Interiority in action-focused scenes in Layne Fargo's The Favorites

As you would expect of a novel set in the world of competitive ice dancing, much of the plot of The Favorites is anchored to high-suspense competition scenes. What you might not expect is that these scenes have a much higher percentage of interiority than action.

Let’s walk through chapter eight of the novel, the first competition scene, and see how Fargo is using this important and flexible tool.

Fully half the scene consists of interiority, with action, summary, and setting occupying a second big chunk, and tiny sprinkles of backstory, character, and dialogue adding seasoning. This is the reverse of what we saw in my scene study of King of Ashes, where interiority was crucial but used more sparingly; here it becomes the dominant note.

Let’s now look at the first way Fargo uses interiority in this scene. We open in summary on the last day of the competition, the National Ice Dancing Championship in Cleveland, Ohio. Kat and Heath are teenagers competing in their first major competition—fourteen years before the 2014 Olympics, the much-teased climax of the novel. The stakes are high: Winning a medal is their only hope for attracting the sponsorships and coaching they need to keep competing. And the odds are stacked against them: Kat has lost both of her parents, Heath is in foster care, and they’ve had to scrape together funds for what training and equipment they do have.

Fargo increases those odds, and thus the suspense, in chapter six, when another skater, Bella Lin, runs into Kat during a practice session, sending her slamming into the ice and injuring her hip. Bella and her twin brother Garrett are Kat and Heath’s main competition and opposite from them in almost every way. They are the children of the wealthy and celebrated Sheila Lin, herself an Olympic gold ice-dancing champion and now their coach.

The summary sentences (A in the figure below) focus on Kat’s injury, reminding us of the long odds against them: “I broke [the day] down into small, manageable steps, like in training. . . . I got through the day one excruciating moment at a time.” And then we get a tiny bit of setting (B) as Heath and Kat wait to skate.

At this point we get our first action of the scene (C): “He stood behind me, palm pressed against my stomach, and we took slow, deep breaths together until we felt our pulses beat in sync.” Fargo then uses two sentences of interiority (D) to draw out this hushed, tense moment before they begin. We learn that Kat always feels calm when she and Heath are touching, and we’re reminded that this could be their last competition. Fargo is deepening our knowledge of the relationship between the two, drawing us closer to Kat and reminding us of the high stakes, just as she used the opening sentences of the chapter to remind us of the long odds.

Only now does the performance begin, as they skate out to center ice (E). Half a page later, the performance ends with a final action, “a quick, chaste kiss” (I). Fargo doesn’t break the performance down moment by moment or include a lot of detail about their movements. She includes only two more action beats: “we wound ourselves around each other in a sinuous combination spin” and “We ended with a standing spin that left us facing each other, Heath’s hands around my waist.”

The real drama of the scene, it turns out, is located at the end as Kat and Heath wait for their scores, which I’ll discuss in a moment. For the first half of the scene, during the performance, Fargo instead uses a combination of setting, summary, backstory, and interiority to help us sink into what it feels like to be Kat during those four minutes.

Let’s look more closely at the moment they skate out (E):

Fargo opens with action, then immediately drops into two quick beats of interiority—“I let it all fall away. Not just the pain—everything.” Next come three sentences of pure setting: the crowd humming, skates scraping, announcer speaking—sounds any spectator could hear. Then she returns to interiority, narrowing from the public noise to sensations only Kat can feel—the pain, the heat of Heath’s fingers. The action is visible to both POV character and audience, the setting is the world everyone shares, but the interiority is accessible only to Kat—and to the reader, via the tool of interiority.

Here we see the power of interiority—the rare and privileged access it can give us. Many of us have likely watched skating competitions, maybe even in person. We have access to a million different sensory impressions that the skater might be noticing too. But the one thing we don’t have access to, can never have access to, is what the skater is thinking and feeling before, during, and after the competition. We can make guesses based on body language and facial expression, but those crumbs of information just make us hungry for more. And fulfilling that desire for more is exactly what Fargo delivers via interiority.

To try this technique yourself, look for an action-focused scene that could be enhanced by additional interiority. How could you use interiority to reveal the inner life and sensory experiences of your POV character? What does privileged access look like in this scene? What do outside observers not have access to that you could reveal to readers through interiority?

You can also use interiority to move around in time—especially if your narrator is looking backward, narrating from a future version of themselves. The Kat who is narrating this chapter is twenty-four years older than the Kat who is skating in this scene, and we get little glimpses of that older Kat who already knows how this part of the story plays out. In fact, that’s how Fargo sidesteps narrating the performance itself, with this bit of interiority (F): “I don’t remember much about that free dance.”

After this passage, we get a bit of summary (G), telling us they were skating to a medley of songs from Madonna’s Ray of Light album, a detail immediately deepened by a chunk of backstory, which takes us further backward in time and reminds us of what Kat’s trying to escape—her poverty and the custody of her drug-addicted and violent brother: “Heath had recorded it off B96 for me, and I’d worn out the cassette, playing it over and over until Lee smacked the wall and shouted to turn that shit off.” Kat is competing, in part, to break free from her brother, so this bit of backstory also reminds us of the high stakes of this competition.

Backstory shares the privileged access of interiority because it always takes place inside the mind of our POV character, invisible to the other characters in the scene. Immediately after the backstory snippet, we hear directly from 2024 Kat again (H): “Here’s what I do remember about our first national final . . .” The rest of the performance section of the scene toggles back and forth between action—a “sinuous combination spin,” a “standing spin”—and interiority, most of which is again focused on what Kat is feeling: Heath’s breath on her neck, the burning in her legs. The performance ends with one final action, a “chaste kiss,” after which we hear from 2024 Kat once more, who notes that it was “chaste compared to the way we kissed when we were older anyway” (J).

Fargo is drawing attention to the narrative layers here, reminding us that our narrator is the same Kat who declared in the prologue that she will tell the story in her own way, on her own terms. How, we might wonder, is Kat’s knowledge of what comes later, and her desire to correct the record or shape the narrative, influencing what she remembers and what she chooses to tell us? Is Kat a reliable narrator of her own past?

As soon as Kat and Heath step off the ice, readers want to know the answer to the next story question: How will they score? Just as we saw Moore doing in The God of the Woods, Fargo makes us wait to get the answer until the end of the scene. In the meantime, she uses a few snippets of interiority to remind us of the stakes and give us the context she wants us to have when we hear the results.

Kat reveals her own expectations, for example: “That was the best we’d ever skated. It had to be enough to put us into fourth. Maybe even higher” (K). She reminds us that she’d been dreaming of this moment since she “was four years old” and emphasizes that the results of this competition will determine whether they have the chance to keep skating at all: “this competition would be the beginning for us, not the end” (L).

At this point, Fargo allows us to see the technical marks, which are high but not breathtaking (M). An action beat—Kat clutching a rose and Heath’s knee—heightens the drama, then another long chunk of interiority pauses the moment, building the suspense, as Kat gives her theory about the “pure magic” of the artistic score (N): “If you can make every person in the arena, from the front row to the nosebleeds, feel something real? That’s how you win.”

Only now does Fargo allow the last beats of the scene to fall into place: a line of dialogue as the marks are announced; two action sentences to convey suspense (Kat holds her breath, Heath holds her closer); and then the closer, a beat of summary followed by interiority: “Then the first number appeared, and I forgot how to breathe.” The interiority signals dramatic intensity but doesn’t reveal the final results; we’ll have to turn the page to the next chapter to get those. And in my post on the structure of the novel, we’ll be looking more closely at how Fargo uses cliff-hangers just like this one.

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