Narrative Lying: You Can’t Trust the Characters are Telling the Truth

Reading a book and assuming everyone is telling the truth all the time is like believing the barista has fallen in love with you

When I was getting notes back from my beta readers for ALU, I started to notice this trend where my readers were taking the main character very literally. In fact, because of that, they really didn’t like her at the beginning and it was hard to win them back. Now, of course this was in part my fault (all things are, look it up), but it also spoke to a broader trend I’ve seen in book discourse where readers seem to believe the characters are never lying to them.

It’s like watching Wednesday season one (we just don’t have time to get into season two today, yikes) and believing that Wednesday (the character) is heartless. She’s weird, she’s largely desensitized to violence and tragedy, but she is not heartless. She’s lying to you.

There was a similar effect going on at the beginning of ALU which follows a girl so jaded to death and passion that when she starts to actually care about something, she’d do anything to shut it down. Her reaction to this does not speak to her true feelings (“I hate caring about things and other people”), it speaks to her deep desires—of wanting, but being afraid of wanting. That’s subtext baby.

Subtext is everything the characters don’t say. Characters never say what they truly mean, so to know what they mean, we have to dig a little deeper into the implied, the unsaid, the emotional hints. This is where character depth comes from, and ends up saying a lot more about them as people than if they were to just tell you who they are.

Take this example, a parent and their child are talking over the phone, maybe the context is the child moved out after a particularly bad argument and this is the first time they’re speaking since it happened. The kid says, “I really miss you and the rest of the family, I’m sorry for what happened, let’s not fight anymore.”

The scene kind of falls flat. Where’s the conflict? The dynamic? The challenge? The child saying exactly what they mean also means that there’s no room for anything extra. We lose out on emotion and meaning, ironically.

Instead, maybe they say, “They have daisies growing in the garden here, I think Clara would like them.” Better—we’re implying this kid is thinking of their sister, that they’re feeling a little homesick, or nostalgic for their old life. We’re saying they miss the family, they’re trying to connect again with Clara so they’re sorry for what happened, they’re calling because they don’t want to fight anymore.

But without saying that, the parent can reply, “She likes roses now.” A rejection of that connection, the portrayal that whatever that old life was has been tainted forever—it can’t just come back.

That’s a very quick example, but there’s so much subtext you can create with the simplest of scenes.

People never say what they mean because saying what you mean is scary. Had the child asked outright for that connection, they would have been opening up to outright rejection. Instead, the relationship can hide behind this implication—words between words. Subtext.