Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48228
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48228
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

A story is an experience. The reader has to trust that experience. If they stop trusting the experience, they essentially drop out of the world created by the experience, and once that happens, their enjoyment of the story is over.

Exactly what creates a trustworthy experience is not entirely straightforward. But a couple of things should be obvious.

1. The experience must be complete. There cannot be parts of the experience that are left blank to be filled in later. Real experiences are not like that.

2. The experience cannot be a lie or a deception. You can't trick or deceive the reader about what the experience is. 

But here is where it gets tricky. There can most definitely be surprises in the experience. Surprises are, after all, a part of life. Anything that can happen in a real experience can happen in a fictional experience. By the same token, the reader can be mislead by a story experience just as they can by a real experience.

They key is that when the reader is surprised or deceived in the story experience, it has to happen in the same way as it happens in a real life experience, but with the additional caveat that the writer cannot lie to the reader. Yes, in real life, people can lie to you and thus cause you to be deceived or surprised. But those liars are part of the experience. They are real things within the framework of the experience. But if an author lies to a reader that is a lie in the creation of the experience itself.

Characters can lie in a story, and if the reader's only source of information is that character, then they may be deceived by the lie. That's fine, as long as everyone else in the story is deceived by the lie, and as long as the reader finds out about the lie at the same time the protagonist does.

It is not impossible to play with this rule a bit. In a classic detective story, for instance, the detective generally figures out who did it before it is revealed to the reader. That deception is an acceptable convention of the genre. But if the author lies to the reader about a piece of evidence in order to make the puzzle harder to figure out, that is unforgivable and the reader will feel cheated and abandon the book.

So, in the case of your story, if the MC knows about Jane's abilities, relies on them, plans around them, but the author does not tell the reader about them, the reader will feel cheated.

If the MC knows nothing about Janes abilities, and Jane has a good reason not to reveal them to him, and he only finds out about them when we do, then the reader will not feel cheated.

However, there is another problem with this. The MC's triumphs have to feel earned or the reader will lose interest in the story, not because they feel cheated directly, but because they will not feel like they know what the stakes are, and therefore don't know how to feel about the events as they unfold. You can't have heart in your mouth suspense if the reader feels that Jane is going to reveal some new power every time the MC gets in a jam.

So, if one of Jane's aibilitis is going to be used to get the MC out of a jam, it must have been revealed earlier. It may have been a while back, and the reader may have forgotten about it, but when it happens the reader has to be able to say, Oh, yes, I remember that!

Even so, that only solves half the problem. The MC still needs to merit their triumph. If Janes abilities solve all the problems, even with proper foreshadowing, it is still going to be a boring story.

There is an old rule about this, and you break it at your peril. Surprise and coincidence can be used to get your MC into trouble, but they cannot be used to get him out of it. Escape has to be merited and the means of escape cannot come as a surprise.

In short, if you are hoping that you can resolve your story and rescue your MC by having Jane's powers suddenly be revealed at the last moment, that won't work, and there is no way to make it work. It is not about how you conceal them. It is about that you concealed them, and the reader will not forgive that.

So I would suggest you worry less about how to conceal them and think more about how to shape a satisfactory story that does not depend on springing them on the reader at the end.

Original score: 3