: Re: Can I conceal an antihero's insanity - and should I? I have an idea for an anti-heroic sci-fi character whose character arc runs from spoilt rich girl, to a refugee in the rubble of human

To be honest, your question has me scratching my head a little. You've described your character as a person with no qualms about manipulating others, all while putting on a sweet face to the outside world. Whether or not you as the author explicitly state the MC's mental disorder at the end of the book, by including scenes in which she lies, cheats and abuses her way to power you've already committed to showing your reader who the MC is on the inside. The chocolate bar's wrapper might not have a label with ingredients printed on it, but I can still tell there's chocolate inside.

Not explicating her condition is a good thing. It leaves us readers wondering what kind of outrageously callous thing she's going to do next.

As to how you can best communicate her insincerity, one way to do it would be to show what's going on in her mind. (Terrible) example:

"Do you love me?" asked the captain. His eyes a watery haze.
I cradled his face with my hand.
"More than anything in the world," I said, and made plans on where to ditch his soon-to-be corpse. His ship and crew would serve me well.

Best of luck, I like your story's premise.

One way you could go about keeping your main character's mental state hidden is to split the main character and narrator into two people. The narrator could be a relatively minor figure, maybe some henchmen in the pirate crew that the MC finds useful for his skills. At first he only sees the MC for what she is on the outside, but he slowly comes to learn that it's all a facade when he reads her journal, sees her push a fellow pirate into an airlock and space him, etc.

I don't like this technique (the narrator is little more than a camera with legs), but it's not without precedent.

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: Re: Can I conceal an antihero's insanity - and should I? I have an idea for an anti-heroic sci-fi character whose character arc runs from spoilt rich girl, to a refugee in the rubble of human

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: Point of View Confusion Iâ€™m confused about point of view. In my storyâ€”so farâ€”I only reveal to the reader what the main character, a child, can see/hear. Not often, but at times, I write

: Character is called by their first initial. How do I write it? A character's name starts with a hard G, as in Gary. Another character (dismissively) calls him by his first initial "G", said

: The most fundamental building block of a novel is the scene. A scene either reveals part of the plot or something about the characters; after reading the scene's last sentence, the story has

: Why this is difficult: dramatic conventions If a description of something is unique and also can't be observed incidentally by the reader, as with a character's highly unusual physical features,

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