How well do you know your characters? Whether you are working on fiction or fact, you can’t write well what you don’t know well. If you don’t understand what your characters are doing, who they are, where they came from, do you think your readers will?
I don’t expect you to know what everything means in some sense of cosmic significance. You don’t have to be a third person narrator God. But you do–at the very least–have to see what is happening. If there are tears in the corner of her eye, just there, write about them. Who cares if the reader doesn’t need to know that once the story is finished? That’s why God made editors, and why He gave you time for cutting and rewriting. If it’s unnecessary later, it’s gone.
But if it’s not, if it is really the little glimpse of something coming only later, after some big reveal or expected twist or unexpected turn of phrase, then congratulations! You just became the master of foreshadowing. And a more interesting writer.
But that doesn’t happen if you don’t know your characters. Knowing them means watching them. Looking through their scrapbooks. Reading the labels in his shirts. Studying how she applies her make-up. And then writing it down. Significance–and vital, living writing–comes from this.
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