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In this episode, you will learn how to use your character’s inner thoughts to convey a unique point of view that can help build suspense in your Mystery, Thriller, or Suspense novel. Suzy and Samantha Skal use real, concrete examples to help you see how to apply this craft knowledge to your work on the page.
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Podcast Episode Transcript (unedited)
108. Using Interiority to Build Suspense
- Interiority in MTS
Suzy Vadori: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Show Don’t Tell writing podcast with me, Suzy Vadori, where I peel back the layers of how to wow your readers with your fiction, your nonfiction. Anybody can bang out a first draft, but it takes a little more work to make your book as amazing as it can be. Join me as I share the step-by-step writing techniques you could apply to your writing right away as I host successful writers who share a behind-the-scenes look at their own [00:00:30] writing lives and as I live coach writers on their pages, giving practical writing examples that will make your own writing stronger.
Nobody is born knowing how to write an engaging book. There are real and important skills that you need to learn. On this show, I cut through the noise and get you all the info you need. I can’t wait to see how this information is going to transform your writing
Today on the podcast, prepare to [00:01:00] be maybe a little bit scared, because I actually got scared when we were recording this one, which Sam actually had a lot of fun making fun of me for. But Samantha Skal is a fan of the scary, the mysterious, and suspenseful. She is the executive director of Thriller Fest, and she’s the co-founder of Shadows and Secrets Writing Retreats, which is a series of thriller and mystery-focused writing retreats in Salem, Massachusetts’ most haunted hotel.
And she’s also, like me, an Author [00:01:30] Accelerator certified book coach, but she specializes in coaching mystery, thriller, and suspense, which is shorthand is called MTS in the industry. And she works with authors all the way from novel planning through the delightful hell that is revision. These are her words.
Her superpower as a coach is brainstorming twists without ground-up rewrites, and she recently released a standalone mini course for blocked thriller writers, which is called Find Your Final Twist. She’s an enthusiast of [00:02:00] homemade sourdough and cheese of all kinds. Sam is an agent and author who writes stories that keep her up at night, and she also lives in the beautiful Pacific Northwest I can’t wait for you to hear this.
You can hear me squirming as Sam sets up. She uses so many examples in this interview where just with simple things and with the intonation of her voice and with some simple setups, she’s actually creating suspense for us. It is absolutely beautiful, and we’re gonna talk all about what twists mean. [00:02:30] We might even invent a drinking game during this.
It was a really fun interview that we recorded together, and there was so much insight that we actually created two episodes for your enjoyment. Enjoy these next two episodes. So wow. Okay. So you also coach using interiority to create suspense- Mm-hmm … right? That feeling of suspense, and we’ve been talking around it and acting like all the listeners understand, but let’s break it down.
What exactly is [00:03:00] interiority?
Samantha Skal: Great question. So interiority is inner thought. It’s that, like, you know, and I read somewhere recently that not every human on the planet has an internal monologue, which is just-
Suzy Vadori: Oh, that’s interesting. I mean- Just- … I knew that not everybody can visualize- Right … and we know people in our circle, and I work with lots of writers on that.
I’m gonna research that because I’m so interested in the brain. Yeah. It’s that I myself have a very robust inner monologue, and it, you know, it’s constantly going. So interiority comes relatively easy to me. I wonder if mine is actually visual. I wonder. Now that I think about it. Yeah. Okay. We’ll [00:03:30] take that off line, but let’s see if you’re interested.
But yeah, I mean, I
Samantha Skal: write interiority, but yeah, I don’t actually think those words.
Suzy Vadori: Okay. So, you know, you have two different ways of thinking about it just with two people here. So however your brain works, just think of interiority as inner thought on the page. It’s in between the dialogue. It’s the translation of what your character, your POV character is seeing around them.
So, you know, we’re sitting in this room, and if I were being super boring about it, I might say that, you know, Suzy is sitting on this couch, and I’m leaning against this pillow, [00:04:00] and, you know, there’s a window over there, and there’s a door. And I am to your
Samantha Skal: right. Yes. And I am about two feet
away from you.
Right. Yes. Yeah. And- And my blonde hair, whatever it is, like these details are-
Suzy Vadori: I love your blonde hair.
Samantha Skal: Thank you so much … so much. What’s the- These details are only interesting when they’re translated. So instead, it’s going to be Suzy is on this couch, and I have just noticed behind her that there is a blood spot.
There’s not, readers. For those of us, everything is fine. But, you know, it’s, I’m noticing the couch because there’s something that’s relevant to the story. I am aware [00:04:30] of the window behind me because I come, and this is again not real, I come from a background where I know that somebody is, like, looking for me, and so having a window in this room is very uncomfortable.
That is translation. That is interiority. And so you can think of it, and so I just injected some fear in that one. So if I’m in my head as the POV character and I’m- I can’t stop
thinking about that window.
Suzy Vadori: There actually isn’t
Samantha Skal: even a window, and I feel like there is now.
I just painted you a picture. Yeah.
Yeah, so you know, I have just told you so much about [00:05:00] who I am by interiority, by telling you in my inner thought as the POV character that the window is freaking me out because someone is looking for me. Absolutely. And so that, instead of it being like, oh, someone is looking for me- It’s, you’re using the translation We’re
showing it and
Suzy Vadori: not- Oh
telling
it.
We are on the Show Don’t Tell podcast. So turn that back around. I can bring it all around, and I can also, ’cause I use slightly different words, but we’re coaching the same thing. And then- Yeah … usually what I teach is that there are five elements of [00:05:30] writing that you can put on the page, and one of those is inner thoughts.
Mm-hmm. And one of those is dialogue, and the other three are setting, actions, and reactions. And to combine them all together, it’s boring to read. We don’t want three pages of interiority or inner thought- No … because, oh my goodness, you’re gonna tire a reader’s brains out. You wanna be able to, you can’t see my hands, I’m making a puzzle thing with my hands.
Yeah. Kind of like
Samantha Skal: a Rubik’s Cube.
Suzy Vadori: Like a Rubik’s Cube? Yeah. My son loves Rubik’s cubes. Yeah. Okay. So, but we’re, we’re kind of [00:06:00] trying to weave those all together to keep tickling their brains and keep them awake, which is part of what we wanna do. But also, what else you said was that your nar- like, your narrator or your point of view character, their interiority is going to translate things or interpret what’s happening.
Yeah. And you gotta remember, they are our interpreter, and we become them, and we will, like you said earlier, we will make the assumptions. If they assume something, we’ll kind of go along with it [00:06:30] unless it’s really out in left field, right? Absolutely. As long as it’s logical. Absolutely. And I, you know, I like to coach people, if you’re unfamiliar with the concept of interiority, pick up your favorite book that you felt really engaged with and look for that translation.
But then in your own work, take a page, you know, hopefully it has a little bit of dialogue on it. Maybe you have some description. Maybe you have some action. If I am the POV character and I don’t explain why I am about to take this action or explain why I took that action, it falls flat because I, as the reader, have- Don’t care, no [00:07:00] idea why you’re doing what you’re doing.
Yep. And so- Take care. Tell me … I don’t care. Yeah. Let me in your head. And we won’t know how to feel about it. Yeah. You know? Somebody knocks on the door and I open it up and it’s, I don’t know, the monkey trainer. I don’t know why I’m a monkey today. Sure. Yeah. Am I scared? Am I indifferent? I have no idea.
Right. As the reader, I don’t know, but if your point of view character does know, share that. Yeah. Because then we know how to f- we don’t know how to feel until you tell us how to feel. Exactly. And that leads me to my second thing about [00:07:30] interiority that’s so helpful with MTS especially, is interiority is the single best way to increase the fear that the reader feels.
Ooh. And so if there’s a knock on the door and, you know, Suzy is chatting about how she’s excited to, you know, talk to the monkey trainer that she’s hired to come and talk to us- And in my interior heart- She’s training my monkeys. Yeah. With so many monkeys. So many metaphors. But in my head, I’m like, “Oh my God, what if the monkey trainer, what if that knock on the door is not at all the person that she expects it to be?”
And I [00:08:00] actually think this is some- this is the person who has found me. All of a sudden, um- Wearing
Samantha Skal: the monkey trainer
Suzy Vadori: outfit … wearing the monkey trainer outfit. All of a sudden, I’m looking around me and being like, “Okay, where can I hide? What if this? What if that?” Agency. Yes. Agency. It gives you things to do- Yes
because you, we know what you want. You do not want to be found, right? Like, all of the things. Yes. Okay, that’s amazing. What is suspense? Suspense is the uncertainty that something bad will happen. Okay. That’s the best way that I know how to define it. But, you know, it’s one of those [00:08:30] things where you don’t wanna have Constant low level, never breaking suspense.
You need to give the reader a little bit of a break. And so if you’re writing a suspense novel and that is your goal, you want to be solidly in the suspense category, which I believe is always going to be either mystery focused or like psychological suspense, domestic suspense, whatever it is, right?
Suspense is present in both mysteries and thrillers. But if you want to be more solidly in the full on suspense, you need to keep in [00:09:00] mind that your reader is going to enter that story similar to horror, knowing that something bad is going to happen. So your work is already- They’re expecting it … they’re expecting it.
And so the suspense is we understand that thing is going to happen, and we’re on the edge of our seat waiting for it to happen. And that is a delicious place to be as both a reader and an author because you can play with it, right? Like a knock on the door is not just a knock on the door because we’re expecting something bad to happen.
And so every time it’s not a bad thing- I mean, a knock on the door in [00:09:30] romance is just to interrupt the first kiss and delay the kiss, right? Mm-hmm. So, so yeah. But a knock on the door in MTS means- Terrifying … something totally different. Yeah. Love that. And if we don’t even know what to be scared of, every little thing in the interiority and how the POV character translates the world around them is going to be quite scary.
Or- I’m actually getting scared just sitting here. Sorry. Life is
Samantha Skal: okay.
Suzy Vadori: Ah, right? We’re very safe together. Much better. You can take it. But specifically, you know, you can have a situation where you’re writing a suspense novel [00:10:00] and you have one POV character who doesn’t even know they should be scared, and that is also a delicious place to be because the reader knows that they should be scared, but the character doesn’t.
And so you have a different kind of suspense, different kind of- Oh, that’s really cool. So how do– we talked a little bit about structure at the beginning. Mm-hmm. And I think, you know, one of the things that I like to talk to writers about because o- oftentimes they’ll come to me with very complex structures, you know, dual timeline or many, many timelines and [00:10:30] jumping back and forth and all the things.
And for many genres the answer is usually, especially for your first book, go with a chronological timeline because it’s easier. And the payoff, I mean, even though you might’ve read that really cool twisty thing where that was a thing, unless it really- plays into, you know, the psychological thriller or something, and you’re trying to piece it all together out of order, and it’s part of the point of the book, you’re really gonna do yourself a [00:11:00] disservice trying to make it really complicated for the payoff, right?
Like, you could probably write it in chronological, in most genres, in chronological order. It’d be just as powerful, and you’d probably do a better job because it’s really hard. But in these, in MTS, what do you coach writers in terms– ‘Cause structure is often really important in how you- Yeah … deliver that information, so what would your best advice on that be?
Samantha Skal: Yeah. Well,
Suzy Vadori: it’s like with every genre, you know, confusion does not equal [00:11:30] stickiness for the reader. If anything, I mean, not if anything, it will- And it doesn’t, it doesn’t– I love that. Confusion does not actually equal suspense either. No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t. And the more confused your reader is, the m- the further out from the story they’re gonna feel, and the whole point of MTS is to suck people in and make them feel like there’s zero filter between them and what the POV character is going through.
And that is that fear, right? MTS readers want to get in to feel scared. But in terms of structure, you know, it’s pretty common, I [00:12:00] would say, to have … So for example, domestic thrillers, domestic suspense often has two POVs because we have two people against each other, and we’re not sure what’s gonna happen, and we know that they’re both scared of one another, right?
Yeah. Psychological thrillers are often, you know, they can be told from a single POV, and it’s, you know, somebody’s being gaslit, someone’s being hunted, someone’s psychologically tormenting somebody else. That can also be a multi-cast, you can have multiple POVs. Mysteries are often one, right? Particularly police [00:12:30] procedural.
Dual timelines are particularly useful if you are trying to have an old crime come to light or tell the story of an old wrong that is very relevant to story present. But in all those cases, to your point, they need to serve the story that you’re trying to tell. And so as the author, you need to know what really happened always, and you need to know what is the most impactful way for the reader experience that you can tell [00:13:00] this story.
And would you suggest, I mean, for those who are not planting it or pantsing it- Mm-hmm … which means that you write by the seat of your pants, and you don’t necessarily spend much time outlining, which is fine. But would you say, you know, lay it out in chronological order first and then mess with it and see what you wanna do?
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, so one of my favorite exercises for people is, you know, I, I sort of talked about figure out what the villain did first, right? That’s the first thing I have people do when we’re trying to figure out what the story looks like. [00:13:30] Your villain’s origin story might have started when they were, like, five years old, or it might have started when they were a teenager or, you know, someone stole something from them when they were 22.
But I’m gonna guess that you don’t need- Sure … to start there. Sure don’t. Yeah. So your villain’s story will start then, and then you’re gonna have your protagonist story, which is page one of your book. And they, they’re gonna have backstory too, but where these two timelines intersect is where you start your actual story.
And that is as close to the action as you can possibly get. We do not [00:14:00] faff around in MTS. We get right into it. And you need enough so that the reader has some background and understands some of the context about why this is so scary or what’s going on. You know, so a haunted house is a good example. So we have somebody who’s entering, you know, they, they’ve learned that they’re gonna be spending the weekend at this house, or they learn that they inherited a house or whatever.
And then we– chapter one is them getting to the house. The midpoint is they realize they can’t leave the house. So it just, you need to understand [00:14:30] what the journey is you want the reader to take when they en- when they pick up your book. Yeah. And the goal with MTS is to suck them in on page one. Do not bore them.
Do not confuse them. Be as close to the character as you possibly can with their experience, and then guide them through it and let them go until the end. In, in haunted house stuff, you… The whole point is horror, right? So like we know that it’s gonna be scary, and like they think that they’re gonna be able to leave, and then they can’t.
But the first half of the book is them being like, “Okay, this is haunted, but like this, I’ll [00:15:00] be able, I’ll be fine. I’ll be able to leave.” Then something terrible happens, they can’t leave, and then they have to Yeah, I mean, in other genres that might be a yawn fest to have that very slow build, but in, in suspense, that makes sense In, in horror and suspense, yeah, you’re, the reader knows that something bad is gonna happen, and so it’s all about that, like, ratcheting tension that you feel.
You know, and if you think of, like, I always use James Bond as an example because everyone has seen James Bond, right? We enter those movies and [00:15:30] those stories with a car action, car chase, or, like, you know, he’s jumping out of a building, he’s chasing somebody, whatever, and then we find out that it’s something to do with the true villain he has to stop from, like, blowing up the world or whatever.
Those are very action-packed, and we have little breaks where he seduces women, and then goes. But psychological thrillers, slower burn. Horror, slower burn. It’s always kind of pissed me off
Samantha Skal: how many women he s- uses and-
Suzy Vadori: Yeah … the like of it just kind of wants the, like, they can’t do it. I’m like, really? You know.
It’s, it’s crazy. [00:16:00] I, it’s just, I, you know- Speaking
Samantha Skal: of tropes.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah. Speaking of tropes, and I know, I mean, I, I dated my husband for, I’ve been with my husband for 30 years. Yeah. And so we watched a lot of James Bond movies- Yeah … inadvertently over the years. Yeah. And I’m always like, ah, and he’s like, “Let it go, let it go.
Just enjoy the movie.” I’m like, “I can’t let it go.” Okay. Sam, this has been unbelievably fun. Thanks for having me. Thank you for sitting down. I wanna know, what’s your best advice for writers that maybe wanna try writing an MTS
Samantha Skal: for the first time?
Suzy Vadori: Yeah. [00:16:30] That’s a good question. Aside from just reading and figuring out what kind of, in that subgenre you want to tell, because you do need to understand that there are, there’s full mysteries, there’s full thrillers.
Like, where do you personally wanna sit? You know, get, get into the darkness of these characters, right? Like, understand, understand their why, and that will, that will guide you, like, 80% of the way, and the rest of it is just structure. But, you know, I just, I’m just fascinated by why people do the things that they [00:17:00] do, and MTS focuses on the particularly bad parts of things, and so there’s always gonna be life and death stakes.
There always is gonna be something that’s, like, sometimes a fate worse than death. Um, so if you’re fascinated by all of that, it’s, could absolutely be your genre. And, you know, it doesn’t make- It’s a fun thing … I
Samantha Skal: mean, this is something that I’ve coached writers through before, but sometimes, you know, when you go to that dark
Suzy Vadori: place,
Samantha Skal: just
Suzy Vadori: make sure that you’re looking after,
Samantha Skal: after yourself.
Suzy Vadori: Yes, yes, and take little breaks. That’s what I tell people, too. It’s like when we’re brainstorming this stuff, like- It doesn’t
Samantha Skal: mean that you did these things.
Suzy Vadori: No, I mean,
Samantha Skal: yeah. It doesn’t mean that you want to do these things. It’s okay, and [00:17:30] sometimes it’s just your way of processing what you think is hypocritical or evil in the world,
Suzy Vadori: right?
Yeah, absolutely. It’s, I mean, it’s, it’s psychology. It’s like, why do people do what they do? But it’s a fabulous genre to be a part of. I’ve loved it so much. I am a very happy person, and I am very tr- I’m very drawn to darker stories, so here we are Amazing. Sam, how can listeners find you? ‘Cause I’m sure they’re all gonna wanna go and find everything that you do.
What is it that you do from a coaching perspective? What do you offer? Tell us about your [00:18:00] programs. Yeah. Where can we find you? Yeah, so I am samanthaskal.com, S-K-A-L, and I do one-on-one coaching. I have a writing retreat company that I co-founded with a fabulous coach as well, Carrie Savage. That retreat company is called Shadows and Secrets, which is shadowsandsecrets.com, and we have an online membership with group coaching.
And I’m also, I love planning conferences, so I’m a big part of Tiller Fest. So if you’ve ever gone to that or want to, that’s a wonderful place to meet more friendly, [00:18:30] shockingly friendly. We like to joke in the MTS community that we are the friendliest group of writers because we work our stuff out on the page.
So we are- Oh, I love it … we are just, just come and have fun. Come and have fun with us. Amazing. Thanks so much for being on the show. I can’t wait to play that twist drinking game soon. Thank you for having me.[00:19:00]
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