: Re: How do I mislead readers about a character in a story? I am writing a story about a war, and there is this particular character whom they are a traitor to their own side. The traitor's identity

@Moriarity138

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Your basic strategy is the same as that of any magician: misdirection. Drop the clues while the characters, and hopefully the reader, is paying attention to something more interesting. A typical way of doing this is providing red herrings, or a plausible but wrong suspect to be hunted down even as the real traitor stands casually by and watches. This is often Agatha Christie's approach, and Rowling uses Professor Snape this way in the first Harry Potter by playing off Snape and Harry's mutual antipathy.

An arguably more interesting method of misdirection is when the characters, and thus the reader, have a strong but somehow challenging relationship with the mole that keeps them from conceptualizing the mole in this different role. One of the best examples I know is Diana Wynne Jones' Cart & Cwidder. The book is ostensibly about a young boy growing up in a family of traveling musicians in a vaguely medieval fantasyland wracked by civil war. One of the many background details of the setting is that his parents often share news as they travel about a mysterious master spy who causes various acts of sabotage around the southern kingdom.

Spoiler:

It isn't until after his father is unexpectedly killed that the boy stumbles on the truth --his father was the spy all along!

The twist is effective because the boy's main concerns are the typical ones of adolescents --sibling rivalries, trying to find his own identity, feeling like an adult but being treated like a child, his increasingly stormy relationship with his parents, especially his father. It's completely believable that he misses what is going on right under his nose. And since you, the reader, are caught up in the character's POV, you pay attention to what he pays attention to, and miss what he misses.

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