I was going to use a more detailed example from one of my own in-progress books, but it just got to be too long to explain. So we’re going to look at this in the abstract instead (from series book 5).
Every time a story event happens, there are people who know (something) about it, and people who don’t. Those people don’t stop with the people on the pages: they include the Reader, (and sometimes even the Author, temporarily– you know — you wrote something not quite final because it seemed like a good idea but you don’t have any plot support for it yet… until you’ve got to finalize it and it has to stop being speculative).
Without getting into exactly how the construction in question below is set up, let me take you through the mid-point crisis of a work in process with a brief sequential list of who knows what (in the abstract):
(1) Hero & Friends suffer a lab accident in the city, followed by panicked escape by all.
— Offstage knowledge? Readers can see what happens, up to a point, better than Friends.
(2) Hero vanishes during the panic and can’t be found.
— Offstage knowledge? No one. And no one (other than the Hero) is going to know for a long time.
(3) Friends discover (belatedly) that Hero is missing. They work out the start, but lose the trace.
— Offstage knowledge? Only Friends.
(4) Family informed that Hero is missing.
— Offstage knowledge? Friends & Family. Rising panic. 4 days pass.
(5) Complete change of scene, new location (miles away), new characters. Doctor visits Country Squire. Laborers inform Doctor of approaching man on foot, from the fields and boundary pond, unresponsive, damaged.
— Offstage knowledge? Readers (who suspect this is the Hero)
(6) Doctor helps where he can, man understands them (eventually), but says nothing. Doctor and Squire deduce enough from clothing and contents to suspect his city institutional affiliation (wizard guild), and send a messenger there with news.
— Offstage knowledge? Readers know his identity for sure, but not what happened.
(7) Messenger reaches Friends & Family, who send people to Country Squire.
— Offstage knowledge? Friends & Family know Hero is alive, but not what happened.
(8) Friends & Family arrive. Wife comforts Hero, who won’t answer her questions or say much. No details.
— Offstage knowledge? Nothing new.
(9) Squire hosts meal before Friends & Family & Hero depart. Hero acknowledges a duty of explanation and narrates a very abbreviated and emotionless description of being lost and then recovering. This does not account for the damage he has suffered, or his reticence.
— Offstage knowledge? The bare facts are inadequate. Clearly more happened than he is saying, and some of it must have been dire.
(10) Friends & Family & Hero return home. The students who are boarders at the Academy which is housed in the Hero’s home institution want to welcome the Hero home. Hero steels himself to say a few words, expressing satisfaction that no one else was hurt in the accident. A student declares that surely the accident was not his fault and the Hero erupts in an impassioned speech about how that business and its safety were his responsibility, that a man is defined by the responsibilities he accepts, that he must be careful about what he takes on.
— Offstage knowledge? This is the first hint about what’s going on in the Hero’s mind. And still, no one knows exactly what happened to him.
(11) The next day, the Hero visits a temple next to his laboratory. (The start of the book sees him agreeing to donate money to help restore it, in the charge of a sister of the order.) He enters the still-being-repaired empty building, and steels himself in this seclusion for a long, long review of all the ways his planning has been inadequate — for his businesses, for his family, for his responsibilities.
— Offstage knowledge? All the horrific events he’s endured over those 4 lost days that he cannot bring himself to reveal to anyone (too humiliated, too inexorable, too powerless). There was nothing for him to fight, just irresistible compulsion that he managed to outlast. Only now do Readers know what has happened and how it has affected him, and how his plans are changing as a consequence. It’s unclear whether he will ever reveal the details to Friends & Family, though they will see the shadows of them by his actions.
What I’m after in this article is getting the most out of the suspense of the various reveals — especially on behalf of the reader, but also for all the other involved parties.
Why can’t the Hero just tell Friends & Family all the gory details of what happened? Well, if the Hero were female, perhaps he could, seeking what comfort he could find… but a man loses status in his own eyes, weeping all over his friends. This particular man is sensitive to his smallish stature, his relative youth, his violation of institutional norms, so while he doesn’t let that stop him, it also doesn’t make him eager to exhibit weakness or vulnerability. Family & Friends may guess at some of it, and perhaps he’ll share a little with his wife, but perhaps not, too. (She will figure some of it out, accurately enough.)
The business about “responsibilities” identifies the psychological engine that makes all of this meaningful for this hero. Saving that explosion for his return home makes it clear how much must have happened to him for it to have that effect in public.
I wanted to present an example how you can restrict knowledge for various audiences, inside the story and out, while still tying things back to the basic themes and concerns of the story as a whole (the Hero’s responsibilities, in this case).
How do you think about these sorts of flourishes for your own work?
Mad Genius Club 
3 responses to “Controlling who knows what”
I stand in awe (regularly) of your ability to plan and control and understand your writing. I try, after the first draft is done, to tame the chaos a little, and inject some order.
The thing is, I ruminate on some of the elements of my books for quite a while, when dropping off to sleep, for example — not on the book as a whole, but on the big pivot points and key scenes — the high-point architecture. If I can make those feel satisfyingly cohesive in some way, then I can write the book itself, filling in the rest of the glue opportunistically as I go along, aiming at the next big pivot point.
In this example, that means I thought of the “Hero-thinks-about-responsibilities in the temple” scene before I knew which responsibilities those would be (and created various minor scenes to find that out) or what decisions he would make, followed by the would he or wouldn’t he feel comfortable telling his wife what happened in his absence, followed by wondering about the details of what actually did happen — sort of working backward or skipping around in the plot structure. That lets me drop foreshadowing and clues in the primary text for upcoming pivot points, because I have some reasonable idea of what’s coming, and how things will be intertwined or related.
This creates all sorts of opportunities. For example, the wife travels to the recovered hero who is lying in a blanket nest on the floor at the Squire’s place. She seats herself next to him and tries to wrap an arm around him. He is indeed comforted by her familiar scent (not enough to remove his inhibitions about telling her the details of what happened to him), but notices in passing that her scent has changed subtly. [And later in the book he realizes it must be because she is pregnant, feeding into his responsibility anxieties.] It seems to me so much better to make such a revelation organically this way than as a planned scene all on its own (wife discovers pregnancy, tells husband) in an overall plot diagram. This way it can creep up on the reader, too, the way it creeps up on the Hero.
When I first considered the material for this book, I knew about the lab, about the cause and mechanics of the hero’s disappearance, and about some of the responsibilities he was feeling — as an overall series-level pressure/instability. The start of the story (casually sponsor the restoration of the temple in that location, and use it as a significant scene at least once) was a deliberate whim that spawned a number of possibilities.
That’s it. Have to start somewhere. “Ooh…. what if…. and then he met… who had these special skills…. but then this thing happened….”
(And then some of it hits the fabulation engine which starts sparking along.)
If you have more than one viewpoint character, you probably need dramatic irony. After all, the point of the second character is to let the readers know something that the first character doesn’t.