Nobody likes a liar in real life. Or at least we don’t like people who lie in order to win sexual harassment civil suits against our publishing companies. But in fiction, it can be thrilling to get inside the head of someone who may not be totally honest.

And if you think about it, there’s no reason a person telling a story must be totally honest. We tell false stories all the time: about the fish we nearly caught, about the reason we were speeding, about why we said we were at yoga class even though nobody saw us there and the teacher said we haven’t attended in weeks.

And we even lie to ourselves. Beyond the obvious lies we might tell, for example, that we still have enough hair and muscle tone to bag a Miami nine, human memory is malleable and susceptible to manipulation. I once gave a report to police about a drowning body that was riddled with errors and inconsistencies simply because I’d been so distraught. For example, I claimed to have been swimming out to save the man when I had actually been standing on the beach, and I also remembered it being a stranger who drowned even though in reality, it was a neighbor with whom I recently had a big feud.

So not only are unreliable narrators true to life, they can provide your story with an uneasy tension.

We’re trained to trust the people who tell stories to us. Maybe because story writers remind us of the authority figures, like teachers, doctors, or like the men in lab coats who, during a college psychology experiment, convinced me my roommate was a communist spy and got me to shoot him in the head. (Don’t worry, viewers, the gun turned out to only be filled with air.)

There are four main types of unreliable narrators. We’ll look at each in turn.

Picaros are characters who are adept at exaggeration, people like Moll Flanders or Don Quixote. In my novel, The Ballad of Ralph Quaid, the titular character claims to have slept with a world-famous celebrity but over the course of the story, the side characters, piece by piece, work out that it’s likely the man actually had sex with a prize show dog.

Madmen are characters who are unreliable simply because they’ve lost their goddamn minds. American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman might be the most famous example here. John Stevens, the narrator of Murder on Spirit Airlines, is unreliable because nobody would realistically put a bomb on a Spirit Air flight when there would be nobody aboard worth killing.

Naifs are narrators who are unreliable because of their youth, inexperience and naivete. Huckleberry Finn fits well in this category. My coming-of-age story The House on Pain Avenue fits here because Daniel Clementine sees his social awkwardness and estrangement from his father as a result of his being gay, when the reader can clearly understand it’s actually because Daniel won’t ever stop talking about how 9/11 was an inside job.

Finally, we have our basic liars. These people are trying to paint a better picture of themselves and work toward specific goals. These are common people we encounter in our everyday lives. They are our coworkers, our lawyers, our clergyman, our business partners who secretly drug us to increase our productivity and get us to sign agreements handing over the rights to a sizeable portion of our books. Agatha Christie novels are filled with this type of person. As are my Colt Action novels, where the protagonist always seems to have an excuse to kill Comanches, even women and children who are minding their own business gardening and basket weaving.

Whichever type of unreliable narrator you decide to utilize, here are some helpful tips.

Step One: Give your narrator a reason to be unreliable

There are a lot of things that can make your narrator unreliable. Humbert Humbert, for example, is unreliable because he wants to be remembered as an obsessive lover rather than a French person.

A childhood profuse with nights spent scrounging for scraps in the fridge to make dinners of relish and tortilla shells taught me that drugs are another thing make someone unreliable. Consider making your protagonist a junkie.

Or you could tie it to a deep need that the narrator hasn’t fulfilled. For example, maybe they’re making up a bunch of lies about their life so their YouTube channel isn’t boring and pointless like all the other writing advice ones.

Step Two: Keep your reader in the dark

But you don’t want to give away the game too early. It’s better to lull your reader into a false sense of security before the inevitable rug pull. Much like an accountant who doesn’t know he’s committing tax fraud for your publishing company, it will be better for everyone if the reader sides with the narrator from the outset.

Think about Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. Even though there are subtle clues at the beginning, we’re on his side because it’s so obvious that everyone else in our lives are phonies and things would be so much better if someone would shoot the guy who wrote this song.

Step Three: Escalate the lies as the narrative progresses

Lies breed more lies. Unless you’ve got an entire propaganda network to complete rewrite reality for you, eventually your narrator will be outed.

Your lies should start small, almost unnoticeable, but they need to get bigger as the story goes on. Let’s say, for example, you write a story about a man who kills his neighbor by bashing his head with oar and dumping him in a lake. Well, you can’t start with the narrator getting caught or confessing to the murder.

You start with him saying he only went to the beach later in the day to do research for his newest novel. You might only draw the connection between the deceased and the narrator two-thirds of the way into the police invest… I mean, novel.

Step Four: Use multiple unreliable narrators

Of course, you could go the route of Kurosawa and tell the story from multiple conflicting perspectives, like he did in the Seven Samurai, where we see the same murder unfold from the seven titular vantage points.

The only thing you’ve got to decide here is, is there one objective truth, or will your story be more about how an objective truth is essentially unknowable, as an impartial jury of the state of Arizona seems to believe?