Today’s post is by author Courtney Psak.
We’ve all seen it before in movies. The female character who gets into a car with a stranger or walks into a house when the door is ajar and looks like it’s been broken into. We find ourselves tearing our hair out yelling at the screen, what are you doing?
As writers, we love these moments because they build tension and suspense. And while they frustrate us as viewers, they aren’t unbelievable. The key is that the reader sees themselves in these characters. It might not be the choice they would make, but they understand why the character makes it.
Our instincts tend to be perceived as feelings rather than logic, but intuition, or gut feeling, is a cognitive process based on your subconscious observations. It’s your brain processing information that you’ve learned from your environment, whether that’s based on your own personal experiences or observed from others. Because it’s hard to pay attention to every detail you learn in life, your subconscious does that for you. When we have intuitive moments, it’s because our subconscious works much faster than the step-by-step thinking that we do all the time. It’s knowing something but not knowing why.
It’s understanding the psychology that allows us to go more in-depth with our characters as we develop them. One of the more popular examples of this is writer Aggie Wiggs on the hit show The Beast in Me. She knows in her gut that Nile Jarvis, accused of killing his wife, is dangerous. The body of Nile’s wife was never found, so it’s only speculation that he killed her. Yet his persistence, combined with her desperation for a bestselling story, pushes her to ignore that feeling. As a result, she finds herself in dangerous situations where she fears for her life that this encounter could suddenly go sideways. It’s this internal conflict that we have with ourselves that readers can relate so well to.
That tension is what drew me to write The Hostess. I wanted to showcase how women will rationalize away feelings of unease for the sake of pleasing others. And therefore allow themselves to become gaslit through various forms of manipulation.
My main character, Natalie, is staying in a guest house she has rented on this gorgeous Southhampton estate. As beautiful as it all appears to be, Natalie knows something is off. But she is recovering from a brain injury after a car accident, and she knows her medication can cause hallucinations. Even though she has been on the medication for months without issue, she convinces herself that the unease is environmental. Dismissing her intuition feels safer than confronting the alternative.
But why do women do this?
Historically, it has been acceptable to favor men as the dominant sex, creating injustices in our society and legal system. Women who have been victimized are often blamed for putting themselves in the situation to begin with, by choosing what they wore, or walking alone at night, as opposed to blaming the men that attacked them. Women do what they think society would do anyway and blame themselves. Ignoring instincts becomes a form of self-protection.
For writers, the question becomes: how do we show our character’s intuition at work?
One effective approach is focusing on your character’s physical reaction to a situation. Reflect on a time when you might’ve had an uneasy feeling. Your heart rate might’ve elevated, maybe the hairs on your arm stood on end or you froze momentarily. These are intuitive signs that your body is sensing danger before your conscious mind can catch up. They’re informed by stored experiences, perhaps even from watching a true crime documentary. When a character notices this sensation, yet proceeds anyway, it isn’t stupidity, it’s social conditioning.
There’s also the other side of intuition: Creating a character that relies too much on their intuition.
In Homeland, CIA agent Carrie Mathison is highly attuned to her instincts, but she is viewed by her agency as impulsive; her instincts make her appear erratic and emotional. Jumping to conclusions based on a gut feeling rather than real proof makes her a wild card. For writers, this creates great drama. It intensifies the plot as the character must fight those external threats, but also the disbelief from the world around her.
Intuition, ignored or not, is a great narrative tool in driving the tension and suspense in your story. Applying this to your writing heightens suspense, plants foreshadowing and invites readers into a psychological partnership with the story. They will keep turning the pages because they want to know if their own instincts are right. Did they guess who the killer was? Would they survive if put into the same position?
If you can get your readers asking those questions, you will hook them in a way that lingers beyond the final page. For writers, that’s the real power of intuition on the page, not just as a plot device, but as a reflection of the quiet decisions we make every day between safety, logic, and being believed.
Courtney Psak is a mystery thriller writer whose novels include Thirty Days to Thirty, The Tutor and The Hostess. She started her career writing for magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Self and Modern Bride. Courtney currently lives in Palm Beach, Florida with her husband and two sons. She is a member of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, the National Writers Association and the Mystery Writers of America.
Women can be raised to think for themselves, and this will help (in real life) to avoid some of the instances that make for good fiction.
Yes, intuition–denied or too habitually followed–makes for good drama, something we want in fiction, but not so much in real life. Thanks for a good read Courtney 👏🙏❤️🌹
Read The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker. In-depth descriptions, discussions, and analyses of this aspect of the subconscious, including real-life examples. Valuable as author research and for life survival.