How to Keep a Secret From Your Own Reader

Writers ask me how I decide what to hide from the reader. It's the wrong question, and the wrong question will wreck a book faster than bad prose ever could.

You don't hide anything from the reader. You hide it from the guy whose eyes they borrowed.

These books run on a single anchor. One point of view at a time, third person, locked down tight — the reader gets welded into one skull and sees only what that skull sees. When Nino's carrying the chapter, the reader knows what Nino knows. Not one thing more. And here's the part people skip right over on their way to the fun stuff: the reader also doesn't know what Nino doesn't.

That's not a limitation. That's the whole engine.

Because the second you accept it, information turns into money. Say Nino's across town on a job — a collection, a favor, some errand that eats his afternoon. Meanwhile the fixer is sitting in a room he will never set foot in, making a phone call that's going to wreck his month. The reader can't hear that call. Nino can't, so they can't. And when the fallout finally lands on him, three chapters on, it lands on the reader in the very same second, with the very same weight. That simultaneity — reader taking the hit at the exact moment the character takes it — is what suspense is actually built out of.

Now watch how you break it. You get tempted. You know about the phone call, you wrote it, and it's exciting, and you want to hand it to the reader early for that little hum of dramatic irony — the reader knowing what poor Nino doesn't. So you slip across town into the fixer's head for a paragraph. Head-hop. And congratulations: you just spent your best coin on penny candy. You traded a detonation for a hum. Nearly always a bad trade.

The discipline here is entirely negative. It's not about what you write. It's about what you refuse to write, over and over, while every instinct you've got is screaming to just tell them. Don't tell them. The not-telling is the machine.

There's a bonus, too, and it's the part I didn't see coming when I started working this way. Locking the POV keeps the character honest. If Nino can't know a thing, he can't act on it — which means he has to go get it. Earn it. Misread it. Get it a day too late, when it's already cost him something. Turns out the point-of-view rule and the no-cheating rule are the same rule in different coats: nobody, character or reader, gets information they didn't pay for.

So no. I don't hide things from you. I put you inside one man's head and I shut the door.

Somewhere across town a phone is ringing in a room he'll never stand in. He's got no idea. Neither do you. That's the deal, and it's the best one in the book.