Unreliable Narrators: When Your Storyteller Gets It Wrong

📚 Overview

We tend to categorize narrators according to point of view: first person, third person, omniscient. But there is another useful way to think of them: how much we can trust what they tell us. Some narrators deliberately deceive the reader, while others misunderstand the people and events around them, sometimes without realizing it.

Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, for instance, prides herself on being a perceptive judge of character while getting some of the most important judgments in the novel spectacularly wrong.

In this masterclass, Noah Charney will explore different kinds of unreliable narrators and how writers can use the gap between what a narrator believes or says and what the reader understands.

Schedule

EVENT

3pm - 4pm EST

In this one-hour masterclass, you will learn:

Different types of unreliable narrators, from deliberate liars to characters who simply misunderstand what is happening
Strategies for making the reader question the narrator without giving the game away
Ways to create tension, humor, irony, or suspense by letting the reader understand more than the narrator
How to keep an unreliable narrator believable and engaging without the reader feeling cheated

At the end of the session there will be a live Q&A where you can ask Noah questions about creating and writing unreliable narrators.

Speakers

Noah Charney

Reedsy Professor of Writing

Dr Noah Charney is the best-selling author of more than 30 of his own books, including a Pulitzer finalist. His latest book is The 12-Hour Author: Everything You Need to Know to Get Published and Become a Successful Writer (Bloomsbury). A professor of art history, he teaches online for the Smithsonian, the National Gallery (UK), and Yale. Noah has ghostwritten and edited books for Reedsy clients, and is Professor of Writing at Reedsy Learning.