How Much Do You Hide From The Reader

We all love a great cliff-hanger. We love that feeling as a reader of wanting to know more and the author getting us to "read just one more page" even though we promised to stop reading at one in the morning. However, there is a fine line between holding information back from the reader and giving us too much information.

I was recently reading a story where the author was doing just that. The author wanted to keep secret from the other characters what one of the main characters was doing. This is fine. This is what we want to happen. The other characters in the story are held in suspense of what is going on. However, here is where the author didn't pull it off just quite right. The author also held that information back from the readers. 

Now, if this was the bad guy in the story, there would be no problem (in most cases). This became a problem because what the author was holding back was part of the character profile that established the GMC of the character. For the readers, we didn't know WHY the character was acting the way the author had written the story. We didn't need the full backstory of how we got there, but without that information, the readers are simply lost.

It is OK to give us little nuggets of what is going on with your characters. We promise, we will keep the secret safe from the other characters in the story. 

We see this also when writers send in query letters to editors and agents. They have been told, when they write that blurb about their story, to model it after back cover copy material. While this is true, we need to know what is going on in the story and YES, we need to know "if the butler did it." That secretive back-cover material is used when we finally publish the book because, obviously, we don't want the reader to know what happened.

I always look at giving out information to the readers with a "need to know" approach. What information does THE READER need to advance the story and keep it moving on? What information does THE READER need to get a three-dimensional image of the character? Along the same lines, how much do we need. In the case of the earlier example, we just needed to know why the main character was acting that way. A single line or maybe a paragraph. We don't need the whole story, just a single mention is all it would take to satisfy our needs as readers.