Withholding Information is Not a Good Writing Technique
Imagine a movie closely following a chef in a pastry competition. We watch her carefully set out her ingredients — the cream, the butter, the chocolate. The competition starts and just because of the perspective of the camera on this one particular chef, we’re rooting for her. She chops, she measures, she mixes. As the competition timer counts down, we see sweat bead her brow and wonder if she can get it all done in time. She painstakingly fills her cake tins and puts them in the oven. We wait for something marvelous to come out of that oven but TWIST! she’s shocked to pull out a disgusting rubbery mess. Then we unravel the mystery by interviewing neighboring chefs, reviewing grainy CCTV recordings, Googling and combing through old police records. Then ANOTHER TWIST! we find out the heart of the mystery — that she accidentally forgot to add the flour.
I want to throw a book across the room when this happens, and it’s been happening a lot in thrillers and mysteries these days. The reason why it bothers me is that it uses violations of the norms of narrative and point of view to create a mystery as opposed to actually creating a mystery. When we’re watching the baker add things to her mix, we assume we’re being shown everything of relevance. The character can forget to add the flour, but the storytelling shouldn’t deliberately hide this from us to create a mystery because the general contract with the viewer is “We’re showing you the things to help you figure this shit out.”
Think about a fairly common occurrence in reality TV that points out just how you can manipulate tension with dramatic irony and POV. Adam lies and tells his love interest Beth that another suitor, Charlie, punched him. Charlie, who is also in love with Beth, denies it. Beth sides with Adam, maybe because Adam’s a master manipulator, or maybe because she has bad judgement. This makes you scream at the TV “They’re taping all this! Just look at the tapes!” This is the deliciousness of knowing something the character doesn’t. The only person who cheated is Charlie, who cheats because he is a liar, but not because he’s a bad writer. Reality TV can do this because of its unique ability exploit POV — it’s similar to third person omniscient. The camera can move everywhere and can document liars and all drama. It’s somewhat omniscient in that people do first person interviews of what they were or are thinking.
What are you as a reader signing up for with a third person novel? One is that the depth of the POV is fairly consistent. In a very close third POV where we are constantly privy to Derek’s thoughts, it’s cheating to suddenly pull the POV back when he’s having coffee with his ex. You did this so that you wouldn’t have to reveal (through his normally constant patter of internal monologue) that they broke up because he beat her. (Then later, TWIST! you find this out. This is only a twist for people with low expectations. It’s only surprising because you cheated.)
What’s the honest way to tell this story? In one case, you pick a close third person POV and stay loyal to it. Derek frets about meeting his ex and tells you why, because he tells you everything. He even shows you via flashbacks. Then you understand why there’s tension when you see it. It means you have to have a more clever plot line than one that hangs on Derek lying to the reader. Another option is to pull the camera way up to a distant third person POV. Maybe we get no internal monologue at all, or very little. When we get very little we have a sense that of course the person has more thoughts than this, but we aren’t going to get them all. Imagine the perspective of an inanimate, impartial object, like a soulless CCTV camera that records a man walking into a building, a lapse of time, then the same man walking out with blood on his clothes. We don’t know what happened in that building, but it doesn’t feel like cheating if the whole book/ movie is through this distant camera.
Call me old fashioned, but I prefer my first person narrators honest and bland. Not bland as a person, but narratively bland — like they’re not going to screw with your narrative expectations. Narrative expectation is not the idea that the story will resolve neatly, or as expected, but that no major rules in the internal logic of the story will be violated. It’s the idea that, ten pages from the end, you won’t find out that the villain has magical powers in a novel that had no hint of anything paranormal. It’s the idea that the camera should show you the baker forgetting to add the flour if it’s going to show you everything else. Violating narrative expectations is not a twist — it’s lazy writing.
Unreliable first person narrators seem to be in vogue right now. Not that any one of these books is bad, but am I the only one who is tired of this?
I think the most acceptable form of unreliable first person narrator is the kind that claims the world is one way but we can see that clearly it isn’t. The narrator guy who tells you that that he’s popular with the ladies but when we see him interact with them they seem to shrink away. Whether the person is just really deluded or just wants to impress the reader, it doesn’t matter — the facts are still straightforward.
If the pin that holds your entire plot together is “I hit my head and I can’t remember” this isn’t compelling plotting. It makes for easy “twists.” The narrator did it! The narrator witnessed their spouse do it but forgot! It’s about as “the call is coming inside the house” as it gets!
The I Can’t Remember Trope breaks the narrative rules, but not radically unfair — people forget shit in real life, in particular traumatic things. But at this point the trope isn’t bringing anything new to the genre. Imagine a book where a girl has two friends who have been murdered right in front of her. Then the twist is about how she forgot that her third friend was actually there too and was the one who did it. I would rather read a novel where the girl remembers the murders. She was there — maybe she could hear the murders rather than see them. The police believe that a man crawled through the window and killed the two friends, but the narrator is almost too afraid to admit to herself that she secretly suspects her friend did it. Then you’re living with the lion in its den, rather than living in the den and forgetting there’s a lion in it.
One step down from “I can’t remember” is “I’m not going to tell you even though I am talking directly to you, dear reader.” A first person narrator that lies by omission — without any problems with their memory — is particularly egregious because it breaks both the rules of POV and of narrative structure.
Gone Girl is a weird example of this technique both working and not. The book opens in Nick’s POV. We know his wife is missing, possibly dead, and he comes off as cagey. But it’s first person — if we know his internal thoughts because he’s talking directly to us, why doesn’t he just say, “By the way, I didn’t do it.” Because cheating to build tension. Because plot. It makes you wonder, why is this person telling me a story if they’re not going to tell a story? It works in The Usual Suspects because Kevin Spacey is telling the police a false story to convince them of something. Why is Nick telling us a false story? (Because it serves the plot.) This is one of the reasons why the movie is better than the book. First person narrative in a novel feels like you’re close inside the character’s head. In the movie, it’s more of a close third person limited with occasional voice over. Voice overs in movies almost never feel as close as first person novels. We view Ben Affleck from across the room, not from inside his head.
Where it works wonderfully is with Amy. Amy never lies to the reader. She lies to everyone, but not us. When we see the snippets of her diary, we take it as an honest recollection of events. But that is our assumption and it turns out to be wrong. Narrative expectations are violated, but it works because Amy created the diary for the sole purpose of misleading the police, the media, and the public about her husband. She didn’t create it to to mislead you.
When first person POV books violate narrative expectations, you’re left wondering, why is this person talking to me? What purpose does lying to me serve them? Why are they even telling us a story dishonestly? (Because that’s how the “twist” functions.) For me at least, it pulls down the fourth wall a bit and reminds me that I’m reading a book, pulling me out of the story, and not in the fun way that metafiction does.
Why does this keep happening in books? For one, I think it comes from a desire to keep the twists coming. What could be more twisty than the narrator turning out to be involved?! (Paging Agatha Christie CIRCA 1926!) Putting the main character in the center of the action — in the room with the killer, or maybe even holding the knife themselves — certainly raises the stakes because they’re involved in the heat of the moment. Not like a detective picking through the dead bodies the next day.
What do we owe the reader? A good story that is internally consistent. Characters that are three-dimensional who do things because of their internal drives, not because it serves the plot. POV that doesn’t play games unless it’s going to do it very, very well. Twists that aren’t increasingly absurd just for the sake of being hard to guess. The best tension comes from when two people with different drives and opposing goals are running headlong toward each other, not from neglecting to say what actually happened when they hit.
This is the first in a series of articles on the craft of writing. Follow to catch the upcoming ones.
Vera Kurian is a writer and psychologist. More of her work can be found at verakurian.com She’s on Twitter @vera_kurian