What if you can’t trust your character?

I’m starting a new book. It’s fun. It’s exciting. It’s hard!

Every book is different in the way it’s difficult. Some are hard to plot, but once I’ve gotten a hold of the story in my head, it’s just a matter of writing it all down, hearing those voices in my head and watching them enact the story. Some are hard to catch hold of the characters—which is really awful because it’s the characters who make up thestory. I need them solid and real (in my own head) so that they can become real on the page.

With Bridges (just what I’m calling my work-in-progress now, it actually has no title, but I’ve got to call it something), my characters are making things difficult for me.

I know exactly who my hero is, how he speaks and what he wants. He’s easy. The fact that he’s not going to attain his goal in order to attain love instead is a minor hiccup, but one I can deal with—the book is a romance after all.

My heroine started out trying to be another heroine I’d already written. That was all wrong and I had to start again. I think I’ve got her down now, but I’ll need to write a few scenes from her POV in order to be sure I’ve got her voice and her personality in my head. I can deal with that. She’s got a definite problem and a definite goal which she will achieve. She’s the lucky one in the story—she gets it all, her goal and the love. She’ll have to make a few compromises along the way, and deal with some unexpected twists and turns, but in the end she’s going to get exactly what she wants (lucky thing).

Then there’s my third character. She’s the problem. She’s not really an antagonist, at least not to the hero, although she is to my heroine. She isn’t actively working to stop my heroine from attaining her goal, but she is a road block in the heroine’s way. The trick is that through the story she slowly goes mad, as in insane. I want to show this because it’s extremely important that the reader watch this happen. The question I’m stumbling over is whether I should show this happening from within her head or outside of it from the point of view of others around her.

I think it’ll be much more powerful if I show from within her mind, but then I’m worried that readers won’t get that she is actually insane. They might just sympathize with her. Empathize with her. To herself, she justifies everything she does no matter how crazy it is. It all makes perfect sense to her. She needs to be in control. If that means going beyond the norms of civilized behavior, it’s all right—to her. If she is extremely cruel to someone, it’s justified–to her. But I’m afraid my readers won’t get this. They won’t make that leap that what she’s doing is wrong, and not the actions of someone in their right mind. If I write the story of this woman going insane from her point of view I’ll be invoking the concept of the unreliable narrator, which is really interesting and loads of fun, but will my readers get it?

Unreliable narrators

I know I’m supposed to assume that my readers are intelligent people, but they don’t always make the same leaps of understanding I do. I know my characters inside and out. I know their motivations, but I’m not always able to convey that in my story.

I’m really afraid that if I have one unreliable narrator in a third person story told from three points of view (hero, heroine and this woman), that the reader just won’t get it. They won’t see that she’s become unreliable. What should I do? Write it and see if it works? Or just leave out this woman’s point of view and show her descent into insanity from the point of view of the others in the story (ie the hero and heroine). What do you think?