What if the main character in your novel has a secret you don’t want your reader to know? How do you handle that? Is it cheating to keep secrets from your reader?
Geoff posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:
I’m 70,000 words into my first novel. The main character is written in first person, other characters are in third person. The main character has murdered someone and the novel opens with him going to the funeral, but I don’t want to reveal he’s the killer until near the end. How do I conceal this as the main character will have been thinking about this murder from, literally, the first chapter.
Randy sez: That’s a tough one.
When you put your reader inside the head of a character, you’re obligated to tell the truth. And what do we mean by the truth?
You Owe Your Reader the Whole Truth
Witnesses in court are required to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Readers expect no less when they get inside the head of a character in a novel.
A little terminology before we go on: In most scenes, the author chooses one character as the “viewpoint character” (also called the “point-of-view character” or the “POV character.”) We’ll use “POV character” here.
The key point is that for the whole scene, the reader experiences life from inside the head of the POV character.
- The reader sees what the POV character sees.
- The reader hears what the POV character hears.
- The reader knows what the POV character knows.
- Most importantly for our purposes here, the reader thinks what the POV character thinks.
Your reader has paid for you to put her inside the head of your POV characters. You owe it to your reader to do that. If you don’t do your job, your reader can vote with her feet—she can walk away from your story. If she does, then it’s probably the last time she’ll pay you. That’s why you owe your reader the truth—because she paid for it.
Personally, I hate it when I read a novel and learn that the author has withheld essential information that the POV character knows. I still remember the rage I felt when I was reading a World War II novel once and discovered right near the end that one of the main characters, an American commando, was actually a Nazi sleeper agent. And he never once thought about this during scenes when he was the POV character.
When it’s natural for a character to be thinking about some thing (“Oh, by the way, I killed that guy in the casket.”), then it just seems wrong for the character to not think about it.
Are there any ways out of this?
Yes, there are a few, but they’re not easy and they normally don’t last very long. Here are a few ways it can be done:
- Befuddle the POV character
- Distract the POV character
- Interrupt the POV character
How to Befuddle a POV Character
Your POV character may not be a very bright cookie. Or he may be drunk. Or he may heavily medicated. Or he may be suffering from the effects of a whack to the head. Or he may be reeling from some emotional trauma. Or he may be, in some other way, an unreliable narrator.
In any of these cases, it’s plausible that he might not be capable of thinking the thought you don’t want your reader to hear. But you have to work hard for him to be incapable for a long time.
How to Distract a POV Character
Your POV character may be fighting for his life. Or he may be obsessed with some other thought. Or he may be responding to a series of intellectual challenges that are maxing out his brain. If your POV character is able to compartmentalize his mind enough that he can fully focus on something else, and there’s a very good reason to focus on that something else, then he’ll do it.
These are possible ways he might not get around to thinking the thought you don’t want your reader to hear.
Interrupt the POV Character
Your POV character may be just on the verge of thinking the thought you don’t want your reader to hear when there’s an interruption of some kind. Maybe an explosion draws everyone’s attention over there. Or maybe some other character interrupts to say something important.
This can work, although an interruption generally doesn’t last very long, so you need to be near the end of the scene when you play this trick.
Don’t Cheat the Reader
These tricks work, but they’re tricks. It’s very possible the reader will resent them. You don’t want your reader to resent you. She paid for an honest story to be told. Tell an honest story. If you need to have a POV character withhold the truth from your reader, you’d better have a very good reason—a reason your reader will agree to. And you’d better come clean at the first opportunity.
If you fool your reader once, shame on you.
You won’t get a second chance.
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I feel EXACTLY the same way, and there are a few authors i won’t read anymore because I was cheated this way. I felt betrayed.
However, Agatha Christie held back that the murderer was the POV character in first person in one of her novels.
She got away with it in my view because the POV character said something like, “You know, of course, that every suspect that had a motive to murder has been extensively investigated by me in these pages. However, the one suspect that was not investigated was me. Yes, I murdered the man, but any sane murderer won’t outright confess, but will always try to put the blame on someone else.” Or something to that effect. Anyway, it worked. I think it would probably work again, because the actually murderer was a sociopath pretending to be a deeply concerned character.
That is a workable solution. You can always give very subtle clues as to the person’s lack of moral character, but always cover those clues with some viable excuse. It would be a lot of work, but also a lot of fun to write that story.
I read a book about an Irish girl who became a British spy during WW2. She moved in with the commander of a Nazi unit in Paris and spied very effectively for a year or two. She also fell in love with the Nazi she was living with. But when the order came for her to pull out–and kill him first–she barely gave it any consideration. She just popped him and left, confessed all to her British boyfriend (who forgave her…”it’s war, some things can’t be helped”) and they lived happily ever after. I won’t be buying anything else from that author either. I would have expected at least a little anguish, y’know?
Do you not know of Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd”? It created great controversy when first published, but went on to become one of her best known mysteries. She did not cheat the reader, the clues are all there. Of course, not everyone is Agatha Christie!
Many books use an unreliable narrator. One way to get away with this is to establish very early on that the narrator cannot be relied upon, so that the reader doesn’t feel cheated when the truth is revealed at the end.
For example, he could be seen to be lying, hoaxing, generally playing around with the truth in the early chapters.
You can also avoid having him actually lie to us. But he can say things that give us a misleading impression on first reading.
In addition, as Gina says, you can plant clues for the (re-)reader to find later.
Also, it depends on how you establish the relationship between narrator and reader.
The reader doesn’t necessarily have to be inside the narrator’s head. The first person narrator could be talking to someone else (see “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”) or putting his version of events down in writing for someone else to read.
I’d read as many books with unreliable narrators as possible. “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” is a seminal one.
I’d also read Scott Turow’s “Presumed Innocent” in which we start to suspect the narrator. (I won’t give away the ending).
It’s not easy. But breaking the rules can always be done, if you know how. Often with great results
What about creating the POV character as an unreliable narrator? “Fight Club” is the perfect example. As is “Girl on the Train.” Unreliable narrators lull the reader into a sense of security that they are getting the truth, when in fact they are not. How the character phrases things they are thinking often has a double entendre that the reader misinterprets. https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/unreliable-narrator
Another method is to have the POV relate his thoughts to a third party through letters or diary. We would expect him to protect himself.
To play devil’s advocate.
Of course, you can lie.
Since when is fiction even a fraction of the truth, let alone the whole truth and nothing but the truth?
The reader is the judge and jury, is he not?
Since when does the writer-artist (the con) swear on a Bible to tell the reader the whole truth and nothing but the truth?
And so what if he did, the writer is a con practicing his craft of fiction to fool the judge and jury to escape conviction, is he not?
A book that successfully kept such a secret is Tell No One by Harlan Coben. Another was Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island.
Both are huge bestselling authors with many books under their belts. To try this with a first novel is risky. To pull it off successfully would be amazing. Best of luck with an ambitious goal.
Brad Meltzer, in one of his earlier novels, pulled that trick where crucial information was left out of the POV character’s thoughts and actions as it appears that the action occurred “off the pages” so the issue was resolved at the very end, all neatly tied up with the reader being left out of how the issue was resolved. That made me so infuriated that I vowed not to read Mr. Meltzer again and I haven’t.
I like other commentator’s suggestions on how to handle the POV character’s murder. It will be difficult to pull off but it could be a fascinating read if done successfully.
The real issue is, what’s the Story Question?
The proposed story cannot be a “whodunit” or the reveal will feel like a deus ex machina, which my dictionary defines as: “A contrived plot device in a play or novel.” The only way to make a whodunit work without screwing the reader is to not give the killer POV.
However if the story question becomes, “Will he get away with it?” then you’ve got something.
Usually the MC (main character) of a novel is sympathetic, as readers are supposed to identify with him.
The slow reveal won’t be in picking up clues and figuring out who committed the crime, but, What kind of person is this? and, Why did he commit murder?
The police detectives are hard at work trying to solve this crime. Will they? As the reader begins to understand the MC she’ll grow fearful that the police will succeed. Will the MC frame someone else? (Or is that unthinkable?) If the police arrest someone else will the MC do the right thing? Will the MC escape, face trial, or die? (Possibly sacrifice himself.)
If the story (broadly speaking) is a “police procedural.” Turning the Story Question around from who, to why and will they succeed, could create a cliche-busting novel that readers remember for a long time.
Hoo-Ray! I’m so glad to read this because I felt that same rage when reviewing a book about a hit and run murderer. I felt cheated and betrayed. If the author wanted to stir up those emotions, he couldn’t have done a better job.
What about make the POV character in denial? Or even have multiple personalities? One personality being the POV and another character being another personality that did the murder? Talk about great psychological thriller stuff. Anyway, great post, Randy!
I guess you can tell that I’ve been thinking about this a lot 😉
In Freedom’s Just Another Word by Dakota Hamilton, the narrator replays the death of her husband over and over again – almost once every two chapters. Each time, the scene is replayed a little differently and we get a little closer to the truth.
Doesn’t Nicholas Sparks do this in most of his books?