: Re: How to hide something in plain sight (and keep it hidden)? I’d like to include in a story “mysteries” and deceptions that (ideally) should be obvious in hindsight (By obvious, I mean "elephant

@Kevin153

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You do this the same way a magician does an illusion, by misdirection. You introduce the discontinuity while the reader is paying attention to something else, and then you continue forward using the illusionary reality as your perceptual frame. In your case, that means your character should note Auntie A's mannishness as a passing detail while something else is foregrounded --maybe Auntie A's annoying personality, or some kind of domestic crisis. After that, write the story largely as though Auntie A was who she claims to be. If you drop other hints, do so while some other issue is taking center stage.

It's worth noting that a great writer can pull this off even if you guess or even know the secret from the start, by catching you up in the alternate reality. In point of fact, all fiction rides on the back of suspension of disbelief --we know the narrative is invented when we start the story, but we start to experience it as real as it is made vivid to us. To give one example, I knew the secret of the movie The Sixth Sense before I ever watched it, but that didn't stop me from losing sight of it early on. The propulsive narrative was so engaging, it kept me from obsessing over the twist. Similarly, when I read The Princess Bride, I was so annoyed by Goldman's interjections, that I completely lost track of the fact that he was the actual author of the novel, and not the "abridger" he presented himself as.

One last note: You might consider reading Paul Russell's novel Boys of Life. Although it isn't a main theme of the book, one of the late revelations is that one of the major characters was transgender, without the narrator ever realizing that fact.

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