A vital consideration in plotting your story: what is hidden from the reader’s view? Author and coach Susan deFreitas posed this question recently and got me thinking.
If you want to build a little tension, suspense and even mystery, you don’t lay out every detail of a story from the beginning. The ‘whodunnnit’ crime novel doesn’t give away the killer’s identity on page one. If it does, the thrill is in the ‘howdunnit’ or the detective proving the killer’s guilt by the end. Crime is a genre in which plot and character points are necessarily hidden from the reader’s view and revealed bit by bit. Right up to the big reveal, solving the puzzle at the end.
But other genres hide these things from the reader all the time. You may get hints, a trail of breadcrumbs leading to these hidden points, or they may come as a complete surprise. Building a compelling story is often as much about hiding certain things as it is laying them out on the page.
The reader only has knowledge of the things you put on the page, along with whatever hints or clues you sow along the way. Some things an alert reader might deduce for themselves. Others come as a surprise – for good or ill. There’s a big difference between clues hidden in plain sight and those locked in a box inside a trunk in a basement with no stairs.
Filtered through Point of View
Story is filtered through the narrator’s point of view. A well-crafted story frames events through the limited point of view of the protagonist(s). Here’s the first hurdle; is the narrator reliable or unreliable? Do we know? How can we tell?
We might ask what can a reliable protagonist know or find out about people and events? What information can they reasonably access? Anything else is hidden from that point-of-view character. It should be hidden from the reader as well. The traditional third-person omniscient narration would often interject with additional plot points; “but little did Mister Smith know that his lawyer also acted for his arch-rival…” This is old-fashioned story telling, rarely used in contemporary fiction. Generally we know what the characters know, but no more.
This is how most crime fiction works; the reader assembles the clues alongside the detective. Unless the writer cheats and pulls rabbits out of hats that the audience knows nothing about (see David Renwick, every episode of Jonathan Creek, ever).
What’s my Motivation?
It can get tricky with multiple point-of-view stories, in which the reader may gather more information than the individual characters. We might know more than them in the way the story is constructed. That doesn’t mean the readers knows everything. And sometimes the writer doesn’t either. Take the TV series Lost, where nobody seemed to know what was going on…
An unreliable narrator may consciously lie in the telling of the story and hide some truths from the reader. Unreliable narration is a technique common to literary fiction and thrillers such as The Girl on the Train. This is outright deception or misdirection.
A different type of unreliable narrator is one who keeps secrets for a variety of reasons; shame, fear, vanity, self-preservation, protecting others. Again, there are plot and character points hidden from the reader under genuine motives.
It’s possible to hide almost anything until an appropriate reveal. But if they’re not revealed to the reader, they effectively don’t exist. Plot and character only make sense of the entire story when shared.
“But Dave’s behaviour all stems from the loss of his teddybear when he was six.”
“What teddybear?”
Tangled in Backstory
This is where we hit the familiar issue with backstory. How much of the plot arises from past events? How much backstory should you reveal and when? Too much bogs down the story and takes us out of the now. Big revelations too early strip away the mystery and tension. Big revelations pulled out of the hat in the climax can turn a plot twist into a honking cliché, undermining the whole thing.
There’s a conflict between an obsession with the past – backstory – and engaging with the plot in the now. Hide the backstory entirely and you have to find some other way to build depth of character, or catalyse behaviour and events.
Hidden figures
Let’s start with two classics. Great Expectations hides the true source of Pip’s patronage until Act Three. It’s a shocking twist that no one saw coming. Further hidden twists include Estella’s true parentage. But at other times, Dickens is happy to undermine characters with that old-fashioned, heavy omniscient hand.
Meanwhile, Pride and Prejudice (yes, collect a sticker) does a grand job of hiding salient plot points from Elizabeth Bennett. Why do the Bingley’s leave Netherfield? Darcy confesses he played the over-protective friend during his disastrous marriage proposal. What a time to reveal a hidden truth. What’s the true source of the enmity between Darcy and Wickham? Only when Darcy takes Lizzie into his confidence do we discover Wickham is a first-class cad. And who engineers Lydia’s marriage? Darcy again. News of his white knight rescue comes to Lizzie by letter after the fact.
Hidden Futures
All of which brings me to my own narrative chicanery. Throughout my fantasy series, we get glimpses of Jovanka’s visions of the future. But not all of them. There are dark hints at certain events that she doesn’t lay out as our point-of-view narrator. Why would she? Her Second Sight is second nature, she doesn’t need to explain it to herself. In fact, she retreats from some of the most painful visions. Who lives, who dies? Those premonitions might provide a detailed map of the plot, but they appear edited and censored. Mystery piles on mystery.
Those visions themselves become unreliable, and Jovanka’s Second Sight breaks completely in Book Two. Like Jovanka, the reader gets only fragments; the rest is hidden from view.