The first rule of lying to your reader: Don’t lie. The second rule? Lie to them all you like, as long as you’re telling the truth. Plot twists, that fabled love of many an over-enthusiastic author, rely upon such lies. Mystery stories, as a genre, outright rely on obscuring the reader’s understanding of what happened (though maybe not their understanding of what’s currently happening, as we’ll get to later); one of the basic tools in the author’s toolbox here is, as any reader of Agatha Christie novels knows, misdirection as to who the perpetrator of the crime is. In fact, the great stories of history quite commonly deceive the reader in one way or another, as tales like The Hideous Strength or Gawain and the Green Knight attest, creating a fictional world and then temporarily lying to the reader about that world. How do these stories lie and get away with it, all while telling the truth?

The first rule here is ‘Don’t lie’, and you have to remember it. Lying to your reader is an absolute no-go, the equivalent of strapping fifteen kilotons of TNT to your story and hitting it with the full broadside of the USS Saratoga. It’s been tried, to be clear¹. The problem is, you are your reader’s sole source for what’s going on in the story. If you lie, then, every other part of the story comes into question, including the story’s integrity as a work of fiction. The fundamental break in the system is this question: if the author lied about Instance A, why should I believe literally any other part of the story? In reality, lying to your reader (and revealing it, because without the in-story reveal, the lie isn’t a lie²) is a deus ex machina³ of the highest order, altering the secondary creation by authorial fiat without bothering to set up the internal justification, and thus disrupting the reflection of the image of God’s story in your story, breaking its secondary reality. Don’t do it.

Just because you can’t lie, though, doesn’t mean you can’t lie. Bamboozling, tricking, and misleading your reader is all fair game, often even expected, and part of the fun of writing the story. The fun of it, of course, is that you can’t lie, not outright. All deception must be done out in the open. You are the magician, standing on stage, and you must turn the audience’s eyes to one hand while the other does the deed, invisible in plain sight. It’s a delicate balance, but one for which we have many tools.

So, we’ve got the idea, but how to do it? A few of our main tools to deceive are emphasis, omission, implication, and perspective.

Emphasis first, then. One effective way to mislead the reader is to choose carefully what parts of the story, what details and events, you emphasize. Emphasizing one clue over another in a murder mystery, for instance, can lead the reader to place an undue priority on it. Readers will naturally pick up on what your reiterate. Do be careful, however, that you don’t promise the wrong thing. As Brandon Sanderson points out in one of his lectures, readers perceive story fulfillment in terms of promises⁴. If you emphasize something and it turn out to be utterly irrelevant, the reader will rebel. You may not have lied, but they’ll feel that their time has been wasted. They will note the hand of the author in the story and receive it as a lie. Two great ways to avoid this are, first, providing implicit promises that the emphasized element is of importance (difficult but doable) and second, using the element as an actually important part of what it promised to be or explain, just changing the meaning via re-contextualization from other, less emphasized facts.

Second comes omission. Omitting can work in two directions: you can do it so the reader doesn’t notice and you can do it so he does. They’re both viable tactics, but we’ll stick with the first here. Omitting stuff is dangerous, let’s be honest. It can very easily verge into lying- if you have a scene where a character passes a poisoned drink to another character, leaving that detail out is effectively lying⁵. Where it’s useful, though, is in leaving out details and facts that would re-contextualize what the reader knows- like the history of the romantic rival the protagonist is worried about being beaten by⁶. Another, closely related device might be called ‘re-arrangement’; here, instead of outright omitting the facts, you just make sure they don’t show up in proximity, making it more difficult for the reader to note the connection.

The third tool is implication. Here’s where you don’t say anything concrete, you just let the reader’s expectations- and a few true bits of information- run wild. Of course, you won’t always be able to control this. You’ll also have to be careful about implication, to not make a promise you don’t keep. Otherwise, this uses roughly the same idea as the others: misdirect, mislead, and never lie. It’s fair game if they lie to themselves, though, as long as you make sure they recognize who made the misleading assumptions (them). One other aspect of literature will here become relevant: genre expectations. In a mystery story, the reader expects to be misled as to who precisely did the deed, so you can get away with a lot of deceptive implications. Some stories, though, aren’t so forgiving; you must be sure you don’t exceed the tolerance you’ve asked the reader to give you.

Your fourth tool, the most involved of the bunch, is perspective. The basic idea of this method is that each character will have his own view of the world and situation. These perspectives, very often, will be partially false, incomplete, or over-confident. Now, let’s return to rule one, ‘Don’t lie’, and add a word: ‘You don’t lie.’ The characters, on the other hand, are free to lie, to be ignorant, to be prejudiced, to assume they know the truth when they absolutely do not. The wonderful thing is this: so long as it’s the character’s speaking, not you, they can lie all they like. Imagine a re-telling of Robin Hood from the Sheriff’s perspective. He looks at the archers taking part in his competition and sees no outlaws. He is quite certain, actually, that none of them are outlaws. He’s dead wrong, but if you didn’t know it was Robin Hood, you’d be forgiven for being deceived (provided the author does this with skill). At its most extreme, this technique leads to ‘Unreliable Narrator’, wherein the story is told by a biased, faulty, and even incomplete perspective. Nevertheless, no matter whether it’s in character dialogue or in a less-than-truthful narrator, the reader must know that it is the character- even an unnamed narrator- saying this, not you, the author⁷.

Come back next week for the other half of the equation: telling the truth.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – Recently, Glass Onion, a movie already filled with enough problems to make it about average for recent Hollywood offerings, tried out the ‘just lie’ tactic by actually showing two different versions of the same scene, versions so blatantly different that the first version could only be a lie.

2 – At this point, because it’s not in the story, your own ideas about your story are just that- ideas. They aren’t canon because they aren’t in the story. If you put them in the story (perhaps via sequel), then the reveal has happened, the lie now exists, and you’ve lost all the readers who actually cared.

3 – Deus ex machina means ‘god of the machine’ or ‘god out of the machine’; it derives from the ancient Greek playwrights’ tendency to solve all the loose plot threads quickly by having the literal gods descend and take care of the problem. Nowadays it refers to an author interfering in the story without any in-story justification- like if Frodo discovered a teleporter halfway through Cirith Ungol and got rid of the Ring that way or the White Witch was killed by a meteor right before her battle with Peter and Edmund’s army.

4 – The lecture can be found here. More discussion of the topic can be found here.

5 – Fairly certain that’s what happened in aforementioned Glass Onion movie from note 1.

6 – SPOILERS Example taken from a book by one of the Bronte sisters, Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

7 – You could argue that the author is a liar if the narrator is telling the entire story, but that’s hardly true, because the author must be telling the truth in saying that the narrator, unreliable as he may be, said what is recorded in the story. Otherwise, trying to understand the narrator (and through him the story) is futile and not worth the effort. The narrator is, in other words, part of the fictional world, however disembodied he may be, however much meta-narrative is used to insulate him from the story.