Master Fiction Writing

Unreliable Narrators: How to Mislead Readers Without Cheating Them

Can your readers trust the person telling them the story? And if they can't, how do you make that part of the storytelling rather than a cheap trick?

In this episode of Master Fiction Writing, I'm exploring the wonderful, complicated world of unreliable narrators. Inspired by a listener's question about a locked-cabin murder mystery, we'll look at how to mislead readers without making them feel cheated, and why unreliable narration is about much more than characters who tell lies.

We'll explore the differences between deliberate deception, selective storytelling, mistaken assumptions and self-deception, and how each creates a different reading experience. I'll also explain how point of view affects what you can reasonably conceal, how to plant clues that take on new meaning after a revelation, and why sometimes revealing a secret earlier can make your story even more compelling.

And unreliable narrators aren't just for mysteries and thrillers. From romance to historical fiction and family sagas, we'll look at how the gap between what characters believe and what's actually true can create emotional depth, dramatic tension and powerful character arcs.

There's also a practical writing exercise to help you explore the difference between what happened, what your character believes happened, and what they're willing to admit.

Because the best unreliable narrators don't just make us question what happened. They make us reconsider the person who's been telling us what happened.

In this episode:

• What makes a narrator unreliable (and why they don't have to be lying)

• How to conceal information without breaking your point-of-view contract

• Planting clues that reward readers rather than tricking them

• Deciding when to reveal the truth

• Using unreliable narration for emotional depth and character development

• A practical exercise you can apply to your own manuscript

Mentioned in this episode:

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Previous Master Fiction Writing episodes: The POV Contract: What You Owe the Reader in Scene 1 and The Reveal Is Not the Secret: How to Control What Your Reader Knows

Need help with a tricky story problem?

If you're struggling with point of view, an unreliable narrator, a revelation that isn't landing, or another aspect of your novel, my Story SOS sessions offer focused, one-to-one coaching to help you work out what's going wrong and what to do next.

Find out more at https://www.thebookcoach.co/story-sos

How do you keep a story moving when there’s no ticking clock, no looming deadline, and the plot unfolds across decades?

This week’s episode comes from a question sent in by Joan over on Ko-fi, who’s writing an epic family saga and wanted to know how to create pressure and momentum across a long timeframe.

I look at why momentum isn’t the same as speed, and how expansive stories can build narrative pressure through accumulation, consequence, emotional deadlines, generational cause and effect, time jumps, and recurring patterns.

Because the opposite of a thriller isn’t a story without pressure. It’s a story where pressure behaves differently.

Also in this episode:

Romance Writers of America Indie Author Weekend 2026
Workshops and info:
https://rwa.memberclicks.net/indie-author-weekend

Register:
https://rwa.memberclicks.net/iaw2026-registration#/

Story SOS, my new focused one-to-one session for writers who know something in their story isn’t working but can’t quite see how to fix it:
https://www.thebookcoach.co/story-sos

More from me:
https://www.thebookcoach.co

A great secret can give you material. The reveal is what turns that material into story.

In this episode of Master Fiction Writing, I’m looking at how to control what your reader knows, when they know it, and how the timing of information can completely change the tension in a scene or an entire novel.

We’ll explore the difference between mystery, suspense and surprise, why some reveals land while others feel flat, and how revealing information earlier can sometimes create far more story than saving everything for the final act.

There’s also a free workbook to go with the episode: The Reveal Map.

The exercises will help you:

• track who knows what, and when;

• test what happens if you move a reveal earlier or later;

• work out what changes after the truth comes out;

• seed information so the reveal feels surprising but earned.

Download the workbook here.

You can find out more about my book coaching at:

https://www.thebookcoach.co

What makes dialogue feel alive? Very often, it’s what the characters aren’t saying.

In this episode of Master Fiction Writing, I’m looking at subtext: the gap between what a character wants from a conversation and what they’re actually prepared to say out loud.

We’ll explore how subtext can create tension, intimacy, humour, conflict and emotional depth, and why it works best when characters have a genuine reason to avoid directness. We’ll also look at how silence, deflection, physical behaviour and seemingly ordinary conversations can reveal far more than a page of explanation.

There’s a simple exercise, too: choose a scene, work out what each character really wants from the conversation, then ask why they can’t simply say it.

Because sometimes the most important thing in a scene is the thing nobody is quite ready to say yet.

Who really has the power in your scene?

Status is one of the hidden forces that can make a scene feel alive. It shapes who controls the conversation, who needs something more, who can walk away, and how the balance between characters changes from moment to moment.

In this episode of Master Fiction Writing, I explore how status works in dialogue, relationships, romance, comedy, conflict and quiet scenes. We’ll look at how power can shift even when a character’s official position stays exactly the same, why silence can be a status move, and how tiny behavioural choices can completely change the emotional temperature of a scene.

There’s also a simple exercise you can try with your own work: choose a two-character scene, decide who has the higher status at the beginning, track where the balance shifts, and see who holds the power by the end.

If a scene feels technically fine but somehow flat, status may be the missing ingredient.

What makes some characters instantly compelling to one another? Sometimes it isn’t vulnerability, physical attraction, or even conflict. Sometimes it’s the moment one character looks at another and thinks: Oh. You’re good.

In this episode of Master Fiction Writing, I explore the Hawksian woman, the confident, capable, quick-witted female character associated with the films of director Howard Hawks, and ask what this classic Hollywood archetype can teach contemporary fiction writers about creating characters with agency and relationships with genuine chemistry.

Using examples from To Have and Have Not, His Girl Friday, Much Ado About Nothing, Pride and Prejudice, Star Wars, The X-Files, Killing Eve, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Hunger Games, Firefly and more, we’ll look beyond the archetype itself to uncover the storytelling principles underneath it.

We’ll explore why competence can be attractive, why banter alone doesn’t create chemistry, how characters earn one another’s respect, and why some of the best relationships are built through mutual reassessment. We’ll also look at the limitations of the traditional Hawksian woman and how writers can take what works about the archetype without falling into the tired idea of the woman who earns respect simply because she’s “not like other girls.”

There’s also a practical exercise to help you examine an important relationship in your own story. You’ll identify what your characters initially believe about one another, find the actions that force them to reconsider those assumptions, and explore what becomes possible in the relationship as recognition turns into trust and intimacy.

Because sometimes the most powerful relationship progression isn’t:

They hated each other. Then they fell in love.

It’s:

They learned how to operate together.

And sometimes the most romantic words in fiction aren’t I love you.

They’re I trust you.

If you enjoy Master Fiction Writing, please follow or subscribe and leave a rating or review. It helps other fiction writers discover the podcast.

A magic system. A monster. A machine. A prophecy. A portal. A ghost. A dystopian regime. An impossible world.

Speculative fiction often begins with a brilliant what if? But the idea becomes a story when that impossible thing collides with something deeply human.

This episode of Master Fiction Writing is an audio version of my presentation for the WorldShift summit for speculative fiction writers. In it, I explore how to move beyond the “cool premise” and discover the emotional pressure hiding inside your speculative idea.

We’ll look at The Human Cost Framework and six elements you can use to connect premise and character: The Impossible Thing, The Human Desire, The Pressure Point, The Cost, The Choice, and The Change.

Along the way, you’ll learn how to:

• identify why this protagonist belongs in this speculative story;
• find the vulnerable place where your premise and character collide;
• give magic, monsters and technology emotional consequences, not simply rules;
• turn enormous external stakes into intimate personal ones;
• create choices in which every available option costs something;
• and use the speculative element itself to drive character transformation.

Whether you write fantasy, science fiction, horror, dystopian fiction, paranormal fiction, magical realism or something that cheerfully refuses to sit in any one genre box, this episode will help you ask a deceptively simple question:

Don’t ask only what the impossible thing does. Ask what it costs.

FREE DOWNLOAD: The Human Cost Map
Use the framework from this episode with your own story.

Find out more about my book coaching:
https://www.thebookcoach.co

If you enjoy Master Fiction Writing, please follow or subscribe, leave a review, and share the episode with another writer who has a brilliant impossible idea and needs to discover the human story inside it.

Romantasy is everywhere right now. Dragons, fae courts, morally grey love interests, spectacular special editions - and sales figures that have made the publishing industry sit up very straight indeed.

But what’s actually driving its extraordinary appeal?

In this episode of Master Fiction Writing, I take a deep dive into the rise of romantasy: what the term means, where the genre came from, why authors such as Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros have become publishing phenomena, and why BookTok alone can’t explain what’s happening.

More importantly, we look beneath the trend at the storytelling machinery.

Strong romantasy often runs on two interconnected engines: an external fantasy story involving danger, power, conflict or survival, and an intimate relationship story involving desire, trust, vulnerability and belonging. When those engines genuinely affect one another, the result can produce extraordinary narrative momentum.

And that principle has plenty to teach you even if the chances of a dragon appearing in your current manuscript are approximately zero.

Along the way, I explore yearning and delayed gratification, romance tropes, reader promises, emotional causality, world-building with consequences, series storytelling, “spice”, the dangers of decorative fantasy and bolted-on romance, and why bigger stakes aren’t necessarily better stakes.

You can also try a few simple exercises while you listen:

• Name the two engines in your own story: what is your protagonist trying to achieve externally, and what do they want emotionally from another person?

• Look for interaction: find a moment when something happening in the plot changes an important relationship - or when that relationship causes your protagonist to make a different plot decision.

• Identify the anticipation: ask yourself what your reader is currently waiting, hoping or dreading will happen, and whether your story is actively building towards that payoff.

There’s also a free companion workbook, The Two-Engine Test: A Story Development Workbook, which takes these ideas much further and helps you apply them directly to your own novel.

Download the workbook HERE.

If you enjoy the episode, please like, follow or subscribe to Master Fiction Writing wherever you listen. And if you know another writer who insists romantasy has absolutely nothing to teach them because their novel contains neither wings nor suspiciously attractive princes, send it their way. They may be surprised.

Sometimes the best edit you can make to an emotional scene is to delete the sentence that explains why it was emotional.

In this episode of Master Fiction Writing, I’m looking at a habit I see surprisingly often in manuscripts: a writer creates a strong emotional beat through behaviour, dialogue, silence or physical detail... and then immediately explains what the character is feeling.

The trouble is, that explanation can rob the original moment of its power.

We’ll explore why writers often don’t trust what they’ve already put on the page, how emotional over-explanation stops the reader from participating in the story, and why your characters don’t always need to understand their own feelings with the precision of a trained therapist. We’ll also look at why “show, don’t tell” isn’t really the rule you need. The more useful question is: are you telling the reader something you’ve already successfully shown them?

Choose an emotional scene from your manuscript and look for places where you’ve written:

behaviour → explanation

dialogue → explanation

physical sensation → explanation

image → explanation

Temporarily delete the explanation and read the passage again.

Does the reader still understand enough?

Not everything. Enough.

You may discover that the behaviour, dialogue or image was already doing all the work - and that the explanatory sentence was simply getting in its way.

If this episode helps you with your writing, please like the episode and subscribe to Master Fiction Writing so you don’t miss future episodes.

And if you’d like some expert help figuring out what’s working in your story, what isn’t, and what to tackle next, you can find out more about working with me as your book coach at:

⁠The Book Coach — Less Stress. More Story.

What does this story want because this character is queer?

That’s the question at the heart of this special episode recorded for ProWritingAid’s Write with Pride event.

Too often, queer characters are present in a story without their queerness meaningfully shaping what they want, what they fear, what they risk or who they become. Representation matters, but great fiction goes one step further by allowing identity to influence the emotional and structural movement of the story.

In this webinar, I introduce The Queer Story Engine: a practical five-part framework built around Desire, Danger, Belonging, Visibility and Change. Together, these elements help writers create queer characters whose identities are woven into the fabric of the narrative rather than simply named on the page.

Whether you’re writing fantasy, historical fiction, horror, romance, literary fiction or something entirely your own, this episode will give you practical revision questions you can apply immediately.

In this episode you’ll discover:

• Why representation and story integration are not the same thing.• How queerness can become a genuine source of plot, stakes and emotional movement.• Why queer joy can be every bit as powerful a story engine as conflict or danger.• How the same framework works across different genres and worlds.• A simple revision exercise you can return to throughout your writing process.

Download the free companion workbook:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NThkobC18oyEnceGBb2q8AI2SFCFefu8/view?usp=sharing

Find out more about my coaching:
https://www.thebookcoach.co

If this episode helps you see your story or your characters in a new way, I’d be delighted if you’d subscribe, leave a review, or share it with another writer.

Happy writing.