraphs, each one a slightly sad efficiency. Ruth, who wants only to be left alone. Carolyn, who arrived early as though she needed no one. Douglas, the third try, the boy they finally settled for. And then there’s the sentence that closes the chapter like a door clicking shut: the family would have stopped at a third girl because “there would have been no sense in continuing what would soon become amusing to other people.” It’s devastating and revealing of Mrs. Bridge’s character—but Connell doesn’t linger. He just moves on.

The white space between chapters does the lingering for him.

By the time we enter Chapter 3, “Preliminary Training,” we arrive already primed. We know something is off in this family, even if we can’t name it yet. The chapter opens with Mrs. Bridge’s confidence in her own child-rearing—nice manners, pleasant dispositions, cleanliness—and then Connell springs the trap. What she stressed “was not at all what they remembered as they grew older.” You can hear the weight of disappointment in that line. And then he gives us the swimming pool scene.

The tension there operates on two levels. On the surface, it’s a small comic incident: a naked child, a mortified mother, a chase. But after what Chapter 2 has already told us—that Ruth wanted only to be left alone, that she was “curiously dark”—the scene lands differently. Ruth thinks it’s a game. Then she sees her mother’s face. And she screams.

The genius of Connell’s method is that each micro-chapter is relatively contained and written with restraint. There’s no purple prose, no raised voice. The tension comes from adjacency—from what one chapter knows that the next one doesn’t quite say. Mrs. Bridge has already forgotten the swimming pool incident by the time it matters to Ruth. Those two facts, placed side by side across a chapter break, reveal the entire emotional architecture of this family without ever announcing it.

Abbott’s tension is kinetic. Connell’s is geological—pressure building in layers, felt most when you notice the fault line between them.

In both cases, the reader understands the tension driving the narrative moment to moment, scene to scene, and feels it even without being able to name it. The narrative thread pulls tight, and the reader turns the page. Which is, after all, the goal.

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Hall of Mirrors on audio …

Brought to life by the stellar team at Deyan Audio, this production features powerhouse performances from Sion Dayson as Judy, Ray Ford as Lionel, and Shea Taylor as Roger.

Now streaming wherever you get your audiobooks—go take a listen!

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Two reasons. I had a full outline for Goddess of Love—and I will never write a novel without a complete outline again (really, I mean it!)—and I do think outlining before, or even after (as I’ve discovered), a draft can help sort out pacing problems. More on that later. I also think the material for the horror novel was simply too close to me. It’s fiction, but the characters and the town it’s set in have deep autobiographical roots, and all the things I find compelling about those relationships kept pulling energy away from the central narrative: solving the mystery of what’s haunting this town before the demon hurts or kills more people.

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So, to say the least, pacing has been on my mind. I’ve lectured on it at the University of Nebraska Omaha MFA program and for Sisters in Crime, and I’m sitting on a panel at James River Writers tonight (See below). I’ve done all that thinking and still find it a challenge—so I thought I’d share what I know just in case, like me, you’re still struggling to make the theoretical actual in your own writing.

I. The misconception

Most writers think pacing means speed—things happening fast, chapters flying by. But a lot of stuff happening quickly doesn’t automatically produce good storytelling. Real pacing is something more like music: the symphonic interplay among three distinct forces working together.

II. The three forces

Plot is an unfolding of events with clear cause-and-effect relationships. It’s not just stuff happening—it’s stuff happening because something before it made it happen. That relationship needs to be legible to the reader. Understanding this distinction is the first step to diagnosing pacing problems in your own work.

Tension is unresolved conflict. The moment you resolve it, the reader loses interest. Tension and suspense are related but not the same thing—suspense lives in the gap between what we expect and what actually happens. If suspense is predicated on a question—which characters will make it out alive? Who killed Mr. Fussypants with a butter knife in a locked pantry?—then tension is the ongoing wrestling with that question, the attempt and failure to resolve it. Writers often collapse the two, and it costs them. (Tension gets its own full post—Post 2—because it deserves it.)

Time is the writer’s most powerful dial. Slowing time creates emphasis; speeding it up creates energy. Different genres require different settings—thrillers and horror novels need energy, literary fiction needs emphasis—but every book needs both, in conversation with each other.

III. The key tool: scene vs. summary

Write a scene for every crucial moment. Use summary to move between those scenes; the less the better. This sounds simple, but it is one of the most consistently misapplied principles in workshop fiction, primarily because writers often lose sight of what each scene is for—how it propels the central question or questions of the novel. Outlines can be useful tools for guiding the writer through the relationship between scenes to ensure a cause-and-effect structure. This is as true of horror and mystery as it is of literary fiction.

IV. Close reading: Dare Me by Megan Abbott

Abbott’s prologue is a gripping and elegant opening for a contemporary crime novel precisely because it uses all three forces at once—and because it does so through an expert interplay of form and content. Not that much actually happens in these two pages. A girl gets a phone call in the middle of the night. She goes to an apartment. She sees something terrible. That’s it. And yet the prologue is almost unbearably tense and beautifully sets up the entire novel. Why?

Dare Me (excerpt) by Megan Abbott

Prologue

“Something happened, Addy. I think you better come.”

The air is heavy, misted, fine. It’s coming on two a.m. and I’m high up on the ridge. thumb jammed against the silver button: #27-G.

“Hurry, please.”

The intercom zzzzzz-s and the door thunks, and I’m inside.

As I walk through the lobby, it’s still buzzing, the glass walls vibrating.

Like the tornado drill in elementary school, Beth and me wedged tight, jeaned legs pressed against each other. The sounds of our own breathing. Before we all stopped believing a tornado, or anything, could touch us, ever.

“I can’t look … When you get here, please don’t make me look.”

In the elevator, all the way up, my legs swaying beneath me, 1-2-3-4, the numbers glow incandescent.

The apartment is dark, one floor lamp coning halogen up in the far corner.

“Take off your shoes,” she says, her voice small, her wish­ bone arms swinging side to side.

We’re standing in the vestibule, which seeps into a dining area, its lacquer table like a puddle of ink.

Just past it, I see the living room, braced by a leather sec­tional, its black damps tightening, as if across my chest. Her hair damp, her face white. Her head seems to go this way and that way, looking away from me, not wanting to give me her eyes.

I don’t think I want her eyes.

“Something happened, Addy. It’s a bad thing.”

“What’s over there?” I finally ask, gaze fixed on the sofa, the sense that it’s living, its black leather lifting like a beetle’s sheath.

“What is it?” I say, my voice lifting. “Is there something behind there?”

She won’t look, which is how I know.

First, my eyes falling to the floor, I see a glint of hair twin­eing in the weave of the rug.

Then, stepping forward, I see more.

‘’Addy,” she whispers. “Addy ... is it like I thought?”

Abbott opens with a disembodied phone call—“Something happened, Addy. I think you better come”—before we know who is speaking or what has happened. We’re dropped into the middle of a moment, and a request is being made (always a great way to begin a story). Then white space. Then: “The air is heavy, misted, fine.” Three adjectives in a row slow us down so we can feel the moment before we understand it. She engages our senses—something scenes do, and summaries rarely do.

Notice how she modulates between that italicized, fragmented phone voice and the narrator’s eerily calm, almost reflective, sensory prose. That contrast creates tension—she’s not building dread through acceleration alone but through form, the distance between the urgency of the voice and the narrator’s muted shock and, perhaps, her desire to understand why she’s been summoned by her friend.

The brief tornado-drill flashback, tucked inside the elevator ride, does something quietly brilliant: it briefly slows the plot, just a flicker, to build character. Abbott stops to give us jeaned legs pressed together, the sounds of breathing, “before we all stopped believing a tornado, or anything, could touch us, ever.” That last clause is the whole novel in miniature—delivered in three seconds of reading time, then gone. This is a story about the intense relationships between high school girls, the desire for adulthood, and the crumbling of childhood innocence.

By the time we reach the apartment, every detail is carefully selected to build dread: the floor lamp “coning halogen up in the far corner,” the leather sectional “its black damps tightening, as if across my chest.” Plot advances but withholds its crucial point—what is Addy here to see? That’s the suspense, and Abbott creates it through form and action. Time stretches and compresses simultaneously. The white space after “I see more” is the horror itself—rendered as absence.

As I’ve been revising my horror novel, I keep returning to how form and space can bolster and advance tension. Questions that drive suspense must be in place, yes—but maintaining and modulating tension is also, often, a function of form. Like an orchestra, pacing is a number of discrete elements working in concert, which, of course, is what makes it difficult to parse.

Next week, we’ll dig into tension. I hope you’ll join me—and please tell me what you think in the comments.

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Ricmond, VA!

Tonight, I’ll be talking about the topic above at James River Writers’ The Writing Show alongside the wonderful Nicole Glover and Alethea McCollin, with Melissa Scott Sinclair moderating. Come find us. We promise the discussion will move at a swift clip.

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This final installment of Inside Character explores how to weave physicality and interior life into a scene. If you’re just joining the series, begin with “Part I: What Is Interiority?” and “Part II: Interiority, First Person, and Third-Person Limited,” where I define interiority, trace its evolution, and examine how point of view shapes a reader’s access to a character’s mind before turning here to the architecture of the scene itself.

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In my teaching, I see a recurring issue: the Unbalanced Scene. You’ve encountered it. You’ve probably written it. (I have.) It reads like:

• a transcript floating in white space: all dialogue

• a museum tour with no bodies in the room: detached, painterly description

• musings on the meaning of life, love, and everything else: an essay dressed up as character reflection

The important thing is to correct the imbalance. But first, you have to understand what’s happening—why you default to one mode, and how to restore the scene to something embodied and alive.

The Three Threads of a Scene

Every writer leans on their strengths. Most at one time or another lean too heavily in one of three directions. It’s human nature to rely too much on what we do well and dodge our weaknesses.

All Dialogue: The Screenplay Effect

Characters volley clever lines back and forth, but no one grips the edge of the table hard enough for their knuckles to pale. No one shifts their weight from a cramped hip. No one feels sweat gather at the base of the spine or the sting of a paper cut. It’s as if the author is writing a screenplay, often with minimal direction about physical action and no access to the characters’ thoughts. Sometimes this grows out of a student’s love of (and misunderstanding of) Hemingway or K-mart realism (aka Raymond Carver). More often than not, it’s the result of a steady diet of film, television, and/or video games. There’s nothing wrong with any of those—I enjoy them all and admire them—but they are not the same as writing fiction, and you need to understand the differences.

Dialogue without the body drifts like a balloon casting about in the wind. As a reader, I struggle to be invested because I’m not grounded. I know characters have bodies—or at least that people do—and characters should seem to as well.

All Description: The Worldbuilder’s Trap

The moss is thick and spongy beneath the fingers. Cathedral glass smolders with bruised purples and blood-warm reds as light filters through. The air carries the faint perfume of incense tangled with damp stone and age. It’s like wandering through Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom—lush, immersive, almost sacred in its atmosphere.

But it doesn’t move. It has no urgency, no desire. It’s nice—oh, what a deadly word “nice” is—but it feels detached from life. Want and need live in the body and drive storytelling. This sort of writing seems to void the body entirely. After a while, the reader stops admiring the flora and fauna and starts looking for an exit sign.

All Reflection: The Solipsist’s Haze

This happens when a character’s interior monologue folds in on itself. The thinking may be deep—dazzling, even—but if nothing occurs on the physical plane, no bodily sensation from temperature to desire, the story collapses into self-reflection and slips from narrative into essay.

If the ideas are projected outward—politics, philosophy, the state of the world—it may be interesting, but it isn’t a story. If it remains purely inward, it can illuminate a character’s psychology, but it creates solipsistic stasis. So we know the character—now what? Is he, she, or they going to go out and do something? Wanting and doing—desire met by resistance—form the heart of storytelling. And here again we see the problem at work in the first two modes: we forget the body. We float away from it.

In recent years, I’ve seen more and more student writing fall into one or all of these traps. I can’t help wondering how much that has to do with social media, intensified by the pandemic. We were separated physically and, frankly, wary of each other’s bodies—you could give me Covid—and even our own—what if I get Covid? Understandable, yes. But it has consequences. Add to that the surge in disembodied experience—Zoom, social media, even video games to a degree—and it’s no surprise that character-building can tilt off balance. Students lean toward what feels safe and away from what doesn’t: the body.

We would all write better if we were less frightened of our bodies. American culture and its underpinnings, from the Puritans onward, have been shaped by an old Protestant suspicion of the flesh, as if it were the dirty counterpart to the spirit’s purity. That split pushes body from soul. But good storytelling is humanistic at its core; it requires honesty about their union. They are not separate but integrated. Our characters must be, too.

Bringing body and mind together

In my development as a writer, I’ve made every mistake mentioned above. Dialogue comes easiest to me, so it’s the one I commit most often. At times—especially when I lean into my visual sensibilities (I once thought I might become a visual artist)—I can grow painterly in my prose. And when I’m trying to work something out, about the world or myself, I’m guilty of lingering in a solipsistic haze.

The trick isn’t to shame ourselves for these tendencies. Being as white Anglo-Saxon Protestant as they come, I know I have to remain hyper vigilant about writing the body.

So what’s the takeaway? Here it is. Strong fiction is a triple braid:

• What characters do and say (action and dialogue)

• Where they are (description)

• What they feel, think, or remember (interiority)

There’s no sacred ratio. A quiet domestic scene demands a different balance than a murder confrontation. But three principles help keep a scene alive—and all must be addressed:

Design for action.
Give the character something to do. Even making tea can carry tension if it’s done with intention.

Remember the body.
A character is not a hovering consciousness. Where are their hands? Are their feet cold? Is their neck stiff from scrubbing? The body anchors thought.

Place them in space.
What is the room doing to them? Is it cramped? Too bright? Does it smell of stale coffee or expensive perfume? The environment should exert pressure.

As Benjamin Percy writes in his craft book Thrill Me:

“There is nothing wrong with characters thinking, nothing wrong with repose, so long as it is strategically employed. Literary writers tend to overdo thoughtfulness, to glut their fiction with interiority that interferes with the reader getting swept away, just as many genre writers tend to neglect interiority in favor of action. One is bloated and precious, the other swift but without substance.”

That diagnosis is bracing and accurate. The aim is neither bloated nor hollow. A scene should be embodied in every sense; it is a physical thing with dimensions, not flat like a piece of paper or a computer screen, and the writer must build every aspect of it.

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Analysis: On the Stairs in Waters’s Paying Guests

To see the braid at work, consider a moment from Sarah Waters’s celebrated The Paying Guests. Set in 1920s London after the First World War, the novel follows Frances Wray, an unmarried woman of genteel background whose family has fallen on hard times and taken in lodgers—the Barbers—to stay afloat. What begins as an uneasy domestic arrangement becomes an intimate, dangerous entanglement that begins as Frances and her female and married tenant fall in love.

In this scene, Frances—a “well-bred” woman reduced by poverty to doing her own housework—encounters her lodger, Mrs. Barber, on the stairs:

A movement at the turn of the staircase made her start. She had forgotten all about her lodgers. Now she looked up through the banisters to see Mrs Barber just coming uncertainly down.

She felt herself blush, as if caught out. But Mrs Barber was also blushing. Though it was well after ten, she was dressed in her nightgown still; she had some sort of satiny Japanese wrapper on top—a kimono, Frances supposed the thing was called—and her feet were bare inside Turkish slippers. She was carrying a towel and a sponge-bag. As she greeted Frances she tucked back a sleep-flattened curl of hair and said shyly, ‘I wondered if I might have a bath.’

Waters does something subtle and masterful here. Frances’s physical vantage point—looking “up through the banisters”—establishes vulnerability and quietly inverts the class tension: Mrs. Barber, socially beneath her, now peers down at Frances. Waters accomplishes all of this without ever stating it outright.

The “satiny Japanese wrapper” and “Turkish slippers” aren’t decorative flourishes; they signal a world of leisure and exoticism that clashes with Frances’s manual labor. It’s especially telling that Frances notices Mrs. Barber’s bare feet inside those slippers—a detail that narrows the social distance between them and hints at her attraction to the woman. When Mrs. Barber tucks back that “sleep-flattened curl,” it isn’t merely a description of hair but a gesture of vulnerability. She is rumpled, unguarded, and in that small movement, intimacy begins. All of this has been achieved by Waters paying attention to her characters' bodies and physical surroundings.

Then the scene continues:

Frances began to get to her feet. ‘It’s no trouble. I shall have to light the geyser for you, that’s all. My mother and I don’t usually light it during the day. I should have said last night. Can you come across? You’ll have to hop.’ She moved her bucket. ‘Here’s a dry bit, look.’

Mrs Barber, however, had come further down the stairs, and her colour was deepening: she was gazing in a mortified way at the duster on Frances’s head, at her rolled-up sleeves and flaming hands, at the housemaid’s mat at her feet, still with the dents of her knees in it. Frances knew the look very well—she was bored to death with it, in fact—because she had seen it many times before ...

Notice how dialogue arises from circumstance. The need to “hop” exists because there is a bucket and a wet floor. Action dictates speech.

At the same time, the lodger’s mortified gaze at Frances’s “flaming hands” and the dents in the mat opens a door into Frances’s history—the Great War, social collapse, the humiliation of downward mobility. Interiority enters organically, sparked first by emotion: humiliation.

The exchange continues:

‘I’m afraid Len and I must have made an awful mess yesterday. I wasn’t thinking.’

‘Oh,’ said Frances, ‘these tiles get dirty all by themselves. Everything in this house does.’

‘Once I’ve dressed, I’ll finish it for you.’

‘You’ll do nothing of the sort ... Here, let me help.’

Mrs Barber was on the bottom stair now and clearly doubtful about where to step to. After the slightest of hesitations, she took the hand that Frances offered, braced herself against her grip, then made the small spring forward to the unwashed side of the floor. Her kimono parted as she landed, exposing more of her nightdress, and giving an alarming suggestion of the rounded, mobile, unsupported flesh inside.

Waters uses the characters’ bodies.

The taking of the hand. The bracing. The small spring. The kimono parting. That final image—“rounded, mobile, unsupported flesh”—lands because the scene has been grounded in action and the characters’ bodies. The sensual charge works precisely because the world around it is so concrete. And the parting of the kimono does more than reveal skin; it foreshadows the desire that will gather force between these two women, the way propriety will give way to longing.

It’s an exceptionally well-balanced scene that pushes the narrative forward.

Practice Your Craft

Try this.

Write a scene—500-800 words—that deliberately includes description, action, and interiority. Continue something already in progress or start fresh.

Constraints:

The Body in Space
The character must be performing a physical task—scrubbing a floor, fixing a car, assembling a complex sandwich. The environment should push back in some small way.

The Internal Pivot
A physical detail in the room—a smell, a texture, a sound—must trigger a brief memory or reflection.

The External Dialogue
Another character enters and interrupts. Dialogue should break up the interiority, but the task continues. Hands remain busy.

Forcing the character to act while thinking and speaking prevents both extremes Percy warns about: the bloated and the hollow.

A living scene is layered. Embodied.

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Last fall, I had the pleasure of speaking at the wonderful James River Writers Conference. My session, “Inside the Character: Techniques for Writing Thought and Emotion in Fiction,” explored one of fiction’s most incredible superpowers: its ability to take us inside a character’s mind. The beauty—and the difficulty—of writing fiction is its ability to render interiority. It’s easy to script a gesture; it’s far harder to map the subterranean currents of a character’s fear and desire.

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This is the second installment in a three-part series on interiority. If you missed the first, I highly recommend going back and reading it. That essay defines interiority and traces its evolution and importance. Here, I want to get practical. I want to talk about how interiority actually behaves on the page—specifically in first-person and third-person limited, the two points of view most writers gravitate toward, and for good reason. They offer intimacy without requiring godlike omniscience, closeness without surrendering all control. But they do very different kinds of work, and understanding those differences is key to writing fiction that feels alive rather than merely reported.

First Person: Intimacy with Consequences

Let’s start with first person.

First-person point of view is intimate and direct, which is where it gains its power. The reader is inside the character’s voice, often without a filter. The narrator doesn’t just report events; they interpret, judge, justify, and reshape them. That kind of access can feel intoxicating—for both writer and reader.

But that intimacy comes with limitations. And those limitations matter.

As Anton Chekhov, paraphrased by Tobias Wolff, famously observed:

“The narrator cannot escape the consequences of the story he is telling. If he does, it’s not a story. It’s an anecdote, a tale, or something else.”

In first person, the narrator is always implicated. They can’t step outside the story to clarify or correct themselves without changing the nature of the narrative. Every interpretation is suspect—not because it’s wrong, necessarily, but because it is human.

As Janet Burroway writes in Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft:

“The narrator may certainly interpret actions, deliver dictums, and predict the future; these remain the fallible opinions of a human being; we are not bound to accept them as we are bound to accept the interpretations, truths, and predictions of the omniscient author.”

This is the essential trade-off of first person: intimacy without authority. The voice is close, but it does not automatically command trust. As writers, we often need to create a sense of contrast—between past and present selves, between what the narrator believes and what the story quietly reveals, between the voice speaking and the truths it may not fully grasp.

Distanced First: The Great Gatsby

A classic example of this is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The novel opens not with action but with reflection—Nick Carraway looking back on his younger self:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.

This is not raw, unfiltered thought; it’s processed interiority. Nick is not thinking on the fly—he’s composing himself for us. We hear his mind at work, but we also hear the gap between who he was and who he is now. That distance—the self watching the self—is doing enormous narrative labor.

Reflective First: Alias Grace

Contrast that with Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, where the interiority feels more immediate, more unsettled:

Sometimes when I am dusting the mirror with the grapes I look at myself in it, although I know it is vanity. In the afternoon light of the parlour my skin is a pale mauve, like a faded bruise, and my teeth are greenish. I think of all the things that have been written about me—that I am an inhuman female demon, that I am an innocent victim of a blackguard forced against my will and in danger of my own life, that I was too ignorant to know how to act and that to hang me would be judicial murder, that I am fond of animals, that I am very handsome with a brilliant complexion, that I have blue eyes, that I have green eyes, that I have auburn and also brown hair, that I am tall and also not above the average height, that I am well and decently dressed, that I robbed a dead woman to appear so, that I am brisk and smart about my work, that I am of a sullen disposition with a quarrelsome temper, that I have the appearance of a person rather above my humble station, that I am a good girl with a pliable nature and no harm is told of me, that I am cunning and devious, that I am soft in the head and little better than an idiot. And I wonder, how can I be all of these different things at once?

Grace’s voice is intimate but unstable. Her interiority doesn’t clarify her; it multiplies her, offering layers. The first-person narration becomes a site of tension rather than authority. The question—Who is she, really?—is generated precisely because we are so close.

First Person in Motion: Dare Me

Then there’s first person embedded in action, where interiority is woven into sensory experience. Dare Me by Megan Abbott opens like this:

“Something happened, Addy. I think you better come.”

The air is heavy, misted, fine. It’s coming on two a.m. and I’m high up on the ridge. thumb jammed against the silver button: #27-G.

“Hurry, please.”

The intercom zzzzzz-s and the door thunks, and I’m inside.

As I walk through the lobby, it’s still buzzing, the glass walls vibrating.

Like the tornado drill in elementary school, Beth and me wedged tight, jeaned legs pressed against each other. The sounds of our own breathing. Before we all stopped believing a tornado, or anything, could touch us, ever.

“I can’t look. When you get here, please don’t make me look.”

In the elevator, all the way up, my legs swaying beneath me, 1-2-3-4, the numbers glow incandescent.

The apartment is dark, one floor lamp coning halogen up in the far corner.

“Take off your shoes,” she says, her voice small, her wish­ bone arms swinging side to side.

We’re standing in the vestibule, which seeps into a dining area, its lacquer table like a puddle of ink.

Just past it, I see the living room, braced by a leather sec­tional, its black clamps tightening, as if across my chest. Her hair damp, her face white. Her head seems to go this way and that way, looking away from me, not wanting to give me her eyes.
I don’t think I want her eyes.

“Something happened, Addy. It’s a bad thing.”

“What’s over there?” I finally ask, gaze fixed on the sofa, the sense that it’s living, its black leather lifting like a beetle’s sheath.

“What is it?” I say, my voice lifting. “Is there something behind there?”
She won’t look, which is how I know.

First, my eyes falling to the floor, I see a glint of hair twin­ing in the weave of the rug.

Here, interiority is fused to movement, memory, and sensation. The italicized lines represent the phone conversation Beth and Addy had before the present-tense action, functioning almost like a crosscutting technique in film—a recent emotionally charged memory impinging on the present moment. This isn’t mediated by years, as it is with Nick in The Great Gatsby, or by deep reflection, as it is with Grace in Alias Grace; it’s unspooling with immediacy. This is first person at its most immersive—impulsive and raw, tethered to the anxiety of the situation and the physicality of the body moving through time and space.

Third Person Limited Omniscience and Free Indirect Discourse

For all the power of first person, we also need to consider the versatility of third-person limited, a point of view that often relies on one of fiction’s most nimble—and slippery—tools: free indirect discourse.

At its simplest, free indirect discourse is third-person narration that slips into the language, thoughts, and tonal inflections of a character without relying on explicit tags like “she thought” or “he wondered.” The narration begins to sound like the character’s inner life even though it remains grammatically in the third person. I admire it because it’s both honest—“Dear reader, I’m reminding you that this is all a construct and showing you the narratorial strings”—while also creating the illusion of intimacy that first person often yields.

That said, it’s worth slowing down here, because this is where writers often get tripped up. While free indirect discourse is frequently described as tagless thought, I often see students writing in third-person limited resort to too many italicized thoughts—which, in my view, should be reserved for moments of emphasis or when a character actually verbalizes thoughts to themselves.

In practice, the transition from authorial narration to a character’s interior world often does require guidance—especially early in a scene or at moments of tonal shift. Thought tags can function as on-ramps. They help orient the reader, establish whose mind we’re entering, and prevent confusion. Once the rhythm is set and the perspective is secure, those tags can fall away.

In other words, free indirect discourse is less about banning certain phrases than it is about managing proximity and clarity.

Let’s break that down with a simple example:

Clara stood at the garden gate, her fingers resting on the cold iron.

She thought she ought to turn back—there was still time to catch the last train.

But no, that would be foolish. And cowardly. The whole thing was bound to be awkward, yet here she was.

Notice the movement here. We begin with neutral third-person narration: Clara at the gate, fingers on cold iron. Then we slide into mediated thought—she thought she ought to turn back—a clear signal that we’re entering her interior space. By the third sentence, the narration has fully taken on Clara’s voice. But no, that would be foolish. And cowardly. Those judgments belong to her, not to an omniscient narrator hovering above the scene.

So the progression looks like this:

Neutral narration → mediated thought → full immersion in the character’s inner voice.

That middle step matters. It teaches the reader how to read what follows.

A masterful example of free indirect discourse appears in Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates (italics and bold mine):

Her name was Connie. She was fifteen and she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people’s faces to make sure her own was all right. Her mother, who noticed everything and knew everything and who hadn’t much reason any longer to look at her own face, always scolded Connie about it. “Stop gawking at yourself. Who are you? You think you’re so pretty?” she would say. Connie would raise her eyebrows at these familiar old complaints and look right through her mother, into a shadowy vision of herself as she was right at that moment: she knew she was pretty and that was everything. Her mother had been pretty once too, if you could believe those old snapshots in the album, but now her looks were gone and that was why she was always after Connie.

Note how we make the transition from narration—in this case, I would argue, not neutral narration. Oates’s narrator is already weighing in through word choice: “nervous,” “giggling,” and the decision to highlight Connie’s compulsive mirror-checking. But we do move from narration through mediated thought (in italics) into free indirect discourse (in bold). This opening is wonderfully layered, because Oates offers a nuanced authorial take on Connie—teenage girls are sooo solipsistic—while also granting us access to Connie herself. If you know this story, you know how powerfully this dynamic sets up its shocking and emotionally unsettling finale. Oates cleverly implicates us by inviting us to be critical of Connie while also humanizing her. If you’ve never encountered this story—and I’d echo this for all the examples I’ve shared—read or reread them with interiority in mind.

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In Part III, we’ll zoom out to discuss how to weave this deep interiority with dialogue and description so your scenes don’t lean too hard in one direction. Trust me, it’s always a balancing act.

Hall of Mirrors on audio …

Hall of Mirrors came out last year on audiobook—and I’m still plugging it ‘cause I’m an audiobook lover and, of course, because I’m proud of this interpretation of my book.

Brought to life by the stellar team at Deyan Audio, this production features powerhouse performances from Sion Dayson as Judy, Ray Ford as Lionel, and Shea Taylor as Roger.

Now streaming wherever you get your audiobooks—go take a listen!

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