Meiyen Bell Kennedy

On Writing Characters Who Lie to Themselves

The most interesting characters I know are the ones who have constructed elaborate, internally consistent explanations for why they are not the problem. Self-deception is not a flaw in a character — it is the engine of the story.

I think about this often when I am drafting. There is a temptation to give your protagonist clarity — to let them see themselves accurately, to make them sympathetic through self-awareness. But clarity is a luxury. Most of us are not clear. Most of us are narrating ourselves into something more bearable.

The challenge is to write a character who is wrong about themselves without tipping the reader off too early. You want the reader to believe the character's version of events, at least for a while. You want them to be complicit in the lie before they realize what they have agreed to.

This is the work I find most difficult and most alive. The moment a reader writes to me and says: I didn't see it coming, but looking back, it was always there — that is the moment I know the book did what it was supposed to do.

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