Jo Schulte has an article on the Writer’s Digest website dated May 28, 2025 about how a writer can establish the mood in a story.
Jo Schulte
Jo Schulte grew up chasing fireflies in Michigan, spent many years navigating London’s publishing industry, and now calls Atlanta home, y’all. When she’s not writing, Jo can be found walking her dog, getting distracted by renovation projects, or enjoying a well-earned brunch (the housecleaning can wait).
Jo says, “Before characters speak or plot threads intertwine, before a reader knows the rules of a world or the stakes at hand, what greets them first—quietly, viscerally—is mood. Mood shapes tone, reinforces theme, and interacts with protagonists as deliberately as any villain or ally. It’s the foggy breath in the late autumn woods, the hum of neon lights in a dystopian alley, the salt tang in the air as a ship crests a storm-spined wave.
Mood isn’t just the flavor of a story—it’s the foundation of setting. Before readers know where they are, they need to know how to feel. That emotional tone becomes the lens through which they understand place. Setting isn’t a neutral canvas; it’s an invitation into a living, breathing world. A map might show where the towns are, but mood shows you how those towns feel. It’s where setting really begins.
If you sit down and start describing trees, you’re going to end up with—guess what?—trees. But if you sit down and ask, “What do I want the reader to feel here?”, your descriptions will carry emotional weight. A clearing in the woods can be peaceful, ominous, ancient, or desolate—it all depends on the tone you choose.
In The Whisperwood Legacy, I wanted a setting that felt like nostalgia gone sour. The story unfolds in an abandoned amusement park in the Appalachian Mountains—a place meant to feel like memory: familiar, even comforting, but wrong in the way a dream curdles when you try to hold onto it. The rides aren’t beautifully decaying; they’re stubbornly refusing to collapse, clinging to the past like a bruise that won’t fade. That feeling—of something rotting just beneath the surface—is the emotional tone that shaped every detail.
Tip: Before writing a scene, ask yourself what emotional undercurrent should hum beneath the surface. Is this a place that soothes, unsettles, tempts, or traps? Jot down two or three feelings the setting should carry—not just what it looks like. Let that guide every detail.
A strong setting doesn’t just look good—it works hard. It should reveal something about the characters, plot, or world. If it’s not doing at least one of those things, it’s just set dressing.
In The Whisperwood Legacy, the park is owned by the protagonist’s family. Every broken ride, every dusty booth, every desilvered mirror ties into the central mystery she’s unravelling. The setting isn’t just eerie; it’s personal. It matters to her, which means it matters to the reader.
Tip: Ask yourself, “Why this place? Why not somewhere else?” If the answer is “because it’s spooky,” dig deeper. Why this spooky place? What emotional or narrative connection does your protagonist have to it? Bonus points if it’s complicated.
A well-developed setting doesn’t just exist—it affects. To build one that resonates, you need more than a visual snapshot. The best settings reach into the body: They hum in your ears, cling to your skin, sit heavy in your lungs. They make readers feel something. That’s where sensory details come in—not as decoration, but as emotional cues.
We often talk about five senses, but there are more: temperature, balance, pressure, the sense of being watched. The goal isn’t to check off every sense—it’s to choose the ones that amplify the mood. A sticky floor can make a room feel oppressive. The sharp scent of antiseptic can make a hallway feel sterile and cruel. These choices turn static space into living atmosphere.
Tip: When developing a setting, ask which sensory detail best serves the emotional tone. Instead of listing what’s there, consider what your character notices and feels. A creaking stair might do more than a paragraph of visual description, particularly if it’s the only sound in a house that should be empty.
Setting isn’t static. As your character changes, their relationship to the world around them should shift too. This emotional arc is one of the most powerful tools in storytelling.
At the beginning of The Whisperwood Legacy, the park is a decaying monument stuffed with history. Then it becomes a puzzle. By the end, it’s something else entirely. That change in how the protagonist sees her surroundings reflects her internal transformation.
Tip: Identify two or three key locations in your story. How does your protagonist feel about each one at the start? How does that evolve? Let the setting mirror or contradict their emotional arc.
The most memorable settings aren’t pristine or sweeping—they’re specific. They’re strange. They have a sense of lived-in oddity that makes them feel multidimensional. The best details are the ones that make a reader pause and think, wait, what?
In Whisperwood, I could have just created a park with aesthetic attractions, but instead every facet of the park is connected not just to fairy tales, but deeply personal histories. For example, the house on the park grounds isn’t just a home with vibes, it’s a clapboard mansion where the basement is off limits, the bedrooms are decorated and referred to by colors, and all the landlines have been ripped off the walls. These aren’t generic moody images—they’re eerie because they’re specific, and because that specificity matters to someone. Everything has history. Everything has a story.
Tip: Add one weird, memorable detail to every major setting. Make your world feel like it has secrets and history.
Ultimately, setting isn’t just where the story happens—it’s why the story feels the way it does. It anchors emotion, drives atmosphere, and creates the lens through which everything else is experienced. When you start with mood, you’re not just sketching a backdrop; you’re inviting the reader into a world with its own weather, weight, and wonder.
So set the scene like you mean it. Choose a mood that distorts the light into the temperature of your choosing. Build a place that does more than exist—make it ache, thrill, hum, lure, swoon, or unsettle. Turn a setting into its own story.”
The Conversation website has an interesting article on this subject, written by Katherine Day, Lecturer, Publishing, The University of Melbourne, Reneé Otmar, Honorary Research Fellow, Faculty of Health, Deakin University, Rose Michael,Senior Lecturer, Program Manager BA (Creative Writing), RMIT University, and Sharon Mullins, Tutor, Publishing and Editing, The University of Melbourne, all of whom,presumably, are Australians. The article is dated February 12, 2024.
They say, “Writers have been using AI tools for years – from Microsoft Word’s spellcheck (which often makes unwanted corrections) to the passive-aggressive Grammarly. But ChatGPT is different.
ChatGPT’s natural language processing enables a dialogue, much like a conversation – albeit with a slightly odd acquaintance. And it can generate vast amounts of copy, quickly, in response to queries posed in ordinary, everyday language. This suggests, at least superficially, it can do some of the work a book editor does.
We are professional editors, with extensive experience in the Australian book publishing industry, who wanted to know how ChatGPT would perform when compared to a human editor. To find out, we decided to ask it to edit a short story that had already been worked on by human editors – and we compared the results.
The experiment: ChatGPT vs human editors
The story we chose, The Ninch (written by Rose), had gone through three separate rounds of editing, with four human editors (and a typesetter).
The first version had been rejected by literary journal Overland, but its fiction editor Claire Corbett had given generous feedback. The next version received detailed advice from freelance editor Nicola Redhouse, a judge of the Big Issue fiction edition (which had shortlisted the story). Finally, the piece found a home at another literary journal, Meajin, where deputy editor, Tess Smurthwaite, incorporated comments from the issue’s freelance editor and also their typesetter in her correspondence.
We had a wealth of human feedback to compare ChatGPT’s recommendations with.
We used a standard, free ChatGPT generative AI tool for our edits, which we conducted as separate series of prompts designed to assess the scope and success of AI as an editorial tool.
We wanted to see if ChatGPT could develop and fine tune this unpublished work – and if so, whether it would do it in a way that resembled current editorial practice. By comparing it with human examples, we tried to determine where and at what stage in the process ChatGPT might be most successful as an editorial tool.
The story includes expressive descriptions, poetic imagery, strong symbolism and a subtle subtext. It explores themes of motherhood, nature, and hints at deeper mysteries.
We chose it because we believe the literary genre, with its play and experimentation, poetry and lyricism, offers rich pickings for complex editorial conversations. (And because we knew we could get permission from all participants in the process to share their feedback.)
In the story, a mother reflects on her untamed, sea-loving child. Supernatural possibilities are hinted at before the tale turns closer to home, ending with the mother revealing her own divergent nature – and looping back to offer more meaning to the title:
pinching the skin between my toes … Making each digit its own unique peninsula.
Round 1: the first draft
We started with a simple, general prompt, assuming the least amount of editorial guidance from the author. (Authors submitting stories to magazines and journals generally don’t give human editors a detailed, prescriptive brief.)
Our initial prompt for all three examples was: “Hi ChatGPT, could I please ask for your editorial suggestions on my short story, which I’d like to submit for publication in a literary journal?”
Responding to the first version of the story, ChatGPT provided a summary of key themes (motherhood, connection to nature, the mysteries of the ocean) and made a list of editorial suggestions.
Interestingly, ChatGPT did not pick up that the story was now published and attributed to an author. Raising questions about its ability, or inclination, to identify plagiarism. Nor did it define the genre, which is one of the first assessments an editor makes.
ChatGPT’s suggestions were: to add more description of the coastal setting, provide more physical description of the characters, break up long paragraphs to make the piece more reader-friendly, add more dialogue for characterisation and insight, make the sentences shorter, reveal more inner thoughts of the characters, expand on the symbolism, show don’t tell, incorporate foreshadowing earlier, and provide resolution rather than ending on a mystery.
All good, if stock standard, advice.
ChatGPT also suggested reconsidering the title – clearly not making the connection between mother and daughter’s ocean affinity and their webbed toes – and reading the story aloud to help identify awkward phrasing, pacing and structure.
While this wasn’t particularly helpful feedback, it was not technically wrong.
ChatGPT picked up on the major themes and main characters. And the advice for more foreshadowing, dialogue and description, along with shorter paragraphs and an alternative ending, was generally sound.
In fact, it echoed the usual feedback you’d get from a creative writing workshop, or the kind of advice offered in books on the writing craft.
They are the sort of suggestions an editor might write in response to almost any text – not particularly specific to this story, or to our stated aim of submitting it to a literary publication.
Stage two: AI (re)writes
Next, we provided a second prompt, responding to ChatGPT’s initial feedback – attempting to emulate the back-and-forth discussions that are a key part of the editorial process.
We asked ChatGPT to take a more practical, interventionist approach and rework the text in line with its own editorial suggestions:
Thank you for your feedback about uneven pacing. Could you please suggest places in the story where the pace needs to speed up or slow down? Thank you too for the feedback about imagery and description. Could you please suggest places where there is too much imagery and it needs more action storytelling instead?
That’s where things fell apart.
ChatGPT offered a radically shorter, changed story. The atmospheric descriptions, evocative imagery and nods towards (unspoken) mystery were replaced with unsubtle phrases – which Rose swears she would never have written, or signed off on.
Lines added included: “my daughter has always been an enigma to me”, “little did I know” and “a sense of unease washed over me”. Later in the story, this phrasing was clumsily suggested a second time: “relief washed over me”.
The author’s unique descriptions were changed to familiar cliches: “rugged beauty”, “roar of the ocean”, “unbreakable bond”. ChatGPT also changed the text from Australia English (which all Australian publications require) to US spelling and style (“realization”, “mom”).
In summary, a story where a mother sees her daughter as a “southern selkie going home” (phrasing that hints at a speculative subtext) on a rocky outcrop and really sees her (in all possible, playful senses of that word) was changed to a fishing tale, where a (definitely human) girl arrives home holding up, we kid you not, “a shiny fish”.
It became hard to give credence to any of ChatGPT’s advice.
Esteemed editor Bruce Sims once advised it’s not an editor’s job to fix things; it’s an editor’s job to point out what needs fixing. But if you are asked to be a hands-on editor, your revisions must be an improvement on the original – not just different. And certainly not worse.
It is our industry’s maxim, too, to first do no harm. Not only did ChatGPT not improve Rose’s story, it made it worse.
What did the human editors do?
ChatGPT’s edit did not come close to the calibre of insight and editorial know-how offered by Overland editor Claire Corbett. Some examples:
There’s some beautiful writing and fantastic themes, but the quotes about drowning are heavy-handed; they’re given the job of foreshadowing suspense, creating unease in the reader, rather than the narrator doing that job.
The biggest problem is that final transition – I don’t know how to read the narrator. Her emotions don’t seem to fit the situation.
For me stories are driven by choices and I’m not clear what decision our narrator, or anyone else, in the story faces.
It’s entirely possible I’m not getting something important, but I think that if I’m not getting it, our readers won’t either.
Freelance editor Nicola, who has a personal relationship with Rose, went even further in her exchange (in response to the next draft, where Rose had attempted to address the issues Claire identified). She pushed Rose to work and rework the last sentence until they both felt the language lock in and land.
I’m not 100% sold on this line. I think it’s a little confusing … It might just be too much hinted at in too subtle a way for the reader.
Originally, the final sentence read: “Ready to make my slower way back to the house, retracing – overwriting – any sign of my own less-than more-than normal prints.”
The final version is: “Ready to make my slower way back to the house, retracing, overwriting, any sign of my own less-than, more-than, normal prints.” With the addition of a final standalone line: “I have seen what I wanted to see: her, me, free.”
Claire and Nicola’s feedback show how an editor is a story’s ideal reader. A good editor can guide the author through problems with point of view and emotional dynamics – going beyond the simple mechanics of grammar, sentence length and the number of adjectives.
In other words, they demonstrate something we call editorial intelligence.
Editorial intelligence is akin to emotional intelligence. It incorporates intellectual, creative and emotional capital – all gained from lived experience, complemented by technical skills and industry expertise, applied through the prism of human understanding.
Skills include confident conviction, based on deep accumulated knowledge, meticulous research, cultural mediation and social skills. (After all, the author doesn’t have to do what we say – ours is a persuasive profession.)
Round 2: the revised story
Next, we submitted a revised draft that had addressed Claire’s suggestions and incorporated the conversations with Nicola.
This draft was submitted with the same initial prompt: “Hi ChatGPT, could I please ask for your editorial suggestions on my short story, which I’d like to submit for publication in a literary journal?”
ChatGPT responded with a summary of themes and editorial suggestions very similar to what it had offered in the first round. Again, it didn’t pick up that the story had already been published, nor did it clearly identify the genre.
For the follow-up, we asked specifically for an edit that corrected any issues with tense, spelling and punctuation.
It was a laborious process: the 2,500-word piece had to be submitted in chunks of 300–500 words and the revised sections manually combined.
However, these simpler editorial tasks were clearly more in ChatGPT’s ballpark. When we created a document (in Microsoft Word) that compared the original and AI-edited versions, the flagged changes appeared very much like a human editor’s tracked changes.
But ChatGPT’s changes revealed its own writing preferences, which didn’t allow for artistic play and experimentation. For example, it reinstated prepositions like “in”, “at”, “of” and “to”, which slowed down the reading and reduced the creativity of the piece – and altered the writing style.
This makes sense when you know the datasets that drive ChatGPT mean it explicitly works toward the word most likely to come next. (This might be directed differently in the future, towards more creative, and less stable or predictable models.)
Round 3: our final submission
In the third and final round of the experiment, we submitted the draft that had been accepted by Meanjin.
The process kicked off with the same initial prompt: “Hi ChatGPT, could I please ask for your editorial suggestions on my short story, which I’d like to submit for publication in a literary journal?”
Again, ChatGPT offered its rote list of editorial suggestions. (Was this even editing?)
This time, we followed up with separate prompts for each element we wanted ChatGPT to review: title, pacing, imagery/description.
ChatGPT came back with suggestions for how to revise specific parts of the text, but the suggestions were once again formulaic. There was no attempt to offer – or support – any decision to go against familiar tropes.
Many of ChatGPT’s suggestions – much like the machine rewrites earlier – were heavy-handed. The alternative titles, like “Seaside Solitude” and “Coastal Connection”, used cringeworthy alliteration.
In contrast, Meanjin’s editor Tess Smurthwaite – on behalf of herself, copyeditor Richard McGregor, and typesetter Patrick Cannon – offered light revisions:
The edits are relatively minimal, but please feel free to reject anything that you’re not comfortable with.
Our typesetter has queried one thing: on page 100, where “Not like a thing at all” has become a new para. He wants to know whether the quote marks should change. Technically, I’m thinking that we should add a closing one after “not a thing” and then an opening one on the next line, but I’m also worried it might read like the new para is a response, and that it hasn’t been said by Elsie. Let me know what you think.
Sometimes editorial expertise shows itself in not changing a text. Different isn’t necessarily good. It takes an expert to recognise when a story is working just fine. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
It also takes a certain kind of aerial, bird’s-eye view to notice when the way type is set creates ambiguities in the text. Typesetters really are akin to editors.
The verdict: can ChatGPT edit?
So, ChatGPT can give credible-sounding editorial feedback. But we recommend editors and authors don’t ask it to give individual assessments or expert interventions any time soon.
A major problem that emerged early in this experiment involved ethics: ChatGPT did not ask for or verify the authorship of our story. A journal or magazine would ask an author to confirm a text is their own original work at some stage in the process: either at submission or contract stage.
A freelance editor would likely use other questions to determine the same answer – and in the process of asking about the author’s plans for publication, they would also determine the author’s own stylistic preferences.
Human editors demonstrate their credentials through their work history, and keep their experience up-to-date with professional training and qualifications.
What might the ethics be, we wonder, of giving the same recommendations to every author asking for editing advice? You might be disgruntled to receive generic feedback if you expect or have paid for for individual engagement.
As we’ve seen, when writing challenges expected conventions, AI struggles to respond. Its primary function is to appropriate, amalgamate and regurgitate – which is not enough when it comes to editing literary fiction.
Literary writing aims to – and often does – convey so much more than what the words on screen explicitly say. Literary writers strive for evocative, original prose that draws upon subtext and calls up undercurrents, making the most of nuance and implication to create imagined realities and invent unreal worlds.
At this stage of ChatGPT’s development, literally following the advice of its editing tools to edit literary fiction is likely to make it worse, not better.
In Rose’s case, her oceanic allegory about difference, with a nod to the supernatural, was turned into a story about a fish.
ChatGPT is ‘like the new intern’
This experiment shows how AI and human editors could work together. AI suggestions can be scrutinised – and integrated or dismissed – by authors or editors during the creative process.
And while many of its suggestions were not that useful, AI efficiently identified issues with tense, spelling and punctuation (within an overly narrow interpretation of these rules).
Without human editorial intelligence, ChatGPT does more harm than help. But when used by human editors, it’s like any other tool – as good, or bad, as the tradesperson who wields it.
There is an article on the New York Times website by Emma Goldberg, dated 25 May 2025, which is interesting in that it reports on the methods of a high level, successful professor at a prestige university.
Sam Freedman has taught for thirty-five years at Columbia. His students have obtained 113 deals for 95 books.
Emma Goldberg is a business features writer for The New York Times. She reports on cultural, societal and economic change.
Sam Freedman leading the course on book writing that he taught for the last time this spring. “This is a big part of my life’s work,” he said.
Ms Goldberg says: “The night before the start of his final semester teaching, after 35 years, Sam Freedman had a dream that he was going to miss class. He woke up with a strange jolt of relief. What comfort, he thought, to know that after three decades he still couldn’t shake his pre-semester agita.
The most difficult work, he has always believed, ought to evoke fear.
“All these years later I’m still anxious the night before, still concerned about getting here at 7:15 in the morning to be ready for all of you,” he said, facing his students on a Monday morning in January, wearing the same dark suit that he purchased in 1989 at Rothmans when he was first starting to teach and realized he needed formal professional attire.
The seminar that Freedman teaches at Columbia Journalism School began in 1991 as something of an experiment, testing whether students could, in the course of a semester, produce a book proposal to sell and hopefully publish. The results have proved his hunch: The class has led to 113 book contracts and 95 published books, out of some 675 people who have taken it.
This spring Freedman taught the course for the last time. He didn’t want to become one of those fading professors he remembers from college, the types who used laminated notes and made students wish they’d been around to take the class in its glory years. The journalism school does not have plans to continue the class in the same form after his departure.
“The course is an institution in itself and you could almost say that about Sam — his retirement is certainly the end of an era,” said Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School, who regularly meets with Freedman at an Upper West Side diner to trade ideas about books and teaching.
Freedman began his career as a reporter at the Courier-News in Bridgewater, N.J., and later worked on the culture and metro desks at The New York Times. He went on to write 10 books, including one following a New York City public-school teacher for a year. But he realized, at a certain point, that teaching the book-writing seminar for young journalists was one way of creating something that would outlive him.
“This is a big part of my life’s work,” he told the class on their first day of the semester. “Teaching this class, it feels like it’s OK for me to keel over.”
The day had echoes of a religious induction, as Freedman told his students to be “worthy of the ancestors,” his term for class alumni. He projected onto the whiteboard at the front of the room a photo of his office “shelf of honor,” crammed with most of the 95 books that came out of the class. Midway through that first day, four ancestors came to speak.
“If he believes you have a book in you,” said Grace Williams, the author of a 2024 history of a women-owned bank, glancing around the classroom, “you definitely have a book in you.”
The relationship between books and authors is obvious and glorified, but the relationship between books and teachers is less clear. The teachers behind books are often invisible, not the hand stirring the ladle to make the stew but the hand that once wrote the recipe down on some well-worn index card.
When I wrote a book in 2020, about young doctors graduating from medical school early in the pandemic, I reached out for guidance to Freedman, the father of a childhood friend, because I’d heard about his Columbia course. He shared audio clips and met with me, over Zoom, to explain his approach to narrative writing.
What struck me then was the exactitude with which he approached the craft, the lessons he pulled from his own career and then passed around the room: that the reader should never know more than the character, that authors should master methods before trying to subvert them, that narrative is an equation comprised of character, event, place and theme (N = C + E + P + T).
“Nothing in the class is contingent on having a gift, or having the muse speak to you,” said Leah Hager Cohen, who studied with Freedman in 1991, which led her to write Train Go Sorry, about a school for the deaf.
Freedman focuses particularly on demystifying the book proposal, a piece of writing that he likens to the albino alligators which, according to urban legend, once lived in the New York City subways — surviving without exposure to the public world, and therefore evolving to be mysterious and often misunderstood creatures. During the semester, his students draft such proposals. Afterward, he sometimes connects them to agents who he feels might be interested in their reporting topics, though he emphasizes that this won’t always lead to representation.
“He’s been the godfather to an awful lot of publishing over the years,” said George Gibson, the executive editor at Grove Atlantic.
Over the decades that Freedman has taught, the publishing industry has gotten far more corporate. And other mentors who work with aspiring authors noted a recent increase in programs that support young book writers outside of journalism school, which can be costly to attend.
What has stayed consistent, Freedman insists, is the need for an obsessive work ethic, and many of his lectures are paeans to just that.
He emphasizes that there is no such thing as writer’s block, only a failure to have done enough reporting, or an ego that’s getting in the way of putting words on the page. He closes the classroom door at 9 a.m. and those who are late have to wait outside until the first break, at least an hour later. (“Latecomers will be seated at intermission,” read the sign he used to post on the door.) He tracks every grammatical error a student makes, with the expectation it will never be repeated.
Kelly McMasters, who took the class in 2003 and went on to co-teach with Freedman, recalled that when she was his student, he got so fed up with her use of parentheses that he drew her a picture of parentheses, curling up like an old pet near a rug and a bowl of food, and showed it to the whole class. “Your parentheses are fine,” she recalled him saying. “Here’s the rug they can lie down on, here’s their food bowl. You may never use parentheses again.”
“I was so mad and hurt,” McMasters said. “But you know what? He was one hundred percent right.”
If Freedman enters his classroom a bundle of nerves, his students do far more so. One current student, Ally Markovich, 29, was so intent on getting into the class that she flew to Ukraine last summer to begin reporting her book proposal even before she had applied. Another, Carl David Goette-Luciak, 33, made a ritual of meeting his girlfriend for cheap pizza every Monday night so he could share with her the notes he took during Freedman’s lectures. “You can’t go to the bookstore to tell the reader what you meant,” one of them read.
What a great experience to have had a professor like Freedman!
On the Writer’s Digest website, May 5,2025, author Paul Vidich examines the way three novels portray deception in fictional marriages to build tension and compelling stories.
Paul Vidich is the acclaimed author of The Mercenary, The Coldest Warrior, An Honorable Man, and The Good Assassin, and his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, LitHub, CrimeReads, Fugue, The Nation, Narrative Magazine, Wordriot, and others. He lives in New York City.
Paul Vidich
Paul says: “What is more intimate than trust in a marriage? My new novel,The Poet’s Game, explores the marriage between a widower who left behind a long career in the CIA and his new, younger wife who works as a Russian translator in the agency. I wanted to examine a loving relationship that is full of joy and laughter, but where one spouse has a toxic secret that calls into question the loving relationship.
“Can two people love each other and still betray each other? In The Poet’s Game, Alex Matthews and his wife, Anna Kuschenko, are trained to use lies and deceit in the course of their intelligence work, and they ultimately contend with a dark secret that will forever keep them from being entirely truthful with each other. How does a couple that uses deception in the normal course of their professional duties, approach intimacy in marriage?
“The marriages portrayed in TheOdyssey, Rebecca, and Berlin Game artfully depict the tension between love and deception, and I studied the texts to see how the authors succeeded.
“Odysseus’s wife Penelope, often described by the epithet, long-suffering, is surrounded by suitors seeking her hand in marriage during her husband’s 20-year absence. He is gone and presumed dead. Penelope defends against the suitors’ entreaties, but it becomes increasingly difficult for her to remain steadfastly faithful. When Odysseus returns, he appears in disguise as a beggar, recognized only by his household’s elderly swineherd. He hides his identity from Penelope. Is he suspicious that she betrayed him and he doesn’t want to reveal himself while he investigates? His deception is one of the epic’s curiosities, but Odysseus’s withholding makes their ultimate reunion more satisfying and Odysseus’s deceit adds dimension to his character.
“Odysseus’s behavior is a good example of what John Le Carré said of complex characters: “The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.”
“Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 romantic thriller, uses suspense and deceit in a marriage differently. The unnamed first-person narrator, a naïve young woman in her 20s who is a companion to an older woman in Monte Carlo, happens to meet a vacationing wealthy Englishman, Maxim de Winter, a 42-year-old widower. They fall in love, marry, and he brings his new wife back to his estate in Cornwall – Manderley. Maxim’s household servants, and particularly his spinster housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, take an immediate dislike to the young wife—comparing her disparagingly to the first Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca, who died a year earlier in a sailing accident.
“At Mrs. Danvers’s suggestion, the new wife dresses in Rebecca’s clothes to please her husband, who mourns the dead Rebecca. But rather than please Maxim, he is angered. The new wife suspects something is not right in their marriage, but she is helpless to discover what is wrong. Only a freak storm one night that sinks a ship off the coast results in the discovery of the missing sunken sailboat, and Rebecca’s body. The discovery causes Maxim to confess to his new wife that his marriage to Rebecca was a sham. Rebecca was cruel and selfish, took many lovers, and on the night that he murdered her, Rebecca confessed she was with child from a beau.
“Layers of deceit are drawn back in the final scenes and all that was hidden from the narrator about Rebecca’s death comes to light, drawing Maxim and the narrator closer together. Jeopardy of the shared secret deepen their bond.
“Len Deighton’s 1983 novel, Berlin Game, features the loving couple of Bernard Samson, a middle-aged British intelligence officer working for MI6, and his wife, Fiona, also an MI6 intelligence officer. They have two children, live a respectable middle-class London life that is filled with the demands of parenting, family and friend obligations, and office scandals of adulterous colleagues. Samson is charged with exfiltrating an important East German asset and in the process confronts uncomfortable evidence that there may be a KGB traitor among his MI6 colleagues. Samson’s suspicions of treachery are confirmed when he is arrested in East Germany as he helps his asset escape, and is confronted by his wife, Fiona, dressed in a KGB uniform. She joined the enemy as a young college student drawn to communist ideology.
“The villain in Berlin Game is the wife. But, in spite of Fiona’s treachery, her relationship to Samson has all the appearances of an affectionate marriage with young children, an active social life, and the little intimacies of a hard-working couple.
“In each of these marriages, one character’s lies and deceptions deepens the complexity of the relationship, and provide the surprises that make for a compelling story. One partner hides an important detail of their life, and the revelation of that detail operates to bring the couple closer together, or thrust them irreversibly apart. The reveal provides an insight into what a character wants from the spouse—Odysseus wants to test Penelope’s fidelity, Maxim wants to protect his new marriage, Fiona wants to hide her treason. Deception and a surprise reversal in the relationships propels the plots of these stories.
“Exposition is helpful to establish scenes and context, but dialogue provides the beating heart of the relationship and deployed effectively reveals the dynamic between husband and wife. Dialogue is used to imply, suggest, and hide and always for the purpose of adding to the unstable relationship between spouses. When characters come in contact with each other, sparks fly and the reader is riveted by the uncomfortable arguments and unexpected intimacies. The appearance of trust masks the inconsistencies and lies that point to betrayal. The best scenes are laden with uncertainty.
“A character’s hidden motives make use of complex maneuvers to maintain the dark secret, all the while under cover of a gauzy film of intimacy and love. The layering of intimacy and artifice creates three-dimensional characters who come alive on the page.”
William Peace Blog 