How to DECEIVE your readers (and why you should) with Alan Moore | Meet your Maestro | BBC Maestro

The single most important thing, the most important instrument that a writer has is absolute honesty with their readers. No, I'm only kidding. It's actually misdirection. Misdirection is wonderful. You can completely deceive and betray your readership and they will thank you for it. um you will have given them such a surprise that it will actually be delightful and they will forgive the fact that you are clearly a incredible serial liar. There's ordinary forms of misdirection that everybody uses. The most common one would be only allowing your readership a drip feed of information so that they only get information when you want them to have it. You withhold the information about a thing until there is time to make the proper dramatic revelation. That's the most common form of mild misdirection. But you can aspire to some absolute genius pieces of misdirection. One of my favorites would be from the novel Magic by William Goldman. William Goldman was the author of Marathon Man made into a film with Dustin Hoffman and Lawrence Olivier. And the novel of that in itself contains some brilliant pieces of misdirection. I assume that it's one of William Goldman's favorite techniques. But in the novel Magic, um it's an absolutely blinding piece of misdirection. He commences the novel talking about a stage magician who is performing in a club and he's not entirely sure that the act's going to go well, but he's fairly confident because uh it's all set up nicely for the performance. The dummy has been planted in the audience so that after he's done a couple of clumsy conjuring tricks which the audience will be starting to feel a bit restless about at that point fats will start to shout out from the audience and heckle him and the banter between him and this hostile audience member Fats will become the real act. It's a comedy act based around a magical act. And as the novel progresses, we see the central character, the stage magician, and fats. We see their relationship. We see them talking in the dressing room afterwards, discussing how the thing has gone, discussing perhaps any possible improvements. And we see their personal relationship. And we follow this until one night in the dressing room, an argument develops and it becomes increasingly vicious and increasingly personal and they're both becoming increasingly angry until at one point the stage magician stands up.