Flashback: Macon's Heart

I remember an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where they all get their SAT results back, and Cordelia gets a pretty high score. They’re surprised because Cordelia isn’t the kind of person they’d expect to score well on a standardized test. She says, “What? I can’t have layers?”

When I write my characters, I’m often searching for their layers. What is the thing that everyone just assumes about them? What’s one layer under that? What’s a layer deeper? And so on. What can their soulmate in the...