: Re: Intentionally leaving out a part of the story, for a more interesting reveal? In the story I am writing, I have a character who is working on a project and will present it to a group of

@Nimeshi163

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I think I understand the difficulty of having the reader experience the story of this character with him as the narrator while trying to hide from the reader something the character knows. The few examples in literature I can think of that have the audience experiencing the story from a character's point of view and lacking significant information at the same time are either because the character doesn't know that information (e.g. Harry Potter, who is the channel by which the reader is given new information about the world/story), or because the character is an unreliable narrator (e.g. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest).

In the case of the unreliable narrator, there is reason to believe that the character from whose perspective the story is being told is not necessarily giving us the whole picture, either because they themselves are experiencing something different from reality (i.e. they have a mental illness), or because they have motivation to hide it from the reader.

In your case, I think the character could have motivation to hide the information from the reader, but only if a reader exists, and by that I mean perhaps the story could be told in a letter or journal sort of format. One where you could have actual statements in the story along the lines of,

I grabbed the hammer and started piecing together my project, but that's all I can say because I don't want to give it away quite yet.

That's one way you could go about justifying the hiding of information from the reader that the main, first-person character knows, although you would need some reason why the character doesn't want to reveal it.

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