Brandilyn Collins is a best-selling novelist known for her trademark Seatbelt Suspense™. These harrowing crime thrillers have earned her the tagline “Don’t forget to b r e a t h e …®”. She writes for Zondervan, the Christian division of HarperCollins Publishers, and is currently at work on her 19th book. Her first, A Question of Innocence, was a true crime published by Avon in 1995 and landed her on local and national TV and radio, including the Phil Donahue and Leeza talk shows. She’s also known for her distinctive book on fiction-writing techniques, Getting Into Character: Seven Secrets a Novelist Can Learn From Actors (John Wiley & Sons), and often teaches at writers conferences.
Visit her blog at Forensics and Faith, and her website at Brandilyn Collins.com to read the first chapters of all her books.

A few months ago on Twitter I posed the question “What annoys you most when reading a novel?” In a few hours over eighty readers responded, and I listed their answers in a blog post titled “Readers’ Rants.” This answer caught my attention:

When you get to the end, and the author has lied to the reader. It’s one thing to pull the wool over my eyes (ala Murder of Roger Ackroyd), it’s another thing to make me feel betrayed by the writer.

I agree. Surprising the reader without lying to her is a fine line that writers should not cross. The more twists you put into your stories, the more you need to toe that line. Since my Seatbelt Suspense is all about twists, this is an issue I’m very aware of when I’m writing. A good twist fools by causing commotion elsewhere—sort of like one actor upstaging another. Once the twist is revealed, the reader should be able to go back, see the foreshadowing, and say, “Ah, yes. I should have known.”

When exactly does a writer lie to/betray the reader?

When he tells the reader something in an author narrative passage that later is revealed not to be true.

Author narrative are the key words. This is when the author is speaking directly to the reader, as in describing a character:

He stood six-four and muscular, a solid wall of a man. Women loved his masculinity; men were intimidated, many jealous. His face looked hard and worn, with lines around his mouth, etching his forehead. But his eyes were gentle, true windows to his soul. This was a man who would hurt no one, lie to no one.

However, anything outside of author narrative is fair game for misleading the reader because it’s in the POV (point of view) of a character. And characters’ perceptions can be inaccurate, no matter how right they think they are. This is a true portrayal of life. We can believe something or someone very sincerely, and turn out to be very wrong.

Let’s say we’re in the POV of the protagonist, a woman who’s known the described man for ten years. They’re having a conversation. She’s thinking things as they talk. In the middle of their conversation runs a similar passage.

He stood six-four and muscular, a solid wall of a man. Women loved his masculinity; men were intimidated, many jealous. His face looked hard and worn, with lines around his mouth, etching his forehead. But his eyes were gentle, true windows to his soul. Stacy knew this was a man who would hurt no one, lie to no one.

Stacy may “know” it. And she may be very wrong. Of course, the story would need to include foreshadowing as to the truth about this man. And when the truth is revealed, the protagonist should be reeling.

But it gets a little trickier. If an author writes in deep POV—that is, a point of view so deeply inside the character’s head that everything is described as that character would perceive the world—there obviously will be no passages of description in which the author pulls back into his own narrative voice. All description will be as the character sees, feels, believes it. My books these days are always in deep POV. In the deep POV of my protagonist, in the middle of the conversation between these two characters, I could run the passage above just as it was first written:

He stood six-four and muscular, a solid wall of a man. Women loved his masculinity; men were intimidated, many jealous. His face looked hard and worn, lines around his mouth, etching his forehead. But his eyes were gentle, true windows to his soul. This was a man who would hurt no one, lie to no one.

If it turns out the man is a liar, I wouldn’t be lying to my reader. I didn’t tell the reader that. The character believed it. And characters can be wrong.

Readers need to understand deep POV—how to spot it, and how it works. It’s easy to spot. In deep POV, when there are multiple points of view, each one will sound different, according to how that character perceives the world. The same scene would be described in very different ways, using different metaphors, depending on whose POV you’re in.

Deep POV works well because it helps characterize—you hear a different voice for each character. It also gives the writer great latitude to present thoughts to the reader that may or may not be true. This is the heart of the fun for suspense readers—trying to figure out who’s right and who isn’t.