In an article for Writer’s Digest, Carter Wilson discusses the art of writing unreliable narrators in thriller novels. “The best thrillers are often the ones in which the protagonist is not only fooling the reader, but themselves as well,” he says. “Occasionally the fun is figuring out who to trust, if there’s anyone to trust at all.”
Carter likes unreliable narrators for three reasons:
- He doesn’t outline. “My stories unfold to me one day at a time, which means my narrator is just as lost as I am,” he says. “I’m writing from my subconscious, which lends itself to a labyrinth of twists and turns, many of which the narrator has created for themselves. Simply put, my narrator is unreliable because the author is unreliable.”
- Life is unreliable. Carter says that unreliability is honest. “What’s not honest is a hero who can do no wrong, always has the answers, and is always willing to save others before themselves,” he says.
- The POV is intimate. Writing in a first-person, present-tense POV shows the world through the narrator’s eyes, moment by moment. “This makes writing an unreliable narrator most effective, because the reader experiences the thoughts and actions as the protagonist does, and offers a fractured, almost stream-of-consciousness narration,” Carter explains. “What’s more unreliable in our daily lives than our swirling thoughts, our sudden fears, our whimsical and wholly unattainable daydreaming?”
An unreliable narrator requires the writer to strike a balance between believability and unpleasant surprise. “An unreliable narrator shouldn’t be approached as a literary device; rather, a narrator’s unreliability should be an organic result of who they are and the decisions they make,” Carter says. In fact, Carter believes that writers shouldn’t intentionally set out to write an unreliable narrator. “Rather, the author should pen the novel as it occurs to them from the subconscious, and only after reading the first draft should they themselves realize their protagonist is not to be trusted,” he explains.
For example, a character may have a faulty memory or incorrect interpretations of past events. She may lie to herself, and therefore lie to the audience. A character may have repressed memories that he can’t share with the reader. However, the writer shouldn’t broadcast a narrator’s unreliability. “Too many times an author hints over and over that their protagonist is not to be trusted, building up an anticipation that’s so great the payoff never quite satisfies,” Carter says. “Rather, the best unreliable narrators are those who never wink at the camera, and when they look into the mirror they’re just as convinced as we are that the person in front of them is telling the truth.”
