The Unreliable Narrator

I finished Rebecca Stead's Liar & Spy recently, and really enjoyed it. It's about a boy who moves to a new apartment building in Brooklyn and meets another boy, who considers himself an ace spy. There are mysterious things happening in their building, but some of the book's best mysteries are hidden right under the boys' noses.

One of the best things about Liar & Spy is that it features an unreliable narrator. A story has an unreliable narrator when the story is being told from the point of view of someone who maybe isn't telling you everything you need to know all the time. The best example of an unreliable narrator I've ever read is Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. (An awesome book!) Books like this are often told in the first person (I did this, I did that, etc.) but you can pull it off in third person too (he did this, she did that, etc.)

The trick is to think about everything that happens in the story, and then choose which parts of it you're going to tell the reader, and which parts of it you're going to hide. You have to be pretty tricky about hiding things too. If you're too obvious, people will see that you're hiding something, and begin to doubt your narrator. If you're too tricky, people might feel cheated at the end.

Give it a shot. Try to write a story in first person, where the narrator is the main character. He or she is telling us a story--but leaves out some important things. Like...maybe he was the one who stole that GameBoy. Or maybe she is already dead when the story begins, and we just assumed she was alive. Or maybe everything your main character says is a lie, and we only see that at the very end, when another person reveals to us that your main character hasn't one any of those things. It's a fun way to have some fun with your narrator--and your reader!