Hiding Something in First POV

I'd prefer revealing what's planned as it's put into action. Spelling it all out might impress readers with its completeness, but it will make for a boring story if it all works precisely as expected. Even if it does go according to plan, holding your cards close means the reader gets to guess at what was meant to happen, which is much more interesting.

Good luck on writing a chessmaster though. I wouldn't bet on my own metaphorical chess-playing abilities, let alone those of a character I made up who has to perform lol.

Read the Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie.

I'm, um, not going to tell you why.

But Unreliable Narrator is a common thing. You may, or may not, want to set them up as unreliable from the off (Walter Mitty comes to mind here)

The Sherlock Holmes stories of Conan Doyle and the Nero Wolfe stories of Rex Stout got around this problem by having a non-MC narrative POV character tell the story, and often puzzle at what the secretive genius MC was actually up to.

That technique worked admirably for both writers. I can't quite see how you get around playing "I've got a secret" with your reader by having your "chessmaster" somehow withhold information. For me, as reader, I'd rather see your MC be puzzled and have to figure things out as the story unfolds.

caw

_Sian_ said:

Quick question -

I've finally come up with the end for something I'm writing, but I want the main character to play chessmaster. There's a bit of manipulation going on here. Now, when he gets the idea for this, do I necessarily have to spell the idea out in all it's detail? I feel it would have more impact if the readers knew he was doing something, but weren't entirely sure what.

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That's usually preferable. The only time spelling out a plan in advance is justified is if something is going to go horribly wrong with it.

I would have no problem with finding out what's going on as the MC does. It's how real life is, really. Nothing ever goes strictly to plan, there's always deviation on the way.

I've spent a bit of time on TV Tropes reading about this topic, as one of my characters spends a fair amount of time on Batman Gambits.

In general, as BethS said, you only want to explain a plan when it's going to fail in whole or significant part. In this case, it sounds like your character is running either an Indy Ploy or Xanatos Speed Chess. Depending on which it is, those pages might assist you in providing examples of how others have handled them.

Unreliable narrators are lots of fun. Recent examples I've read are The False Prince and Dangerous Girls by Abigail Haas. Both amazing books in my opinion. Go for it.

If you want to keep your narrator reliable and not be hiding things from the reader, can you have your solution be "Plan B" that has to be invented down the road when something doesn't fall into place for "Plan A"?

Damn. I'm just not getting it. Why would this be a problem? You are saying - please correct me if I'm wrong - MC has an idea. He doesn't share it with the readers until he/she is putting it into play. How is that misleading? How is that an unreliable narrator?

That is exactly the way I'd like to read the story. It would be boring to have the MC explain the idea and then go through it all again later, unless, like BethS said, something is going to go terribly wrong.

WriteMinded said:

Damn. I'm just not getting it. Why would this be a problem? You are saying - please correct me if I'm wrong - MC has an idea. He doesn't share it with the readers until he/she is putting it into play. How is that misleading? How is that an unreliable narrator?

That is exactly the way I'd like to read the story. It would be boring to have the MC explain the idea and then go through it all again later, unless, like BethS said, something is going to go terribly wrong.

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Well, it is first person. The way I write those, the reader is inside the MC's head, knows his thoughts, sees what he sees, so it makes it difficult to come up with a plan and then suddenly his thoughts become inaccessible for that moment.

As others have suggested, there are ways around it.

You don't have to create an unreliable narrator to conceal the character's plan from the reader for a short time. I think the key is to not keep the secret for too long, and to not write it in such a way that it's like you're holding up a sheet in front of the reader saying "Nyaaa, you can't see what's going on."

I've read a lot of 1st person books where the narrator says something like "I knew what I had to do." Then, scene (or chapter) break, and he's doing it, narrating the steps as he goes.

Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden does that quite a bit. Usually, it feels pretty natural to me in those books. It flows very well, because we have been given some clues and Harry goes right into the execution of the plan we were just told he came up with.

Diane Mott Davidson does this a bit with her Goldie the caterer books, too. Goldie will say she's had a revelation, and then almost immediately use that information to track down the killer.

Dan Brown does this with Robert Langdon (though close 3rd not 1st), and I feel it's handled clunkily. Everything will be moving along, then Langdon gets a note, or a phone call and says something like "He gave me the last piece of the puzzle, and I told him the plan." Only, suddenly he's not telling ME the plan, and he's hiding that last piece from me -- deliberately. For that reason, Dan Brown's way of handling the surprise bothers me a lot more than Jim Butcher's.

ah, that's fun to do

Hiding some thoughts does not put it into the unreliable narrator category.

If your MC drives to the store to buy cheese, you don't need to go into long detail about why he brought yellow instead of white. You can't show every thought! You do not have to explain the reasoning behind every action.

The trick is to reveal enough to build mystery and suspense, while not showing all. Show too much, the suspense collapses. Show too little, and the reader doesn't have a clue and fells cheated.

You can use technique to tell the reader "hey, I'm withholding information, but it's for your own good and enjoyment, so enjoy the ride."

How many novels has the MC reached a key decision, but doesn't tell the reader? "He couldn't sleep all night long. In the morning he put his father's old pistol in his pocket and headed towards the office."

You know the authors holding back, but he's not cheating you. He never promised to reveal each and every thought. Now, if the pistol mysteriously appeared in the MC's hand in the next chapter with no explanation of how it got there, that would be cheating.

Whatever you do as an author, it's got to feel natural and in the flow. "I woke up knowing exactly what I was going to say to my boss. What I didn't know was what I was going to do about the consequences."

See how this sentence works? The author hasn't told us what he's going to say, and what he thinks the consequences are, but hasn't hidden the decision either. The author simply isn't doing a deep play by play thought readout. The reader knows the author is building suspense for the next chapter.

Bottom line, controlling the depth of the MC's thoughts is a stylistic choice you can use to the novel's advantage, just don't make the reader feel cheated.

Shadow_Ferret said:

Well, it is first person. The way I write those, the reader is inside the MC's head, knows his thoughts, sees what he sees, so it makes it difficult to come up with a plan and then suddenly his thoughts become inaccessible for that moment.

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I understand first person. However, you don't write everything that goes through the MC's head. Ending a chapter as an idea forms does not make the MC an unreliable narrator.

Myrealana said:

I've read a lot of 1st person books where the narrator says something like "I knew what I had to do." Then, scene (or chapter) break, and he's doing it, narrating the steps as he goes.

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Exactly.

I don't write in first, so take this with a grain of salt. But, as a reader, I get annoyed by first person narrators withholding details that nobody telling you a story would ever think of withholding. It reminds me that I'm reading a book that someone sat at a computer or typewriter and thought up, distancing me from the POV character and taking me out of the story.

not to make an absurd analogy or anything but..

in the game of chess, all moves, and the perceived reasoning behind the moves, are in clear sight to both players and the spectators. what make's the game interesting is that true logic behind each move is obscure, because a player can have multiple reasons for it in retrospect, or they can describe it as a blunder, or as the beginning of an attack plan, or a gamble, or anything really.. a lot of this depends on how the 'game' is played out. as we watch a game of chess (or a story) we don't necessarily need to know why some things are happening, because we know it had a purpose on some level, even if we aren't sure what it is yet. chess is most enjoyable when a grandmaster explains why they made the moves that they made, and precisely because its never exactly for the reasons we thought.