Writing An Unreliable Narrator: Our Best Tips

Writer’s Relief
3 min readDec 17, 2021
If you’re writing a short story or novel, one way to grab and keep your readers’ attention is to use an unreliable narrator: a character who misleads or lies to the reader and creates doubt in his or her ability to tell the story. When readers encounter an unreliable narrator, they are challenged to think for themselves and come to their own conclusions, bringing the experience to another level. Here are our best tips for writing an unreliable narrator.

How To Write An Unreliable Narrator

Using an unreliable narrator means adding a layer of deception to your story. What you share with your reader through your character’s perspective is their “objective truth,” but certain traits about your character, as well as specific details in the story, can clue in the reader that things are not what they seem. You can use…

Writer’s Relief

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