No Tricks, Never further plot through dialogue, Show don't Tell.
This is a bit of a technical deep dive, apologies in advance if this isn't what you're here for.
I recently heard some writing advice that sent me down a hole I had no business wasting so much thought on.
It’s very simple advice:
No tricks.
The gist of this idea is:
When trying to invoke mystery in writing, it’s tempting to hold back information from the reader. But If you’re using a first-person narrator, don’t allow them to hold any information that the reader doesn’t have access to.
I.e. No tricks
I told you it was simple.
Trust me, I wanted to accept this advice at face value and move on with my life, but it kept nipping at me.
This advice took me back to high school maths class when teachers would occasionally share a “rule” for solving an equation without fully laying out its mechanics.
The rule simply “worked” and that was all I needed to know.
Back then, even on occasions where I found myself capable of putting the rule into practice and landing on the correct answer for the purposes of the class, if I didn’t understand the mechanics of it, the “why” of it, I’d never fully trust that rule.
Rote learning might get me through the immediate class exercises, but during important tests later on, due to that lack of trust in the rule, I’d often find myself reverse-engineering the equation and taking double the time to solve it manually, just to “make sure.”
This was never enough to make me write down the wrong answer, but it added about nine extra layers of needless suffering that a normal person would have avoided.
I won’t burden you with any more quirks of my broken brain, but this goes some part of the way towards explaining why I got stuck on this topic.
Why?
This rabbit hole was triggered by this episode of the New Yorker fiction podcast where George Saunders discussed Claire Keegan’s short story So Late in the Day.
(If you don’t know Claire Keegan. Her award winning novel Small Things Like These has just been made into a feature film starring Cillian Murphy—which hopefully won’t butcher the original too badly).
Without giving away the plot of the story, during this Podcast Saunders made the point that Keegan clearly broke the “No tricks” rule in the writing of this story.
He pointed out how her narrator has knowledge of a hidden plot point before it has been revealed to the reader in the story. A “trick” according to his own rule.
Yet he goes on to point out how Keegan, somehow “got away” with it in this case—proven by countless accolades this story has since received.
This became the main mystery to unpack in the podcast wherin Saunders eventually concluding that: Keegan’s character was inherently in denial about features of their own life, so the knowledge they kept from the reader was also being kept from themselves—too painful or truthful to look at. Therefore, within the rules established by this story’s internal world it made sense to play a trick of this kind.
No tricks. Simple stuff.
I’m only half convinced by this justification. It feels like a stretch. Wouldn’t it just be easier to say, “not every rule is concrete?”
I suppose it doesn’t help that an exception to the rule was my introduction to the rule, but here we are. At the mouth of the rabbit hole.
What follows is a literary version of that reverse engineering I suffered through in math class as I attempt to go back to first principles and flesh out examples and exceptions to further ground this concept. All because I’m incapable of accepting things at face value.
So what’s there to understand about “no tricks?”
If no tricks is all about the narrator knowing things that the reader doesn’t, perhaps a good way to frame the slipperiness of this advice is to contrast it with ‘dramatic irony’ where the reader has access to info that a character or the narrator doesn’t.
This isn’t strictly an opposite, but it shows some of the subtle distinctions buried in this “rule.”
The function of dramatic irony is to put your reader in the power position and allow them to be the clever one (or at least give them the opportunity to be the clever one) in relation to the characters.
Naturally, you don’t want to go too far with this, because stories where characters are plodding towards a disaster that the reader can see coming from a mile away are equally annoying.
But as a broad rule, dramatic irony harmonises fairly well with the “no tricks” idea because it highlights how both rules are localised to: the relations between two elements of your story.
According to the No Tricks rule characters within a story are fair game to be tricked all you want. Your narrator can trick other characters all they like. “No Tricks” is about the dynamic between narrator and reader.
I’ll repeat that distinction to make sure it sinks in.
The “no tricks” adage is reserved for the narrator of your story in relation to the reader. Nothing else.
The important thing is to let the reader be “in on it” at all times.
Parallels:
Instinctively I also sense a harmony between “no tricks” and another adage, “never further plot through dialogue.”
As far as I can tell, breaking either rule is a cheap way of delivering a revelation or development in your story.
So perhaps that’s the “why” driving this rule?
All good stories lean on the cause and effect of the action their author has introduced.
A writer who foregoes foreshadowing work and springs an important revelation on their readers isn’t going to generate the satisfied response they’re expecting. They’re more likely to draw out a confused look or worse, a sense of robbery. This type of writer forgets that anticipation and prediction are a much larger elements of intrigue than the moment of surprise itself.
The no tricks rule demonstrates Hitchcock’s bomb under the table example to perfection:
What carries more tension?
The dinner party that plays at as normal but is interupted by a sudden explosion?
or
The bomb revealed to you under the table at the outset of a story which forces the reader to watch the dinner party, wincing every time they anticipate the bomb might go off?
Clearly the latter carries more payoff. The important ingredients to a well told story is all this work going on inside the reader’s own mind and body. Not the left field surprise, you’ve thought up behind your laptop screen.
Never further plot via dialogue puts the mechanics of this reasoning into practice in a different way.
This latter rule insists: A writer shouldn’t introduce the news of the British invading via a passing conversation between two characters. The way to make this news land effectively is to let the reader witness those horses coming over the hill in real time.
Never further plot via dialogue.
Give the reader the visual of a union jack flying on a flagpole and it will deliver miles more payoff than stating it outright. Let the reader solve that problem let them feel it on their own terms.
The writer’s job is to give the reader all the ingredients to draw the conclusion that would have come through thinly without the correct priming.
So perhaps that’s the crux of this rule:
Tricks never land as satisfying as a well plotted game of hint, discovery and carefully timed revelation does.
Tricks have a dirty feel to them. They’re unearned.
It’s the character in poverty who conveniently finds out about a long lost inheritance which will make everything better at the end of the story.
It’s the inexplicable rescue helicopter that carries the doomed heroes to safety.
If there was nothing structurally keeping the narrator from sharing this info with the reader at the beginning of the story, then they should make that reveal from the outset.
These “tricks” make all the unfolding struggles within the plot feel pointless.
“Forgetting” to share a detail is not good enough.
Sorry, you don’t get to do that.
But doesn’t this rule risk breaching that other rule, “Show don’t Tell?”
No tricks sure.
But, if you “Tell” too much, you’re not just giving the reader the ingredients to make the cake for themselves, you’re taking the baking powder out of their hands and divvyig out the portions.
You’ve stolen their means to participate.
Just like this “no tricks” advice, it took me a while to wrap my head around what “show don’t tell,” really means. I misunderstood it for a long time and overcorrected with (ironically) a shitload of tricks in order to make sure I wasn’t “telling” the reader too much.
This resulted in me burying plot points and running from anything that smelt like it might be giving away what was going on in the story.
So as with all things, there’s a line.
To be transparent or no tricks at all? It’s not one or the other.
To get around this, you need to pare back the release of info.
Disguise it a bit, but not via “convenient” timing.
Build in valid reasons why the narrator cannot know or share a detail with the reader until a specific point in the story. That’s what plotting is at the end of the day.
So it is simple after all?
There are some of you out there who may be baffled by my slowness on this.
It really is quite simple.
But, this advice keeps trying to shake itself free from my head because every time it starts to sit neatly, I think of another exception. (I’ve included a few of these exceptions at the bottom of this newsletter for those with an equally disobedient mind).
And even if I solve that exception, isn’t that proof that there might be others which I will need to go on to solve to get back to this point?
At what point does this end?
As I stated at the beginning. This is a slippery idea.
George Saunders’ attempt to shoehorn an objectively successful story into the bounds of this rule is proof that it’s slippery.
But after all the above, I think I do agree with him. Claire Keegan’s story fits the bounds of the rule.
There was nothing unearned about her revelation. She just got there via a different route.
It also resulted in a satisfying ending which is the goal at the end of the day right?
The rule holds.
Apologies for this tech-talk, but hopefully, amid all this waffle I’ve landed on a few gems that may help the key points of the rule resonate:
Don’t steal the moment of discovery from the reader.
Don’t use sleight of hand to hold onto unearned mystery.
No tricks.
It’s not perfect but for me it’s a step in the right direction.
That’s all.
And if you’re after extra credit, here are a few of those exceptions I thought of…
Unreliable narrator:
But what about the unreliable narrator?
This device is a mainstay of classic fiction. I personally use it a lot.
The naive child. The ‘expert’ narrator who lacks self-awareness of how they’re coming off. The lying narrator.
Is this rule more a case of keeping your narrator from wilfully deceiving your reader rather than keeping info from them?
Perhaps barring a narrator who is an outright liar, you can still follow the deliberate release of information I as described above without breaching the no tricks rule because these characters aren’t aware they’re tricking the reader.
So is that it? As long as the narrator isn’t betraying the reader, is it okay for them to hold back info.
Red Herrings and twists:
Aren’t mysteries built on tricking the reader? How can you structure an Agatha Christie style plot without heavy use of misdirects and false leads?
Furthermore, what if you use a plot where the reader is acting in a Jury capacity and there is a narrator attempting to make a case that doesn’t align with the truth?
Surely by definition this style of plot requires a whole bag of tricks?
I don’t have answers to these (or at least the energy to think them all the way to their natural end) but if you’ve got any answers or can think of other exceptions to this rule, feel free to comment.