The Big Reveal

Secrets, surprises, and twists are powerful narrative tools. They can conjure questions and mystery in readers’ minds that raise suspense, stakes, and reader investment, and knowing how to use them effectively can create some of the most memorable moments of your story.

Stories with a shocking reveal often get widely read and talked about. They keep readers hooked throughout, not knowing what comes next, eagerly turning pages to find out.

But pulling off a successful reveal is a tricky tightrope act between giving readers enough information to feel invested and keeping back enough to keep them hooked. It’s the striptease of literature: show too much and you lose all the excitement and buildup. Too little and nobody cares.

Balancing these considerations often relies on three key elements: knowing what and how much to keep as a reveal, when to reveal it, and how to unspool the hidden information for maximum suspense and impact.

What and How Much to Reveal

Reveals aren’t a device every story needs—and one reason they may fall flat is when they don’t feel necessary or intrinsic to the main story.

Effective reveals are the ones that essentially clarify, illuminate, or define a character arc or story: Amir’s actions in the past with his childhood best friend, Hassan, are a central facet of his arc and the story in both present and past storylines in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner; what happened to Stella Vignes after abandoning her twin sister in the 1950s to live as a white woman in Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half reverberates among all the other characters for generations.

If the information revealed isn’t directly germane to and materially impactful on the character arc and main story, then it can feel to readers like manipulation or a trick played on us by the author—a false promise or an anticlimactic letdown. You risk a disappointing payoff and losing reader trust and engagement.

But not every aspect of a story unknown needs to be (nor should be) a reveal. Readers need enough information and context to orient ourselves to the story—to know who the characters are, what they want, what’s at stake, what’s in their way, etc.—and give us a reason to care. If everything is a mystery, then readers have nothing to hook into.

Vague hints at a “dark secret” or painful past can feel cryptic, coy, or manipulative. But offering so much information that readers are left with no questions at all leaves no reason to read on.

Think of paving in a reveal—of storytelling in general, really—as giving readers pieces of a puzzle. We need enough pieces to get a sense of the full picture, with a few key missing pieces that keep us from putting the puzzle fully together.

When to Reveal

Not all reveals serve the story best if maintained throughout; sometimes you gain more narrative mileage by spilling the beans sooner, so readers see the aftereffects of the secret and its impact on the characters and story.

Liane Moriarty’s The Husband’s Secret begins on the unanswered question of what is in a letter a protagonist finds while her husband is out of town that he wrote her years ago, to be opened only in the event of his death. The secret creates wonderful suspense, but the letter’s contents are revealed about a third of the way into the book rather than sustained throughout.

That’s because the story isn’t about what the secret is, but rather its corrosive power on the characters keeping it and how they overcome it; about when the other relevant characters will learn the full truth; and about what will happen when they do. Moriarty gains much more narrative punch from showing the secret’s fallout and its impact on the story and the characters than from stringing out the secret itself throughout the book.

Knowing what type(s) of reveal you’re using in your story may help indicate how fast and far to pull back the curtain:

Reveals kept from the protagonist or POV character Reveals kept from other characters Reveals kept from the reader

Moriarty expertly uses all three: keeping the secret from the husband’s wife until about a third of the way into the story; from readers until several chapters later; and from another key character until nearly the end. The plot and each character’s arc hinges on when they learn it.

Consider what purpose the secret and its reveal are meant to serve in your story as a whole. Keeping a reveal hidden only for the sake of the mystery or suspense you hope it creates may feel like a one-trick pony if it isn’t foundational to the story you’re telling, and it’s not usually enough to build an entire plot on.

Nadia Hashimi’s A House Without Windows withholds the central secret—did one protagonist kill her husband?—from readers and all other characters till almost the very end, but the story is based on the premise that no one but the wife knows the truth and the other characters’ goals are to unearth it. The protagonist and the plot are dependent upon the keeping of the secret rather than its revelation, which resolves the story, so Hashimi gains more narrative impact from maintaining the mystery until the climax of the story.

Gone Girl begins with the mystery of what happened to Amy and whether her husband did it, which creates strong initial suspense. But halfway through the story Gillian Flynn reveals both answers to readers, and later to Nick that Amy is alive and trying to frame him for her murder, and the story shifts into a taut cat-and-mouse suspense of who can outfox whom, and who will win the game.

In Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants, readers see the central murder that the entire story builds to in the very first chapter, and all the players in the story know what happened—but it’s not till close to the end that readers learn we didn’t see the full truth. The story isn’t about keeping the animal stampede or the murder a secret—it’s about what led up to it, and in fact showing it from the beginning adds an additional element of suspense as readers turn pages to figure out the “how” and the “why” that comprise the true reveal.

“The challenge of a successful reveal is balancing how to salt in enough information to orient readers and give us something to invest in, while withholding enough to keep us turning pages to discover the answers.” —Tiffany Yates Martin

Writer’s Digest

How to Unspool a Reveal

Probably the hardest balancing act to pull off with reveals is unspooling the information without vexing readers, either through giving us too much information or too little, and without our seeing the author setting the hook.

That often requires a sort of benign manipulation, selectively omitting or occluding certain information, and gently misdirecting readers to lead them to draw the conclusions you want them to draw. If readers see the author’s hand, though, you risk losing their investment and trust; these devices must be invisible, believable, and organic to the story.

There are a number of techniques for pulling off this tightrope act, regardless of which types of reveal you’re incorporating:

Use the premise: The story itself may offer justification and a framework for the reveal. In Laurie Frankel’s This Is How It Always Is, a family moves to a new town to allow their young trans daughter, Poppy, to live openly as a girl without the stigma of judgment from people who knew the family before. The reader and every one of the characters in the family at the center of the story knows the secret, but the plot hinges on whether and when other characters find out.

Use the character motivations: Moriarty does this in The Husband’s Secret, where the wife who finds her husband’s mysterious letter resists opening it at first because she feels it’s a breach of his trust; then because when she tells him about it, he asks her not to. Hashimi’s A House Without Windows is predicated on the protagonist’s refusal to tell anyone what actually happened in the courtyard where she was found next to her husband’s murdered body, and her reason for doing so is the spine of the story.

Use the plot: The Husband’s Secret shifts to this device when the wife determines to open the letter: The evening she intends to do so despite her husband’s wishes, he surprises her by coming home early from his business trip and she can’t. But later that same night, when she hears him frantically searching for it while he thinks she’s sleeping, she realizes she must know what’s in it, and finally opens it.

Use the story structure: Moriarty avails herself of this device too: Because her book has multiple protagonists, she is able to show the wife learning what’s in the letter but withhold it from readers from several more chapters simply by cutting to other characters’ scenes. Gillian Flynn skillfully uses the structure in Gone Girl as well: Part one is all Nick’s first-person POV, so Flynn is able to keep Amy’s fate secret from both him and readers until part two, when Amy narrates the story.

Use POV: The conventions of the various points of view can offer you tools to keep back unknowns. Frankel uses omniscient POV to add meaning and heft to the secret each character is keeping about Poppy, heightening stakes and building suspense and tension into the constant threat of reveal. Flynn uses first-person to mine suspense and stakes from what each character knows and is withholding, both from other characters and from the reader.

Use reader assumptions and expectations: Outright lying to readers sacrifices our trust, but you can lead us to draw incorrect conclusions from what we think we know. The classic example of this in film is The Sixth Sense, where filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan highlights at the end all the many clues he peppered into the story about the central reveal that many viewers overlooked or misinterpreted.

You can deliberately influence readers’ assumptions with the skillful use of devices like red herrings (Ruta Sepetys uses these to point reader suspicions away from the actual spies in I Must Betray You; Agatha Christie uses them in pretty much everything), unreliable narrators (like Pi in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi), foreshadowing (poor tragic Oedipus in the Sophocles play, who knows of the prophecy that he has unwittingly fulfilled but refuses to believe it), and upended expectations (like Rebecca’s character and backstory in Daphne du Maurier’s eponymous classic).

There’s no need to limit yourself to just one of the above techniques—strong reveals often incorporate elements of many of them. In Water for Elephants, Gruen uses structure to conceal the secret in the “past” timeline, and character motivation and reader expectations to conceal it in the present. The Vanishing Half uses the story premise, plot, structure, and point of view. A House Without Windows uses character motivation, point of view, premise, plot, and structure.

Reveal Guidelines and Tips

Putting all these elements together for an effective reveal can be tricky, so keep a few tips and guidelines in mind to plant readers’ feet in your story while withholding the full picture:

Determine what works best as a reveal in your story, how much of the facts to reveal, and when. In the early part of The Vanishing Half, the main drivers of Desiree’s story are Stella’s choosing to absent herself from her twin’s life and the unanswered questions of why, not the specifics of her sister’s life afterward. But learning Stella’s whereabouts and situation later becomes central to Desiree’s and other main characters’ storylines. Reveal enough context to ground readers, keeping back just one or two key elements that constitute the full reveal, as in the omitted piece of crucial information in the opening scene of Water for Elephants. Reveal all the facts, but only to a point—let the depth or nuances of the story serve as the reveal. Sepetys does this in I Must Betray You with the final reveal of one character’s true motivations for actions readers already know about but have likely attributed to other motives. Play the feelings even as you conceal some facts; show how the characters are influenced by the secret, how they react, feel, behave, act as a direct result. Hosseini bases much of the character arc and story of The Kite Runner on this technique, as does Moriarty in The Husband’s Secret. Reveal pieces of the puzzle gradually as a key framework for the plot, leading up to the main reveal, as Flynn does in Gone Girl, or Ruta Sepetys in I Must Betray You. Letting readers be part of putting the puzzle together avoids a deus-ex-machina reveal that feels ret-conned or sprung on readers. Reveal pieces of the puzzle incrementally to different “audiences”—readers, protagonists, other characters— to keep stakes high and suspense taut, as Moriarty does in The Husband’s Secret and Flynn in Gone Girl.

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The challenge of a successful reveal is balancing how to salt in enough information to orient readers and give us something to invest in, while withholding enough to keep us turning pages to discover the answers.

But used skillfully and intentionally, reveals can be a powerful tool for creating the kind of “unputdownable” stories that gets readers talking—no matter your genre.

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