Bookreporter.com ran an interview with best-selling novelist Julia Spence-Fleming ("One Was a Soldier"). She said, "One of my favorite techniques is to have a character be an unreliable narrator of his or her own life, so in the first book, we see Clare unaware of her feelings toward Russ until she's sandbagged at the end, and we see Russ maintaining he's happily married when everyone else can see the cracks in the relationship. Here [in "One Was a Soldier"], Clare is in denial, which means writing the behavior from the viewpoint of someone who doesn't see what she's actually doing to herself."
That's true of most of us most of the time. We are experts on other people's lives, but in the dark about our own.
This strategy of keeping the characters ignorant about themselves--while often quite wise about what's going on in other people's lives--is powerful. As readers we get to be smarter than the characters at least in that one aspect, and being smarter than somebody else usually feels pretty good.
It's a strategy you might want to consider using. I've playing with it in the script I'm writing at the moment. The protagonist knows he is terminally ill and that concentrates his mind enough for him finally to see his life clearly. He doesn't like what he sees, and the question is whether it's too late for him to do anything about the choices he's made.
In this context, your character's ignorance can be bliss for your novel or screenplay.
(For more on screenplay writing, see my other blog, www.ScreenWritingSuccess.com; for more on how to write three-dimensional characters, get my book, "Your Writing Coach.")
