But like any descent into the underworld, I returned changed, and I brought back Salt Bones.

(Are We Over the Hero’s Journey?)

As a Mexican-American and Indigenous poet and novelist from the Southern California desert, I’ve never written in straight lines. Mesoamerican mythology taught me that time doesn’t move forward; it spirals. Our stories don’t progress in neat arcs but circle what we cannot or should not let go.

Although I plot like nobody’s business and for this novel filled five journals cover to cover with my purple pen scrawlings, this story came not from a plot outline but from a wound. It is structured in myth, genred by voice.

I’m often asked how I braid genre, as a poet novelist who writes in the borderlands of mystery, psychological thriller, lyric and literary family saga, and monstrous magical realism. Here’s my truth: I don’t braid genre. I braid a rope and climb it down into the underbelly where everything alchemically mixes in the sopa pot. 

When I was a girl we used to go to the New River in the basin a few blocks from my house where people would fish but my mama told me never to swim or even dip my toes and never eat the poison fish.

Years later, after I’d moved away when a toxic relationship nearly killed me and which I wrote about in my first novel Jubilee, I returned for a cookout at my comadre’s house. Over carne asada, she told me that the Salton Sea beside our town was drying up, releasing arsenic, lead, and DDT from the pesticides that crop dusters had sprayed over farmworkers in the fields—our neighbors, familia, and comunidad. This toxic dust had aerosolized and was fishhooking into our lungs. Lawmakers up in Sacramento or DC had said things like, No one lives down there anyway. My comadre said if nothing was done, our home would become a ghost town.

I knew I had to break my writing open and excavate my memory where deep myth resides. 

I recalled how Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo revisits the town of his father, ghosted and otherworldly, how he speaks to the long dead. While sitting on a beach in San Diego with my husband and beloved dog Bebe, who has since passed, I was revising a story I’d rescued from the compost heap, called “Salt Bones,” about siblings growing up on a toxic lake.

My protagonist, Malamar, or bad sea, her mother named her, like bad seed, is the final girl grown up. She’s the badass butcher mama who descends back into her own girlhood to save her daughters. I’d lent Mal some of my mother’s childhood, some of my own, and I was at a crossroads. Should I write a literary family saga, an ecological swansong for the land that had raised me? Or a murder mystery, for which I’d had just a small taste of commercial success and platform growth with my third novel, River Woman, River Demon?

My soapbox was made of driftwood and seaweed. It was crackly and adrift. But if I wrapped my ecological desert monstrous mama heart in a murder mystery like a burrito, maybe people would listen since who doesn’t love a good whodunit?

I had the bones of a mystery ready. But how to braid them?

Later, we entered the ocean, not noticing the warning signs that the water was infested with sewage. I got so sick—as sick as when I caught Covid toward the end of our time in San Diego. When I recovered, I began the new draft in earnest, developing the voices that became the final iteration of this novel that had taken a decade to live and write. Not memoir but something on the edges, in the borderlands. Not fiction either, although it is fictionalized. I’d curled up with the duende for this story. We’d wrestled, yes, but then we’d found a tentative relief, together, a truce, in the underbelly.

The duende is the force deep inside us that must be dredged up from the dark, murky recesses. The psychic and emotional toll for uprooting the duende can sometimes be devastating, and it’s in that shattering that some of our most powerful writing can emerge. Does all writing need to take us to the brink of the wreck, and sometimes even shove us over the edge into the abyss? No, absolutely not. But I called upon the duende and asked it to do my bidding. And it asked me only this: Let go of nothing. Hold everything tight. Bring it all back with you.

Readers, editors, and critics may ask you to let go of this or that like flotsam and jetsam, warning that you could sink. That you’ve taken on too much dead weight.

But you must trust the story. Trust your own voice.

Click to continue.

Early 20th century Spanish poet Federico García Lorca envisioned the duende from the Spanish word meaning little goblin who guards “the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know” and “all ignore.” It’s a dark energy residing deep within the writer, the spirit of creation who “won’t appear if he can’t see the possibility of death and haunt death’s house,” says Lorca. And that’s precisely where my braided rope took me.

Like Pedro Páramo in his descent through the underworld, I dug deep into my experiences and those of my beloveds, and through listening, stillness, and connection with my Ancestors, I tapped into the collective unconscious, the dreamworld, the mythmaking fabric, the great Storyteller in the Sky, and dredged out my heartwork.

“The story of a daughter lost in hell. / And found and rescued there,” so goes Eavan Boland’s recounting of Persephone and Demeter in her poem “Pomegranate,” which prefaces my novel.

A daughter disappears. A mother grieves. The seasons turn. A world is reshaped by maternal love and loss. I hadn’t abandoned poetry when I’d turned to fiction—I’d carried it with me. The semiotic chora, as linguist Julia Kristeva calls it, that prelinguistic womb-space of rhythm and scream and music. Syntax as heartbeat. As first cry. And last. The poem is the story.

The underbelly shows me how to steep a work in magical realism, psychological suspense, and horror through my motherhood poetics. The arc is Persephone’s and Demeter’s—not only descent, darkness, transformation, return, but doing it all again and again as motherwork, as reclamation, as cyclical as life itself, and death in El Valle, the apodo or nickname for my hometown near the Salton Sea, where the land is poisoned, where Malamar’s grief carves through her body like her knives through bone. She is a butcher, a mother, a daughter, a sister who descends into her own memory and trauma and that of her daughters, that of her whole community, to dig out the sick root. To battle the monsters. To make peace with them. To learn from them.

Carl Jung says myth connects us, tapping us into the collective unconscious where we become part of the unseen world. I’m using it to bring the unseen world I grew up in to the consciousness of those who have unknowingly benefited from it. Our labor. Our culture.

The journey in Salt Bones isn’t the classic hero’s or heroine’s quest, not a linear or individual reclaiming of self or breaking free of expectation. What I’ve written is the mother’s journey: recursive and embodied through lineage, it’s the story of a mother digging not only for her daughter but for the girl she once was and bringing all of her familia back with her. That slipping between selves of mother and daughter and self is its own mythic territory. As D’Arcy Randall writes in an anthology of Adrienne Rich’s feminist work on motherhood, “For maternal poets the [Persephone]/Demeter myth is like a passport freeing them from the stasis of ‘motherhood’; they gain access to a dual identity as mother and as daughter.”

And as a Chicana and Indigenous woman, I would add the layers of familia y comunidad y cultura to this passport.

Salt Bones leans into the liminal motherdaughterness of the land and its people, deeply interconnected. The Chicana motherdaughter returns to her childhood in recursive, transgressive cycles, holding tight to everything she’s created and everything that’s created her, stubborn, relentless, and badass.

She knows that myths are archaeological digs into what’s shaped us, offering insight into what’s been buried, layered into the strata of history, culture, silence, and survival. And they can be found in the underbelly, the vulnerable margins, roiling and dark, where stories ferment. Like the Salton Sea, saltier than the ocean, rank with the smell of rot, which became my underworld. A place that warned us not to swim. And yet, we not only swam and survived, we transformed.

Check out Jennifer Givhan’s Salt Bones here:

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Establish your “closed circle.”

The best mysteries tend to be “closed circle” mysteries—meaning they involve a small number of suspects within a single unit. How you define your closed circle is up to you: It could be family members at a country house or passengers on a Nile cruise … use your imagination! But if you’re planning to write a puzzle mystery, it’s a good idea to focus on a handful of main characters, with the killer lurking somewhere among them. That way, your reader won’t feel short-changed by a villain appearing from nowhere in the final chapter.

Establish your “rules.”

It might seem counterintuitive to talk about rules for a genre where all the most satisfying examples break the rules in some way. But you need a logical framework of some kind in which your plot will unfold. A good rule of thumb is to make sure your detective is never more than one step ahead of the reader, and that your Watson character is never more than one step behind.

Keep it simple.

The best mysteries are the ones which hide a deceptively simple trick in plain sight. Now, that’s not to say that your plot shouldn’t be devilishly complex. But most of those ornate convolutions will be in service to a single, overarching trick. A favorite analogy of mine is the “Orange Tree Illusion” of the great magician Jean-Eugene Robert Houdin. This is a stunningly elaborate trick which relied on an ingenious mechanical construction, pyrotechnics, and various stagehands lurking behind the scenes. But it was all in pursuit of one of the simplest and most ancient illusions imaginable: the disappearance and reappearance of a handkerchief.  

Click to continue.

The timeline is your friend.

In any fiction where the plot is at the forefront, it’s vital to have a clear understanding of your chronology. You need to know who was where, and at what time. Even if the characters lie to each other, and to your detective, you need to have a clear visual of where they were and what they were up to. Think of it like pieces on a chessboard—everything is relative; one move has various ramifications for every other piece on the board. You need to plan your sequence of moves accordingly.

Treat your suspects equally.

Of course you know whodunit, but it’s important to remember your reader doesn’t—or rather, they shouldn’t. To keep them guessing, it’s a good idea to devote equal space to each of your suspects, so there isn’t one particularly obvious front-runner. Also, make sure you don’t go too far in the opposite direction—your murderer should be someone who’s been present in the narrative from the beginning. It can be a difficult balance, but it’s worth getting right.

Motive, motive, motive.

When writing mysteries, you are essentially attempting to deceive several different types of readers. Some will be highly attuned to the physical clues, the erroneous alibis—in other words, the material details. But others will be more directly focused on character and motivation—the immaterial, psychological clues. That’s why it’s important to ensure that your victim was either universally loved or universally loathed. Either everyone has a motive, or nobody does—at least on the surface.

Surprise yourself.

In many ways, you are your own “Ideal Reader.” Presumably you want to write a mystery because you enjoy reading mysteries, so it’s a good idea to think about the types of plot twists and “reveals” that truly startled you. How can you set about replicating that effect? Often the best method is to think of the most obvious solution to your puzzle, and then invert it.

Let’s say that the hated patriarch of a large family has just written his unruly youngest son out of his will. The kid gets nothing. When the old man dies, surely the first suspect to be ruled out is the unruly son? After all, what did he have to gain? This is the “obvious” path for our detective—it’s a logical deduction, after all. But what if the youngest son did have a motive that none of his siblings knew about—something that ran deeper than money? That’s the first inversion.

But it’s not really enough: The best mystery writers tend to orchestrate a double-bluff, only to transform it into a double-double-bluff. What if the youngest son was plotting to murder his father, only for a second, unidentified murderer to beat him to the punch? This is the kind of approach I usually take, with one complication feeding neatly into the next. As long as you don’t tie yourself up in knots, you can leapfrog your way from one revelation to another en route to that all-important satisfying denouement, in which the whole tapestry is unravelled.

Check out Tom Mead’s The House at Devil’s Neck here:

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(Immutable Moments: The Load-Bearing Beats of a Story.)

Instead of giving up, I decided to change how I approached writing. I renamed my failed manuscripts exploratory drafts and built the scaffolding of a crime novel to hold them up. The crime was surprisingly easy to incorporate into my otherwise upmarket novel. But to have a good crime or thriller, I needed some plot twists, too. Those were a bit harder to suss out, and took a lot of trial and error.

I’m going to save you some “exploratory drafts” with my five steps to sticking a plot twist.

STEP 1: BRAINSTORM YOUR TWIST

A good twist does not exist in a vacuum. It serves its plot. It isn’t there only to surprise the reader—it also needs to add a layer to your story.

To achieve this, start by considering your genre. What typically happens in novels like yours? What preconceived ideas will your readers bring to the book? What expectations will your audience have?

Now, think about your story in particular. What is unique about your characters, your setting, or your themes? How could these things interact with your genre’s conventions? Where is the overlap? Is there any way can you use the unique parts of your story to disrupt the conventions of your genre?

For instance, say you are writing a crime novel about a serial killer. You’d want to think about what serial killer tropes are common—the lone male criminal genius, for instance, with some twisted sexual motivation or satanic drive pushing him to kill. Your question should be: How can I flip that expectation on its head? Your answer—one of many—may be: I will make the killer an old woman.

STEP 2: FORM A PLAN

We aren’t talking about a premise here, though; we aren’t talking about a set-up, or anything that can be given away on the flap-copy. A twist requires that you subvert expectations in media res, which is trickier than nailing a hook.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a pantser or a plotter—to make the twist land in a satisfying way, you must make a plan. If you’re a pantser, the twist will probably come to you while you’re writing an exploratory draft. If you’re a plotter, it will come while you’re outlining. Either way, once you know what your twist is, you must consider where to put it. Is it a shift in perspective that changes everything? Maybe it’s the midpoint. Is it the solution to a mystery? Try it as the climax.

Rule of thumb: To give the twist maximum effect, withhold as long as you can.

STEP 3: LEAVE BREADCRUMBS

The best twists are those that readers call “surprising but inevitable.” This means that the twist cannot be something totally out of the blue. Nor can you outright lie to your reader. That feels like cheating. You, as an author, are in a partnership with your reader. You are playing a game with them, and if they suspect you’re cheating, they won’t play with you again.

In order to avoid such a misstep, you must know your twist at page one. Whether you’ve written 80,000 words to find your twist or have a detailed outline, you must make sure that the rest of the story adds up. Every line that comes before the twist has to work with the twist.

The answers, in other words, must all be hidden on the page.

Click to continue.

STEP 4: MISDIRECT

You cannot lie, but you must manipulate your reader. Think misdirection. Think distraction. Think magic. You must draw attention to one hand, while the other hand does the dirty work.

On an early episode of The Shit No One Tells You About Writing podcast, host Bianca Marais asked thriller writer Jeffrey Archer about misdirection. He gave away his “great secret:” “When you drop that line,” he said, “that’s going to tell you everything, make the next line so startling, they forget it… that’s the game you play with the reader.”

This means revealing the truth in such an offhand way that the reader practically ignores it. Let a bomb explode directly after the question is answered. Or a car accident. Or a confession. Any such upheaval will pull the attention away from what you just revealed.

STEP 5: SANDBAG

Sandbagging is when you play below your skill level in order to dupe your opponent to betting more. If you can manage to get your reader to believe that she has figured it out, just long enough to feel full of herself for her ingenuity. Then, you pull the rug out.

Ta-da! Gotcha.

Check out Laura Leffler’s Tell Them You Lied here:

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(What Is Romantasy, Anyway?)

Stakes, conflicts, magic systems, and tension are foundational to building a high stakes, epically romantic world in fantasy romance. So how can it be done? When a world and storyline is both rich with romance and immersive with magic and lore?

Building out From Motivation:

The way I like to create the tension and stakes in a story comes by the characters and chipping away at their motivations. Be it the dastardly plans of the antagonist or the hopes and desires of our (preferably) shady-on-the-morals MMC, or the struggles and trials of our FMC.

When the motivation of the characters is clear, from there the building blocks of their internal and external struggles can take shape.

The struggles might stem from other characters and their choices, or perhaps there are conflicts in the world itself. Are they a captive trying to find a way out of an enemy prison? Are they locked in forced proximity with a rival assassin and forced to journey around the land to find a certain mystical gemstone to stop the spreading dark magic? But at the heart of it, their motivations are clear and the driving force in their moves throughout the story.

How to Keep Conflict Rising:

A good thing to keep in mind while building a world, character motivations/desires, and rising stakes, is the placement of conflict and inciting incidents. A lot of us realize there is usually something that occurs at the beginning of a book that “incites” the story, it forces the characters and plot forward into the tale we’re about to read. Perhaps it’s an attack, a death, a plot for revenge.

In my latest release, Broken Souls and Bones, my FMC Lyra has been living as a servant in Jarl’s household, and she prefers it that way. Because she’s hiding a coveted, dangerous magic that kings desire to own for themselves.

Her story begins when the silent Sentry of the king arrives in her village with soldiers, under the guise of gathering boons for the upcoming wedding of the prince.

But, of course, our broody, dangerous MMC has other plans. He knows exactly who Lyra is and forces her magic to reveal itself in the worst way she can imagine. After, Lyra is not only forced on a new journey from her inciting incident, but she’s not in the hands of a man she considers a dangerous, ruthless enemy. Cue the enemies to lovers tension.

But stakes don’t die at the beginning or the middle can feel . . . long. Gradually increase the troubles the characters faced in the beginning by foreshadowing, adding fears and unknowns, creating a new dilemma they didn’t see coming.

In my fae enemies-to-lovers, The Ever King, the inciting incident is an enemy pirate king returning after ten years and kidnapping his enemy’s daughter. But to keep the tension and trouble building (while also drawing our two enemies closer) after she’s been kidnapped and brought to his kingdom, she’s unexpectedly faced with a siren-like character who entrances her and forces her captor/enemy’s hand to break her spell in brutal ways. It brings the characters an inch closer to lovers, build the darker parts of their world, and adds a new conflict to keep readers enjoying the ride.

Click to continue.

Navigating the Middle:

I don’t think the middle of books needs to be the long haul to get through. I love the mid-point of books because it’s where the nitty-gritty world building and character development really starts to take shape. The mid-point is a great place to add a new stake. Be it a new problem, or an addition to the one they faced toward the beginning. Here, it’s fun to ramp up tension between lovers, maybe the first kiss or intimate moment occurs. Maybe a secret is discovered about the motivations of another character. It’s an excellent place to introduce new information that is going to ramp up the thrill of the story, leading to the climax.

Make the conflict deeply emotional and personal to the characters. Doing so can add that extra layer that draws readers in, so they can feel what the characters are feeling.

Capturing the Wild Ending:

Here is where we can really reveal the motivations of our antagonist. To add more layers, more stakes, more beautiful tension that keeps the heart rate up, craft a villain who makes sense. A villain who truly believes their motivations are superior, their plans are the only way to go, even if they are simply a cruel person who wants to burn it all. Make it believable.

Keep the stakes visible and teetering on the edge for the protagonists and they face the climactic experiences in the end of the book. This can be final battles where they face off against their foe, perhaps it’s a vicious betrayal and they’re forced into exile to save their lives and the lives of those they love. Perhaps the lives of those they love literally hang in the balance and they are forced to test their own morality with their actions.

Whatever it is, keep it believable, fierce, and full of those gut-punches we can’t stop devouring.

Stakes are in every story. They might be more life or death in some books, but if they’re believable, emotional, and fierce, readers will find the wonderful escapism and storytelling they want.

Check out LJ Andrews’ Broken Souls and Bones here:

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If I outline, my story will be the same as everyone else’s.

I don’t want to know everything!

Planning takes away all my creative freedom.

I get it. Plotting can feel like putting a straitjacket on your creativity, forcing it into a constrictive shape, leaving you no wiggle room for all those brilliant ideas that pop into your head in the middle of the night.

But plotting is inevitable. When you finish your book and start writing your query letter, my friend, it’s made of the first few beats of your novel. That synopsis agents and publishers want? It’s also made of all the beats of your novel.

Creative freedom is lovely, and I fully support that. The thing is, there are some moments in your book that are non-negotiable. If they don’t happen, the entire story collapses like that soufflé you made to procrastinate writing your novel.

So, you need beats, but you still want freedom. That’s why I started a plotting method I call “Immutable Moments.” It’s a big word for the simple idea that there are certain beats of your novel which are load bearing. Unchanging and unchangeable. It’s like building a house. If you knock out a load-bearing wall, your whole house is coming down. If you knock down (or rearrange) your decorative walls, you haven’t done anything but create a fabulous new kitchen and made room for that SMEG fridge, which you definitely didn’t buy just because they use them on the Great British Bake Off.  

The basic idea is that Immutable Moments are the events your story can’t function without.

• If you remove them, the story falls apart.
• They directly push the protagonist forward in their core goal.
• They connect the overall arc of the plot from start to finish.

An example:

In The Princess Bride, Westley “dying” has to happen, otherwise Buttercup doesn’t agree to marry Humperdinck. It’s an Immutable Moment.

But other things, the Rodents of Unusual Size (R.O.U.S) or the encounter with Miracle Max are wild card moments. They can be shuffled, even omitted. But the world won’t collapse.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Earth has to be destroyed, otherwise, Arthur never goes on his journey.

But things like the bowl of petunias and the sperm whale are wildcard moments. They’re fun and they add to the richness of the world, but they don’t collapse the core arc of the story if you remove them or shift them around.

So how do you figure out your Immutable Moments before you accidentally write an 80,000-word novel without a plot and have to go back and figure out how to restructure it to make sure it doesn’t crumble to dust around you?

You should know the basic arc of your book. This means that before you start writing your story, you should know three things:

1. Who is the main character?
2. What is their primary goal?
3. What do they have to learn/do/experience to get there?

Once you know these things, you can start fleshing out the rest of your beats. Start with your inciting incident. This is the event that starts everything in your novel—the moment where the protagonist moves into the quest, the pursuit of the love interest, the fight against the monster tidal wave threatening to destroy the world, the step into the new way of living.

Once you know your inciting incident, you can work forward with the cause and effect of the rest of the structure and ultimately, sum up the entirety of your plot arc in one long sentence.

Click to continue.

Main character experiences inciting incident which causes them to move into new world where they face rising action and conflict in pursuit of main goal until they finally resolution.

In The Princess Bride, this might look like:

Buttercup believes Westley has died (inciting incident), which leads her into a forced engagement with Prince Humperdinck and is moved to the castle (new world), where she faces kidnapping and deception (rising action and conflict) in pursuit of her own freedom and true love (main goal), until she is finally reunited with Westley (resolution).

In the Hitchhiker’s Guide, this might look like:

Arthur Dent experiences the destruction of Earth (inciting incident), which propels him into a bizarre and terrifying universe (new world) where he faces evil aliens, improbable technology, and existential confusion (rising action and conflict) in pursuit of understanding his place in the universe and simply surviving (main goal), until he ultimately accepts the absurdity of the cosmos and settles into his strange new life (resolution).

Try writing this yourself, for your story. Write your plot arc in one sentence.

Now you’ve done it. If you can write a sentence like the ones above, you have the Immutable Moments of your story.

You have the inciting incident. The new world. The rising action and conflict. The main goal. The resolution. Those moments hold the entire arc of your plot together. Simple, right? But there’s still so much to explore!

From here, you can go deeper into emotional arcs by asking yourself questions about each beat:

• Does this moment force my protagonist to change something about their beliefs?
• How does this moment affect my character emotionally?
• If I cut this moment, what would it change about my character’s emotional arc?

Using the beats of your story to build an emotional arc can lead to a more satisfying payoff for the reader. Knowing the beats of your story, even just the Immutable ones, means you have a roadmap, not only for the plot, but also for the character’s inner journey.

Developing your Immutable Moments also means you can filter in those wild card moments. Remember the decorative walls we talked about earlier? These are scenes that add to the richness of your novel without bearing the weight of the entire structure. Wild card moments are those added details you think about when brainstorming. Silly moments. Heartfelt ones. Hilarious comments from another character.

In The Princess Bride, some of the best parts of the book are wildcard moments such as the “mawwaige” scene, the over-the-top sword fight, and the bisexual subtext between Inigo and Westley.

In the Hitchhiker’s Guide, wildcard moments make up the heart and soul of the series. Consider the improbability drive’s side effects, the ghost of Zaphod’s grandfather, the guide entries sprinkled throughout the book, and Marvin the Android’s endless pessimism. Would the book be the same without them? No. Would the entire arc still stand without it? Absolutely yes.

The best part about wildcard moments is you can plan them ahead of time or you can lean into them while you’re writing. They give writers who crave creative freedom the ability to go off on tangents, all the while keeping the Immutable Moments in mind to keep them on track, to keep the structure solid. If you know the Immutable Moments of your novel, you can start writing today without worrying about utter collapse and ruin because one of your load-bearing walls was built on a slant.

Try it today. You may still end up in a writerly crisis at some point, weeping over plotting beats and asking yourself why anyone ever writes anything. Ever.

But at least you’ll have Immutable Moments. Unchangeable. Unchanging. And waiting for you to stop crying and start writing.

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(5 Ways to Surprise Your Reader Without It Feeling Like a Trick.)

When I finished my first thriller story and it landed with a resounding thud, I finally understood what went wrong after a long time. The clues weren’t there. The groundwork wasn’t laid. The characters suddenly behaved like strangers. In other words, I was focusing on surprising the readers more than building up to make the surprise make sense.

What Readers Actually Want

Readers don’t want to be fooled—not exactly. They want to be led down a garden path of their own assumptions, only to discover they’ve walked right past the truth a dozen times without noticing.

Writers need to be aware of the implicit contract they have with readers before they try any literary tricks. To put it plainly, you can deceive me but not defraud me.

I once lost interest in reading a mystery novel when the killer turned out to be a character introduced three pages before the reveal. That’s not clever writing; that’s just withholding information. The reader feels cheated rather than outsmarted, manipulated rather than surprised.

The contract between reader and writer is fragile. We agree to suspend disbelief; authors agree not to abuse that suspension. Break that trust, and you’ve lost a reader forever.

Techniques That Don’t Suck

Leverage Reader Assumptions

You know what’s funny? We all carry these assumptions into stories, and clever writers exploit them mercilessly.

In The Sixth Sense, we assume a character interacting with the protagonist can be seen by everyone. In Fight Club, we assume a narrator experiencing events is separate from other characters. These films don’t cheat—they just know what we’ll automatically believe without being told.

Kazuo Ishiguro does this brilliantly in Never Let Me Go. He knows readers will assume the boarding school students are normal kids until slowly, horrifyingly, we realize they’re something else entirely. The clues were there from page one, but our assumptions blinded us.

The Power of Partial Context

Half the truth can be more misleading than a lie.

Take Gone Girl. The diary entries we read seem straightforward, emotionally raw, authentic. We believe them completely. Why wouldn’t we? It’s only later we discover how carefully crafted they were to create a specific impression.

This technique works because it doesn’t withhold information—it presents real information in a context designed to be misinterpreted. That’s not cheating; that’s brilliant misdirection.

The Background Detail That Isn’t

I love when authors plant crucial details in seemingly unimportant descriptions. Not hiding them, exactly, but camouflaging them among other information.

Raymond Chandler would describe a room, mentioning a half-dozen items including one that would later prove crucial to solving the mystery. The detail registers in our brain without triggering any special attention. When it later becomes important, we get that delicious “it was there all along” feeling.

I tried this in a short story once, describing a character’s kitchen including a “block of knives with one missing.” Readers completely overlooked it, focusing instead on the character’s conversation. When the missing knife showed up 10 pages later, several readers told me they flipped back, found the detail, and felt that perfect mix of surprise and satisfaction.

Click to continue.

Ways Writers Screw This Up

The Unforgivable Sins

Look, we all know the worst offenders:

• The narrator who “forgot” to mention they saw the killer
• The detective who noticed a crucial clue but “decided not to mention it yet”
• The sudden twin/relative/friend who appears to save the day
• The villain whose motivation comes out of nowhere

These aren’t twists; they’re failures of storytelling. They don’t surprise so much as annoy.

What’s worse is when characters suddenly behave in ways that contradict everything we know about them. The loyal friend who betrays without foreshadowing. The coward who becomes heroic without development. These aren’t clever reversals; they’re character assassination in service of a plot point.

The Pointless Surprise

Sometimes the problem isn’t how the surprise happens but why it matters—or doesn’t.

I remember reading a thriller where the big twist was that the protagonist was actually adopted. Ok…and? It changed nothing about the story, affected no relationships, altered no motivations. It was just there to be surprising. That’s not a twist; it’s a gimmick.

A good surprise should transform the story, not just redirect it. It should force us to rethink what we’ve read, reconsider characters’ motivations, see events in a new light.

Getting the Execution Right

The Revelation Moment

Even a well-prepared surprise can fall flat in delivery. The moment matters enormously.

I still remember the gut-punch of realizing what was happening in Atonement. The revelation comes at exactly the right moment, when we’re emotionally invested but not yet at the story’s conclusion. Too early, and it would lose impact; too late, and it would feel tacked on.

Some revelations need breathing room. Others work better when delivered rapid-fire, giving readers no time to recover. There’s no formula here—just an intuitive sense of rhythm and impact.

Aftermath Matters

A surprising revelation should send ripples through the rest of the story. If characters learn something that changes everything but then behave as if nothing happened, the surprise feels cheap.

I still think about how The Good Place handled its massive first-season twist. The revelation didn’t just shock viewers—it completely transformed the show, affecting relationships, goals, and the fundamental premise.

Learning From Different Storytellers

Different genres handle surprise differently:

• Mystery novels play by formal rules—the detective can’t know things the reader doesn’t.
• Horror often reveals the true nature of the threat gradually, each revelation more disturbing than the last.
• Literary fiction frequently focuses on revelations of character rather than plot twists.

But the best writers borrow across these boundaries. Gillian Flynn uses literary techniques in her thrillers. Kazuo Ishiguro employs mystery elements in literary contexts. Shirley Jackson’s horror derives from subtle character observations.

Why We Keep Coming Back

Maybe we crave literary surprises because life rarely offers neat resolutions. We desire stories that mirror life’s unpredictability while offering the satisfaction that reality often denies us.

Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe we just enjoy having our minds blown, seeing familiar landscapes from suddenly different angles.

Whatever the reason, when done right, literary misdirection creates moments readers remember decades later—those perfect instances when everything shifts, and we see with new eyes.

Final Thoughts

The best surprises don’t just trick readers—they reward them. They acknowledge the reader’s intelligence while still managing to stay one step ahead.

For writers willing to master the technique, literary misdirection offers rare possibilities—the chance to control not just what readers see but what they expect to see. Few approaches demand more precision, and few offer greater rewards when executed well.

In the end, perhaps that’s the real magic: not that the story fools us, but that it makes us willing participants in our own deception. We emerge not feeling cheated but enlightened—as if we’ve gained something valuable by being momentarily led astray.

And isn’t that worth the effort?

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(The Art of Writing Deceptive and Unreliable Narrators in Thrillers.)

Plot must happen for stories to entertain, but plot is simply a test of identity. No matter how exciting the plot point, readers need a human element—a character’s response—to care. A tree falling in a forest certainly makes a sound, but it needs a character to turn that sound into story. A plot falling onto a page needs a character with identity issues, a character who ideally faces those issues and changes. Because of this, I believe every story at its heart is an identity story.

Identity is often a signaling term in fiction, referring to the realm of other. As an Indo-Caribbean immigrant woman in America, I will always be “othered,” which forces me to micro-analyze myself within our societal framework and keeps me attuned to overt markers of identity, such as race and ethnicity. My debut novel, A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl, deals with identity on this explicit level as my main character inhabits multiple selves to survive her difficult childhood. But I believe everyone everywhere grapples with the question, “Who am I, really?” And by extension, every writer grapples with the question, “Who is this character, really?”

In exploring identity in fiction, it’s important to understand how your character sees herself, what she hides, and how the world sees her. To start, map out your character’s visible, invisible, and buried defining traits. You could also do this exercise with yourself or famous fictional characters, as demonstrated below.

Visible Defining Traits: How the world sees the character or how your character presents.

Brainstorm words and phrases to reflect first glance and outward characterizations. How would the character answer small-talk questions such as: “What do you do?” and “Where are you from?” Does she code-switch at times, changing speech and behavior according to audience? Does she lie?

Examples:

• Maya, the main character in my novel: dental hygienist, wife and mother, of Indian descent, “Americanized,” has a deaf son, honest. These words represent how she is seen and how she wants to be seen. But she harbors a secret that contradicts this public front.
• Popular fictional characters: Harry Potter—visibly scarred, often bullied, orphan, unaware of abilities, vendetta against Voldemort. Katniss Everdeen—hunter, family caretaker, eschews feminine traits, sacrifices herself to save her sister. But these characters are more than they seem.

Invisible Defining Traits: How the character’s inner circle sees her.

Consider the character’s close friends and family—what do they know that not everyone knows? Start just below the layer of visible and delve deeper by considering events that shaped the character’s life. They’re usually true, but at this level, the character can still be lying.

Click to continue.

Examples:

• Maya: fluent in sign language; has tattoos that quote favorite books; former foster child; former alcoholic; former smoker; once stripped for money; avoids discussing the past.
• Harry and Katniss: Harry—suffers from self-doubt, was abused by his aunt and uncle, scar sometimes hurts. Katniss—resents her mother’s crippling grief, hates being used, is a rule breaker, would rather starve than beg.

Buried Defining Traits: Things only the character knows about herself that she might deny or even fail to recall.

Here, dig into the character’s “original damage,” those experiences that shaped them, creating their realm of secrets, fantasies, and regrets. Consider parenting, bullying, breakups, abuses and traumas, and past mistakes. What might be so shameful your character doesn’t tell anyone? Is anything buried so deep she can’t recall them, even as those events shape her behavior?

Examples:

• Maya: Was born Sunny; lived in Guyana; arrived to Miami without papers; was called Neena when she moved, then chose to be called Cindy; finally reinvented herself after an incident she has kept secret and tries to suppress.
• Harry and Katniss: Harry—visits Voldemort in nightmares and visions, feels a connection when he’s angered. Katniss—resists intimate relationships, afraid of courting love and having a family under the dystopian government.

The Interaction of Identity With Plot

When characters interact with plot, these visible, invisible, and hidden characteristics affect their behaviors. Harry Potter’s secret connection to Voldemort causes him to sic a snake onto his cousin, Dudley, and nearly kill his rival, Draco; he resists and fights these manifestations because he does not want to identify with Voldemort who exerts more power over him as the story progresses. In the Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen must face her fear of intimacy when she is pitted against Peeta, who loves her; to win the games and stoke revolution, she confronts her identity as an unemotional stoic and opens herself to Peeta. In my novel, my character, Maya, must own up to her hidden past to save her marriage and reunite with her long-lost sister. These characters are forced to deal with their buried truths as the plot unfolds; in this way, plot can be seen as a vehicle for character change.

As you sketch a story’s plot, it’s important to understand that your characters’ layered identities will interact with it in interesting ways. This is what makes writing so much fun.

We writers are armed with endless possibilities because identity is complicated. To paraphrase George Saunders: readers are drawn to stories as a way to glimpse into the “black boxes” of each other’s minds. Being equipped with complicated “black boxes” of our own, writers hold enough raw material to craft a world of fascinating identities. 

Mining the truths, fictions, interpretations, and baggage we often cannot untangle within ourselves is a great starting point. Simply add a little imagination and test the created identity with a plot, and a messy and honest story will certainly emerge. With a little work, it can become one that connects to the messy, honest identities of readers everywhere.

Check out Nanda Reddy’s A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl here:

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(Alternatives to a Professional Edit.)

Brandon Sanderson says that all stories have been told before. As authors, it’s our voice, our style, and our own experiences that shape the way we tell the story. Toni Morrison tells us, if there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. Keeping both of these things in mind, I set out to create a story that honored the elements I loved in the examples above while making it my own story and journey. To do that, you have to isolate the pieces you love.

I love the idea of exploring the path not taken. It’s human nature to think about this whether it’s something as simple as, “What if I had said hello to that person who caught my eye?” or “What if I’d left my job when I wanted to the first time?” Where would we be if we made a different choice. While it’s normal to wonder this, my character, Isabelle Duprees, does not.

That was the first marked difference in the story I was telling as opposed to some of the others I admire. Isabelle wasn’t curious about other options. Readers immediately learn that she isn’t someone who is worried about the proverbial path not traveled. She’s carefully chosen every step she’s taken, climbed the ladder beyond the glass ceiling with precise and calculated decisions, and closed doors she no longer wished to pursue. When one of those slammed shut doors lands on her doorstep in the form of a family member, after a party given in her honor, she doesn’t want to open it. In fact, she’d like to barricade it shut and stay safely ensconced in her current world.

How do you get the person who has no desire to change to take a look at what might have been? That was the first problem encountered in the story; the first inciting incident if we’re using writing terminology.

Her older sister, Elaina Duprees, shows up without warning, knowing that she’s unlikely to get a warm welcome. She is, essentially, a stranger to Isabelle, which the younger sister has no desire to change. Or so she thinks. There are many things that can pull us in a specific direction in life, such as emotion, nostalgia, obligation, guilt, hope, or the desire to escape.

As much as Isabelle would like to turn off her emotions as easily as she can shut down a board meeting, it’s not as easy when Elaina is standing in front of her. Goading her in a way only a sibling can, Elaina’s words and actions get under Isabelle’s skin and send her spiraling down a rabbit hole she’d never imagined.

She might not have wanted to take paths other than the ones she did but when that choice is taken away from her in a surprising way—as in, some other version of her took those roads instead of this Isabelle—she’s too intrigued to close the door.

This plot device, the idea of exploring other avenues your character can take, was the next piece for me to tackle. How could this be different than the other examples I mentioned? This is where creativity and suspension of disbelief come into play because, really, it could be whatever I wanted. Did I want to have Isabelle invisible to the other versions of herself, should she watch from afar, be embedded within the version she visits? Ultimately, I wanted her to be able to interact with other versions of herself in a way that left an imprint. In a way, it’s like the only person who could truly get through Isabelle’s barriers, is herself.

I read somewhere that the purpose of secondary characters is to help the reader better know the main characters. This is definitely true in Elaina’s case as no one knows her sister quite like she does. Even though their relationship is fractured, the bond is unbreakable. Your main character has to have that counterpart that pushes them, forces them to see what’s right there in front of them.

Isabelle and Elaina set out on a road trip that will further test their relationship, open old wounds, and take them through parts of the United States neither of them knew held significance for them. The sharpest turns in the road come from them trying to figure out who the other is in this life while coming to grips with who they might be in the life of the other version of Isabelle they go to visit.

Neither of them are prepared for the impact of the confined space, the turmoil of seeing what might have been, or the resentment both of them are still clinging to.

For Isabelle, she’s also struggling to face hard truths about who she has chosen to become. She’s purposely walled herself off personally, emotionally, and romantically, or so she believes. As she travels down these different avenues with her estranged sister at her side, she starts to realize that just because you purposely chose to take a left instead of a right, it doesn’t mean that option never existed, or that it doesn’t still exist, if that makes sense. Isabelle’s folly is that she thinks she can push through life without feeling. She fools herself into believing she can by creating boundaries so rigid, she forgets who she is on the inside. Who she used to be. And who she might have been.

Lastly, with any writing, we have to decide what kind of impact we want to leave. What is it we’re trying to say through our story and through our characters. For me, I like believing that regardless of what paths we take, we end up where we’re supposed to be. This is a personal thing I sometimes hang onto in hard times. Maybe this is because of how I grew up, the age I’m at, or my anxieties but that’s what I brought to the table when starting this story; that was the piece of myself I wove through Isabelle’s journey.

Sometimes the hardest thing we can do is take a look at where we might have gone wrong when we didn’t have to; this is even more humbling when we admit we avoided a particular route out of fear. From the outside, Isabelle Duprees doesn’t fear anything. But as she travels down all of these roads, she realizes she was lying to herself all along. She’d like to believe she doesn’t need anyone. Meeting each version of herself shows her that as successful as she is, maybe there’s more to life than money, power, and accolades.

Like the book, All the Other Me, life can take us on a lot of winding paths and the only thing we can actually do is make the best choice that is available to us at the time. We don’t ever know with certainty where it’ll take us but at least we can take comfort in knowing we did all we could. I often think about that with writing. There were opportunities I said no to for specific reasons and ones I said yes to which meant I couldn’t say yes to others. Who’s to say where I might have been if I’d made different choices. But, I love this book and it’s a result of the choices I made, the paths I took and I’m hoping, you’ll make the choice to read it and fall in love with all the Isabelles. 

Check out Jody Holford’s All the Other Me here:

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Without a beginning that hooks them right away, they might not read the rest. So, if we’re all agreed that beginnings are very important, the next natural question is how to make beginnings great.

Twelve years, 50 books, and countless workshops and craft lessons in, I’ve gathered a list of tips over time that I hope you’ll find useful. Here are my top 4 tips for writing great beginnings.

TIP #1: FIGURE OUT WHERE TO START

Figuring out where to start a book is sometimes the hardest part. Starting too soon in the story you’re confusing the reader and not ground them. Starting too late and you’re giving large info dumps and backstory. Your opening scene is perhaps your most important, so let’s look at a few ways to approach it.

Show the “Before Picture”

Open with where the character/world is starting from but be deliberate about the snapshot you are showing. What does this moment say about the character or world they are in? Why does the reader care? What impact does this moment have on the character, the conflict, or the inciting incident? How will it be different from the “end picture”?

Avoid the “Before Picture” Cliches (or Use them with Purpose)

Writer’s Digest has a great list of common cliched and overused openings to books. Unless you can break the rule well by putting a unique twist on it, try to avoid these.

Make the “Before Picture” Not Boring

The reader isn’t going to care about a random character sitting around having coffee with their best friend. Not yet. So try one of these tricks to up the interest level:

• Surprise the Reader: Do start with what looks to be a boring, day-in-the life moment, and then surprise the reader with unusual dialogue or characterization.
• The Best Day Ever: The character is having a great day. Show the reader what the character is about to lose with the inciting incident, so it makes that moment more emotionally impactful.
• A Very Bad Day: The character is having an “everything that can go wrong does” kind of day. Bonus: Make the worst day count by having it feed into the inciting incident in some way.
• Drop Into Action: I’m not saying start with a battle, unless it works for the genre or story (look at every Mission Impossible movie ever). But give the character action. They aren’t just sitting and talking or thinking.

TIP #2: CONNECT TO THE MAIN CHARACTER

Many readers will put a book down if they don’t like the main character immediately. Even if your character is going to start from an unlikable place and grow, readers aren’t patient enough to read that far. Some things to try include:

Give the MC a Compelling Voice

Give your character a voice right off the bat. Show their personality through action, through dialogue, through short bursts of internal monologue, and through reaction.

Create Complex Motivation

Motivations, such as love, power, revenge, or self-discovery should be strong enough to drive the MC to action. Even better if their motivation conflicts directly with their own personal desires or needs or is tied to their conflict or to the inciting incident.

Give Them a Fatal Flaw

If a character is perfect, they have nowhere to grow. Also, perfect tends to stir up feelings of resentment in readers, rather than interest. Give the MC a relatable flaw which you can then tie to their character arc and even to the conflict.

Make Them Sympathetic

Give the reader a reason to take the character’s side. For example, we are naturally more sympathetic to a person who gets knocked down, and even more when they get back up.

“Save the Cat”

The well-known Blake Snyder technique. Give the character an action that shows them doing something “nice.” If they show even one tiny moment of empathy, kindness, thoughtfulness, or even astuteness, they immediately become more relatable and likable.

Show What They Love Most / What They Might Lose

Show the character with the person or doing the thing they love most. Even better, make it the thing they could lose when the inciting incident hits.

Check out Abigail Owen’s The Games Gods Play here:

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TIP #3: MAKE THE SCENES DYNAMIC

The biggest mistake I see in beginnings is paragraphs or pages of the same thing. Just internal monologue, or just exposition, or even just action, which can be disorienting. Even worse if all that same doesn’t drive the story forward. Here are a few ways to make sure you are keeping your writing as dynamic as your plot and characters:

Focus Beyond the First Line

A first line can be used to shock, to draw in, to set tone, to establish a compelling voice, and more. But often writers end up focusing so much on the first line, what comes after isn’t as good. Fine tune the entire beginning first, then go back and create that amazing first line.

Limited & Purposeful Backstory

James Scott Bell, gives this tip: Highlight any lines about the backstory a bright color. This will give you a visual clue where you’re spending too much time on it. Then whittle. Decide what’s most important for the reader to know right then to either ground them in the story so they aren’t lost, or to move the story forward. Trim the rest.

Every Scene Gets More Than One Purpose

Every scene should have a purpose that drives the story forward—establishing character, plot, conflict, tone, theme, setting, and so forth. But it’s even better if there’s more than one purpose to a given scene. Add layers of purpose!

Mix Up Your Narrative Modes

Use a quick hitting mix of exposition, description, internal reflection, internal monologue, dialogue, and action. Think of it as a playing a piano. If you hit the same note over and over, listeners will tune you out quickly. The goal is to play lots of different notes in a way that makes music.

TIP #4: MAKE THE INCITING INCIDENT HURT

This tip I got from a fantastic Pandemonium on Beginnings. The inciting incident is the moment that the character has the tables flipped on them, their world turns upside down, they are given an impossible decision, or what they love most is ripped away. It’s what sets that character on their journey and starts the conflict. Already this is an important moment. But you can punch it up by taking advantage of all the ways it impacts the MC.

Make It the Worst Possible Thing

By now you’ve established who your character is and what’s important to them. If the inciting incident can be the worst possible thing to happen, based on that characterization, it will hurt more.

Changes to Future, World, and Sense of Self

That fatal flaw you established earlier, was it involved? Does the inciting incident directly impact who they see themselves to be? What about their motivations or their internal conflict? Does it tie to their backstory? What is going to change about all those things?

Add Insult to Injury

Now make it worse. Find a way to add insult to injury and rub salt in that wound. What if the inciting incident is their fault? Or it’s served up by their worst enemy? Or it takes away the thing they care about the most?

If you didn’t know before, now you know that I’m a fan of lists. LOL. I hope a few of those were good arrows to add to your arsenal as a quiver. Now go out there and write your own great beginnings!

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(5 Tips for Writing About Grief Without Bogging Down Your Reader.)

When I first started my novel Pocket Full of Teeth in late 2020, I was in the throes of grief. Like many of us, I was isolated and lonely from a year of quarantine. I was unhappy in my career. I was grieving relationships of the people I’d lost, and it was abundantly clear which relationships I’d outgrown. On top of that, I was living with health conditions that doctors only took seriously when I couldn’t perform everyday tasks.

To escape, I dove into the story of Cat and her haunted manuscript. In many ways, my first draft was a sad, sappy version of what it feels like to experience loss and be completely consumed by grief. Thank goodness, that’s where good editing came in on the second, third… okay, fifth drafts, but it was only when my novel was finished that I realized something greater: Storytelling (and writing in particular) is about the circle of grief.

Many writers are familiar with Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey,” and many more are probably familiar with “The Five Stages of Grief.” When I looked through my own experience writing, I could see that they matched up perfectly, and that in many ways, storytelling is its own grief process that helps us let go of our old selves to accept something new.

Grief and Leaving the Ordinary World

The Hero’s Journey starts with a hero in their ordinary world who gets called to adventure. Something shakes them up so completely that their lives are changed forever, and they can never go back to life as they know it. Many times, the hero is called several times before they finally accept their role as the hero and embark on their hero’s journey. They are in denial (the first stage of grief) and can’t comprehend why or how the events are happening. They are left stunned and questioning how it can be true until they realize that there’s no going back.

As writers, we experience denial when an idea first comes to us. An idea pops into our heads and simply won’t leave us alone. We question if it’s a good idea or if we’re able to pull it off. We don’t have all the answers, but we know that ultimately we must follow the tough topics and leave our old ways of thinking behind. If, for example, we’ve always thought that love is unconditional, we might be forced to explore this topic through the eyes of a character who has known nothing but conditional love. 

We leave our idealistic ways of thinking behind and ask what might happen if someone was only shown conditional love. How would that affect their relationships? How would that affect their self-esteem? How would they raise a child of their own? Following these questions, the writer is forced from their comfortable place behind the keyboard into the story of their hero.

Entering the Unknown

Once the hero enters the unknown world, they are faced with allies and adversaries who will test and teach the hero as they work to realize their great potential. They are in constant motion–and constant friction–so that they might shine just like a plain piece of coal would after experiencing high pressure. It is only after this intense period that the hero can become who/what they were meant to be all along. This process is NOT comfortable, however, and the hero experiences constant setbacks, frustration, and anger.

Much like the tests and trials experienced by the hero, a writer is tested when they work through their novel. Often, they will let anger (the second stage of grief) take over. They toil with the larger themes in their writing. They wrestle with big issues and allow tension to build. They see what works and what doesn’t work and find that the things that don’t work often teach them more than the things that do.

This is the slog. It is hard, and it is messy, but it is essential to the writer’s voice and the character’s journey.

Battle Royale

When the character is ready to finally fight their big battle at the climax, they face the hardest challenge they could ever imagine. Similarly, writers often face the challenge of finishing their work. What answers have they learned along the way? What inconsistencies do they see? What are the many possible ways the character could work through their conflict and what does that reveal?

It is usually at this point that writers give up. They enter the bargaining stage. They convince themselves that they aren’t writers and that they have no idea what they are doing. They question their talent and the quality of their ideas and sometimes their sanity. They’ve tried to slog through the mess and finish their work, but writing is hard. Yet, this is where the magic happens. 

This is the big battle that all writers face–embodying their identity as a writer. Through the big battle, they can finally understand that they are a good writer and that they can explore tough topics that change a reader after the story is done.

The Darkest Hour

After the climax, every character experiences a type of death. Sometimes this is a real event where someone dies. Other times, death is a loss of innocence or heartbreak or saying goodbye. They must grieve the things they have lost along the way. They have entered the abyss.

Writers also go through a darkest hour. The fourth stage of grief–depression–often follows after they finish their book. They come off the high of completing a manuscript and can finally see the next steps… but that also means they see the amount of editing and submitting and marketing they need to do to get a book into reader’s hands–all of which are not for the faint of heart. It truly is the darkest hour.

Lessons Learned

Just like our hero who returns to the ordinary world after their journey, so too do writers. They enter the fifth stage of grief–acceptance–however this stage is like a comforting welcome home. They’ve finally reached the point where the work is over and they have come to terms with their own journey in the process.

For the writer, though, this entire grief cycle isn’t final. It’s cyclical. It comes and goes and restarts as many times as necessary to work through an idea or a chapter or their work as a whole. The important part is that we trust the process because we all go through it and it allows us to become great storytellers along the way.

So What Can That Teach Us?

As writers, we are always working through the complex situations and relationships around us. We can see how things work and see interesting ways to convey our big ideas into stories that can change lives. Yet, we are finding ourselves as much as our characters are finding themselves as we work through ideas of identity, love, legacy, revenge, and society (just to name a few) in our own writing.

I knew I had to follow the ideas that came forth from writing Pocket Full of Teeth, such as how do our perspectives influence the stories we tell and can we get a complete picture of a story if we include multiple perspectives? The process wasn’t comfortable or easy. I definitely went through all the stages of grief as I wrote the book, but through this novel, I became a better writer with a better understanding of those complex questions.

As writers, we have ideas that won’t leave us alone, we follow them into the unknown and face big questions in an epic battle (often bargaining for the story to work, please, work!), and ultimately we let our old ways of thinking die so that we can accept a new reality with a new–and often more nuanced–way of thinking.

We are all storytellers, so it would only make sense that our stories mirror our process for growth. In this way, we are not consumed by grief. We learn from it. We share it. We learn complexity and empathy because of it. And we become better writers–and better human beings–because of the stories that connect us. 

Check out Aimee Hardy’s Pocket Full of Teeth here:

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