cell theory

Dave and others . . . a narrative problem I have here is that I don’t want my protagonist to know too much.  He’s not a spy type; he’s just a writer/teacher who crossed the wrong people and now has both the good guys and the bad guys after him.  To keep the narrative believable, he can’t have prepared beforehand for a life of crime.  But he’s not totally ignorant.   This is what I wrote in the story – “From researching my first novel I knew how to engage a proxy cell host, to make it look like we were calling from New Orleans.  It wouldn’t fool a government agency – or the Enemy, presumably – but it would cover our tracks on the domestic front.”  (By which he only means that he and his girl have called their parents, who think they’re in New Orleans, with phony reassurances.)  My own narrative problem is the ordinary one of feeding the reader enough information to make the story believable, but not sit him down and say “you need to know this stuff to understand the plot line,” and proceed to lecture him on espionage protocols.  (Obviously, if it were a spy novel I could do it.  But this is just a novel novel.)  Joe