The Novelry on Writing Podcast: 5 Ways to Use Your Shadow Side in Your Writing

Writers have long been enthralled with the battle between good and evil, but did you know you can use your own shadow side to fuel your fiction? In this captivating episode of our podcast, The Novelry on Writing, join writing coaches Kate Riordan and Anissa Gray as they delve into the dark side of writing, and learn how to use it to your advantage. Read on for the episode transcript.

KATE: The other thing I wanted to talk about, which I think definitely applies to me as a writer, is the idea of exploring that shadow self as a safe form of revenge for past wrongs...

Introduction

[Kate Riordan] Hi, I am Kate Riordan and I’m an author coach at The Novelry. I write mystery, suspense, all the dark stuff. And I’m here today with Anissa.

[Anissa Gray] Hey Kate. My name is Anissa Gray. I am also a coach at The Novelry. I write literary fiction, women’s fiction, commercial fiction. I sort of straddle that line, and I’m happy to be here.

[KR] So we are here today, aren’t we, to talk about the shadow side of characters and people and all that stuff. And I think the idea is that, actually, we all have a dark side.

[AG] Yeah.

[KR] And we might be in denial about it, but it’s there, and it lurks there. And I think books with that layer, and particularly in the kind of stuff we are writing where we really want to get under the skin of our characters, it’s a really fun exercise, I think, as a writer, when you’re planning and you’re getting to know your characters, to work out what that secret shadow side is.

[AG] Yeah. So, we’ll run through a few tips here.

Tip No. 1: Look within

[AG] One of my first tips to find that shadow side in your character is to first look inside yourself. And then, because this is fiction, amplify it. You know, the shadow self is a very real concept, psychologically. It’s this sort of darker side of yourself. We all have this person we aspire to be, but that’s often in conflict with this darker side of ourselves. And it can create conflict in ourselves.

So one of the things I do when I’m creating a character, when I want to create a really nuanced, layered character, I start with myself and some of my own darker impulses. In my first novel, The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls, I wrote a character who had an eating disorder. So I gave her that part of myself, but for her, you know, I amplified it.

[KR] And we want that amplification. And that, you know, all our characters should be pushed and pushed.

[AG] Yeah.

[KR] I was thinking about Yellowface and how...

[AG] Oh yes.

[KR] You know, such a talking point among writers and publishing generally because, you know, who hasn’t been horribly jealous of another writer who seems to be getting more attention than them and seems to have this perfect life on Instagram, where they just always look gorgeous and they’re always kind of eating a croissant while they’re writing, while you’re at home in your pajamas and you haven’t washed? And I think that idea of stealing someone’s manuscript...

[AG] Yeah.

[KR] ... is sort of the dark side of just reading a book and admiring it and thinking: I wish I’d written that. And you push that and you get Yellowface. And you get proper stealing a manuscript from somebody who’s just died. In front of you!

[AG] Yeah. We push them to do the thing most of us wouldn’t do.

[KR] Yeah, absolutely.

[AG] And that’s the amplification process in that. In that part of a way.

[KR] Yeah. I love what you say about, you know, digging inside you.

[AG] Yeah.

[KR] And, you know, I’ve done the same. And sometimes, it’s quite subconscious. I realized... I had a chat with my mum recently because we were laughing about the fact that I write horrible mothers, and I always write horrible mothers. And my mother is not horrible; I have a really good relationship with her. It’s complex because I think female relationships are complex. But she was saying: are these kind of me? Are you getting something out on the page? And I said: no. And it’s almost a sort of... I don’t know, kind of going to a place if I had  had a horrible mother, what would I have done? And I feel like I’m in a safe place with my mum, so I can explore the idea of having a nightmare mother. But it’s a pattern that I see come up again and again in my stuff.

[AG] Yeah, that’s really, really interesting.

[KR] It’s funny.

Tip No. 2: Stress-test the characters

[KR] Now, you had another really good point that I wanted to ask you a bit more about this, which was the idea of stress-testing your characters.

[AG] Yeah.

[KR] So I guess this is a bit further on. Once we’ve dug inside ourselves, we’ve got our characters who aren’t us, because obviously that’s really important. We don’t want to write ourselves entirely because it’s very important.

[AG] Absolutely.

[KR] So, how do you do that?

[AG] I mean, I don’t know about y’all, but when I’m under stress I am, let’s just say, not my best self...

[Both laughing]

[AG] So when you put your character in a stressful situation where they’re under duress, and you work through and see, you know, do they lie their way out of it? Do they harm other people to get out of it? You really push them to the maximum by putting them under stress.

[KR] Yeah. I think it’s interesting because you write— I think you begin with character. I’m probably in a slightly more commercial zone than you. And, you know, the realities of commercial fiction now is that hook is very important and premise is very important. And I almost need to pitch to my publisher in a very succinct way. So, often I’ve realized that even though character is so important, and I love delving into characters, I have to start sometimes with that premise and sort of work backwards with it and come from the other angle. So I come up with this sort of extraordinary situation and then put an ordinary person in it who is then relatable to the reader. And so the stress-testing is almost coming at it the other way?

[AG] Yeah, yeah.

[KR] It’s sort of external, rather than your stuff is coming from internal stresses.

[AG] Yeah. So for me, you know, writing more in a literary fiction space, that conflict typically comes from inside the character. I start with character. You know, who this person is, I get to know them well. And whatever is going on is typically internal. Now, there are some outside forces that may act upon them. I have one character in my first novel who... Her family runs into financial trouble. And, you know, that’s the external force acting upon her, and she engages in illegal behavior to deal with it. But you come to see that this is a form of darkness that always lived in her. As you develop that character.

[KR] And almost that unique set of circumstances has brought that out. That it was, like you say, it was sort of waiting there.

[AG] Yeah.

[KR] Which is really interesting. And actually, you see it with characters who do heinous things and you think: if they’d had a different childhood... You know, there’s a sort of fork in the road. And if that hadn’t happened, then they would never have been tested in that way.

[AG] That’s absolutely correct. Yeah.

[KR] And would never have gone dark, as it were.

Tip No. 3: Throw rocks at your character

[KR] And also, it goes back to those Nabokov rocks, you know? That idea of putting your main character up a tree and throwing things at them.

[AG] Yeah.

[KR] And that can be, you know, childhood stuff. Or it can be... I wrote a story about a child with psychopathic traits in The Heatwave, and there was a sort of internal argument with the narrator, who was the mother, all the way through. Was it nature or nurture? And you never really know. But that was really interesting for me.

[AG] That is really fascinating. Yeah.

[KR] Yeah. I loved it.

Tip No. 4: Examples from novels

[KR] Let’s talk about some great examples. Because a really good tip, actually, if you’re trying to do this in your own book—and we use this a lot in The Novelry and I think it’s so helpful—to use other people’s books. You know, people who’ve done it well, the kind of books that we read and think: I want to write like that. And there are some brilliant, brilliant examples of shadowy self books.

[KR] I thought of a couple which, actually, are very similar, and one sort of occurred to me and then the other. So, The Collector by John Fowles and Engleby by Sebastian Faulks. Both of which I think really illustrate this idea of the unconscious dark side. This dark side that we don’t even know lurks within us. Both these men do awful things and contort themselves throughout the book to not tell you they’ve done them.

So in The Collector, he kidnaps a woman and he really believes, or he tells himself, that she will come round and she will fall for him, but he’s keeping her captive. And in Engleby—I mean, this is a spoiler coming up—but he talks very obliquely about a woman he knew at university who goes missing. And then he talks about him and his childhood and all this other stuff... And we find out at the end that she went missing because he murdered her. And it doesn’t come round till the end that he almost admits that. He never really admits it. He just gets arrested. And we’re like: oh, wow.

Were there, is there anything that’s really inspired you in that way?

[AG] One of my favorite books is The Girls by Emma Cline.

[KR] Yeah.

[AG] And so, in that book, we have a young girl. A teenage girl.

And I’m going to just back up and say: it is really important to make sure you fully understand your character’s motivations. Because those motivations push them, you know, through the novel, and they help the reader understand exactly what it is that motivates them.

So, in this novel, this teenage girl is motivated by the things we all want. Love, acceptance, belonging... All benign things. But she goes after them in a way where we see her dark side really come to the fore. You know, she ends up stealing, lying, and engaging in really, really disturbing behavior. So I love that book because it takes something that’s quite benign, something that, you know, has meaning for all of us, and it pushes this character to the edge.

[KR] Yeah. To the edge. And TV, I think, is very good for this, showing these. That kind of... A hitherto ordinary person who something happens to, and then they kind of flip. Again, it’s that idea of what was lurking there all along. And you came up with a great example earlier.

[AG] Yeah, the great Walter White in Breaking Bad. A mild-mannered chemistry professor or teacher going about his life. He gets a diagnosis and he needs money. So this is an external force acting upon him, drawing out an incredibly dark side. And, you know, with a character like that, there was really an opportunity to plumb the depths of darkness. And we ended up with one of the more interesting and intriguing characters on television. And it made me, when you were speaking earlier, think about that point of: where does this come from?  And if this hadn’t happened, would he have just gone along and been, you know, a normal human being?

[KR] Probably he would. But I think what’s really clever about that premise is he’s got nothing to lose.

[AG] Yeah.

[KR] You know, so you’ve got those external factors, like you say, but I think that’s always a good thing to think of. You know, what can I put in my book to make this character think: it doesn’t matter? Like, everything’s sort of lost anyway. So I can do what I like.

And I think it’d be very interesting if we were given truth serum, you know? What we might do in that situation. If there was ten minutes left in the world before it blew up, what would we do, maybe?

Tip No. 5: Seek revenge

[KR] The other thing I wanted to talk about, which I think definitely applies to me as a writer, is the idea of exploring that shadow self as a safe form of revenge for past wrongs...

[AG laughing]

[KR] And I’ve definitely done this. I wrote a book called Summer Fever, where I’ve got flashbacks in there, which take place at the university I attended. And I lifted that setting and it was— I went there in the late 90s and there was a particular sort of vibe there, and I won’t bore you all with the details, but it was a very weird time where, you know, lads mags... And women were really objectified in a way that is much less acceptable now. And I don’t think— I’m not that old, but actually things have moved away from that very fast.

And I used that. My main character is in so much denial about a boyfriend that she had in the past at this university who treated her really badly and tried to coerce her into doing things that she didn’t want to do, who treated her like she was worthless. But she’s decided to remember him as the one that got away and have a romantic memory of him. And so this weird denial, and that’s, I think, really interesting for the reader. Hopefully—I don’t mean necessarily in my book—but as a setup where the reader knows that this was a bad situation and the main character can’t quite see it. And there’s real suspense in that gap, I think.

[AG] Oh, I love that.

[KR] Yeah.

[AG] Writing where the reader, you know, you’re in there and you’re worried about your character. And they can’t quite see it.

[KR] They can’t see it. And you can see them going down this path. And in this book, you know, she starts having an affair 20 years on with this guy. And, of course, he’s still a total s**t, basically. And the reader’s like: God, please, you’ve got a really nice husband, what are you doing?  So it’s that road to destruction.

And I feel as though, you know, what happened to her in the past did not happen to me, but there were elements and hints of it and near-misses, and I think that was really cathartic for me. So actually plumbing those depths that are inside all of us can be really helpful and get anger out, I think.

[AG] Yeah. And again, to your point, it didn’t happen exactly to you that way.

[KR] No.

[AG] It’s amplifying it.

[KR] Yeah.

[AG] You know, taking those experiences and making them really a story that can hold a reader and intrigue.

[KR] Yeah. And sort of put it at a remove from yourself.

[AG] Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[KR] I think that can be very, very therapeutic in a strange way.

[AG] Yeah.

[KR] So this has been really interesting. I think I could talk all day about this. Thank you so much for joining me.

[AG] Thank you so much. I absolutely enjoyed it. And we can talk later in the cab. Just keep going.

[KR] Yeah, keep going. No, we’ll carry on. I’ll tell you some more safe revenges I’ve got up my sleeve! Goodbye, everyone.

[AG] Goodbye.

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Closing words

[Louise Dean] Thank you for joining us today. We are so pleased to have you along for the writing journey and we hope to see you on another episode of The Novelry on Writing.

If you’d like to learn more, visit us at thenovelry.com. From first draft to finished manuscript, at The Novelry you’ll enjoy one-to-one coaching from bestselling authors, live writing classes with award-winning authors and literary agents, and you’ll work with a publishing editor all the way for submission to literary agents toward a publishing deal.

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