What Lies Beneath: Adding Subtext To Your Story

In real life, people are not necessarily open and honest about their feelings, their intentions, or their actions. Sometimes they try to hide them, and sometimes, they honestly don’t know themselves.

In writing, it adds to a character, helping round them out from 2-dimensions into 3 if you can figure out how to add the sub-text.

Sub-text is how you manage a big reveal or plot twist at the end of your book and have readers go “Oh! Of course!” rather than feeling cheated or misled.

But how do you add subtext to your novel?

Top 10 Tricks For Writing A Better Query Letter

Query letters are hard.

They’re a job application to sell a project that you’ve poured your heart, soul, and more-than-just-all-your-free-time into for months, years, or even decades.

But, if you could have told your story in 250 words or less, you wouldn’t have needed to write the whole novel!

The problem is, there are thousands of other writers who (mostly wrongly or naively) think their novel deserves to be published more than yours does. You’re reaching out to agents who’ve seen almost everything and you need to convince them that your novel is different! (Or at least written well enough that readers don’t mind)

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you how to get it right. I don’t know the secret formula either, and I suspect it’s different for every agent, and dependent on how recently that agent had lunch.

But all is not lost!

3 Things That Make a Great 1st Line

3 Things The 1st Line Of A Novel Must Do

(Or at least the 1st page)

It Must Make You Want To Read The 2nd Line
It Must Establish The Tone of The Novel
It Must (at least) Hint At A Problem

Let’s take a look at famous 1st lines and see how many of these things they manage. And how they do it…

How To Write Better Villains – a #Balticon panel

Writing Better Villains

Not all antagonists are villains.
The Biggest challenge to writing “good villains”
Which came first? The Hero or the Villain?

Writing Diversity

Diversity is a big topic in writing today.

There are so many ways to do it wrong and no one consensus on how to do it right.

Here are thoughts, from two #Balticon panels, on common mistakes and things to try to get it right.

Biggest take-away: remember, characters should be 3 dimensional, not 2-D.