: Re: How can I keep secret a major detail known to the POV protagonist? How do you write a story where the point-of-view character knows something, but you want to keep it a secret from the reader

@Kevin153

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If the character knows the vital detail, and if the vital detail matters to the character, and you want us readers to be deeply inside the character's head, you have to give the detail.

Otherwise, when you reveal the detail, we suddenly discover that we were never really deeply in the character's head after all. If we were, then we too would have known the thing that they knew and that mattered so much to them.

That kind of sudden discovery is enormously jarring, and not in a good way. It throws us right out of the character, and perhaps right out of the story.

If you don't want us to feel cheated, you have three options:

Keep the viewpoint characters from knowing the detail.
Keep the detail from mattering in even the slightest way to any character while we're in their viewpoint.
Keep us out of the character's viewpoint altogether.

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