What does your character NOT want to think about?

I love this question because it takes you directly to the heart of subtext, that subterranean realm, which is the story itself, the real story.

Subtext is what makes story feel so much larger than what's on the page. It's the implied, the suggested, the unspoken. As the poet Louise Gluck writes in Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry, "The unsaid, for me exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen for example, to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete. Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole...."

What haunts your character? What is that internal conflict?

In a current story I'm writing, I finally figured out my character is both repelled and attracted to her past. That insight took months. Then came a flurry of questions: How can she reconcile herself to this tension? Is there sanctuary? Even a momentary one? And that took me to my images-water, she's drawn to water. The fluidity of it, the way it allows such free movement, her initial home, ie, the womb.

As Charles Baxter writes in The Art of Subtext, "In fiction, the half-visible and the unspoken-all those subtextual matters--are evoked when the action and dialogue angle downward, when by their multiplicity they imply as much as they show."

So now that I've figured out what my character doesn't want to think about, now comes burying it in a proliferation of precise details. As Baxter says, "Our most haunting dreams, no matter how hallucinatory, are the most busily etched."