Don’t Tell the Truth — The Key to Intriguing Stories

For our next roundtable, let’s talk about the importance of lying to your readers. No, no you as a writer, but your characters lying. 

Perhaps the easiest genre to realize that some of your characters (or maybe all) need to be untruthful is the mystery genre, whether hard-boiled, cozy, procedural, urban fantasy, whatever. All genres, however, can benefit from dishonest characters, from Victorian adventure (think about Dicken’s characters) to romantic leads the reader is supposed to root for? Why are dishonest characters so necessary?

Raymond Embrack: I am liking making the hero a liar to add imperfections. And when he is caught in a lie he goes “Clearly I lied. Bullshit is a tool for experts.”

Marian Allen: Dishonest characters add another obstacle to the characters’ journey through the story arc and another source of conflict/tension. The most intense way to handle this is to have the reader know something another character doesn’t know. Prime example: in Breaking Bad, when Walt skirts around telling Jesse about Jane. The viewer is in agony, yelling at the screen, “Don’t! Don’t tell!”

Gordon Dymowski: Dishonest characters provide great complications to a story. Regardless of genre, having someone either hold the cards close to their chest and/or being outright deceptive provides a greater opportunity for storytelling. If every character in a story were completely honest, most stories would simply be laundry lists of events. Dishonesty provides for richer storytelling and greater potential for building atmosphere.

Sean Taylor: For me, dishonest characters are a must, as everyone my MCs encounter is out for something and they tend to keep that something close to the vest, as the saying goes. Nobody dishes out all the info in a first pass, and that’s what keeps my protagonists having to search for what’s really happening in the story. Anything less would be boring for the reader. 

John French: In the first story in one of my first books (Past Sins) the CSI narrator is told “Everyone lies). Even the one character who does not lie manages to shade things by telling literal truths. The thing is, to me at least, that it is important that the writers not lie to their readers. They can omit, they can distract, but they can’t tell them and out and out lie. And therein lies the writing.

Read more:

https://seanhtaylor.blogspot.com/2021/06/dont-tell-truth-key-to-intriguing.html