Intentional ambiguity vs. confusion: How to use ambiguity effectively in novel writing

There is an important difference between a story that deliberately leaves some things unanswered and a story that leaves readers unsure what is happening because the narrative has not given them enough information. Both kinds of stories can be confusing, but they create very different kinds of confusion. One invites interpretation; the other makes it difficult to understand the story at all.

This distinction matters because writers are often encouraged to trust their readers. We are told not to over-explain, not to resolve every mystery, and not to tell readers exactly what a story means. That is good advice when the writer is deliberately creating ambiguity. It becomes bad advice when the writer uses “ambiguity” to excuse a story that is simply difficult to follow.

Intentional ambiguity happens when the author knows what information the reader has and deliberately chooses not to provide a definitive answer. The reader might be left wondering whether a supernatural event really happened, whether a character can be trusted, what motivated someone to make a particular decision, or what will happen after the final page. The important thing is that the story gives the reader enough information to develop plausible interpretations.

Unintentional obscurity is different. In an obscure story, the reader cannot form a reasonable interpretation because important information is missing or presented so unclearly that the underlying events are difficult to reconstruct. Instead of wondering which explanation is correct, the reader is wondering what the author is trying to tell us happened in the first place.

That distinction can be summarized pretty simply: ambiguity leaves the reader with questions, while obscurity leaves the reader without enough information to answer even the basic questions.

This distinction becomes especially important when a writer is using an unusual narrative structure or a narrator whose perception is unreliable. A character might be suffering from memory loss, experiencing hallucinations, moving between different states of consciousness, or simply interpreting events incorrectly. In those situations, the reader does not necessarily need to understand everything the character understands.

In fact, the reader may be meant to share some of the character’s uncertainty. If a character cannot tell whether something actually happened or whether she imagined it, the reader can be placed in that same position. That can create an unsettling and effective reading experience.

However, the character’s confusion should not necessarily become confusion about the basic mechanics of the story. There is a difference between not knowing what a character believes happened and not knowing what the narrative is telling us happened. The first can be intentional and meaningful. The second can make the plot incoherent.

A story can therefore have an unreliable narrator without having an unreliable plot. The narrator may misunderstand events, but the author still needs to give the reader enough information to understand the sequence of events and the relationships between them.

Olivie Blake’s Dreamland is a good example of how difficult this distinction can be to manage. The novel has an intriguing premise involving a character with two personalities trapped in the same body. That body is also frequently sedated, and as the story progresses, the sedation becomes less effective.

Given those circumstances, it makes perfect sense for the character’s point-of-view chapters to be disjointed. The character’s perception of himself, his surroundings, and his experiences is unstable, so the prose does not need to provide a straightforward account of events from his perspective. In fact, the fragmented quality of those chapters could have been one of the novel’s greatest strengths.

The problem is that the character’s fragmented perception is not the same thing as the plot being fragmented. The reader can be uncertain about what the character knows, what he remembers, which personality is in control, or how he is interpreting what is happening. At the same time, the reader still needs to be able to follow the larger chain of events that makes up the story.

In other words, it is fine for the character to think, “I don’t know what is happening to me.” It is much more difficult for the reader to reach the point of thinking, “I don’t know what is happening in the story.”

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That is where Dreamland illustrates the gap between an ambitious narrative technique and effective execution. The fractured point of view has a logical reason to exist, but the novel still needs to provide enough information outside that fractured perception for the reader to understand the underlying plot. Without that foundation, the same disorientation that works for the character can become disorientation for the reader.

And that is frustrating because the idea has so much potential. If the novel had more consistently separated the character’s confusion from the reader’s understanding of the larger story, the fragmented perspective could have been extremely effective. We could experience his instability while still understanding what was happening around him.

The same principle applies to open endings. A story does not have to answer every question in order to have a satisfying ending, but an open-ended story is not the same thing as an unfinished or incomprehensible story. For example, a novel might end without telling us whether a character ultimately stays in a relationship or leaves it. The author might intentionally leave that decision to the reader. We can look at everything that happened throughout the story and make an argument for either possibility. That is an open ending because the story has established the circumstances that allow us to interpret the ending. The author has deliberately left one question unresolved.

An obscure ending would be one in which the reader cannot tell what decision the character is even considering because the story has not established the situation clearly enough. In that case, the reader isn’t interpreting an open ending. The reader is trying to figure out what the ending means. The difference is not whether the author provides a definitive answer. The difference is whether the reader has enough information to understand the question being asked.

Readers don’t need every answer, but they do need a coherent story. This is why I think the advice to “trust your reader” needs a little more nuance. Trusting the reader does not mean withholding information simply because explanations are considered unsophisticated. It means giving the reader enough information to draw conclusions without telling them exactly what conclusions they are supposed to draw.

A writer can leave a character’s motives ambiguous. A writer can leave the reality of a supernatural event ambiguous. A writer can leave the meaning of an ending open to interpretation. But the reader still needs to understand the basic events of the story well enough to consider those possibilities. Think of it as giving the reader puzzle pieces. An ambiguous story might give you all the important pieces but refuse to tell you exactly how they fit together. The reader gets to decide what the completed picture looks like. An obscure story, by contrast, may simply be missing several of the pieces. No amount of careful interpretation can completely solve a puzzle when essential information was never provided.

That is why ambiguity should be intentional. Before leaving something unexplained, a writer should know whether the unanswered question is actually part of the story’s design. If the answer is supposed to remain uncertain, then the uncertainty can be valuable. If the answer is unclear because the writer has not established the necessary information, revision is probably needed. The goal is not to eliminate confusion from a story. Some confusion can be deliberate, powerful, and necessary. The goal is to make sure the reader understands what kind of confusion they are experiencing.

A character can be confused. A narrator can be unreliable. A situation can be mysterious. An ending can be open to interpretation. But underneath all of that, the author needs to understand the story well enough to give the reader a coherent foundation. That is the difference between intentional ambiguity and unintentional obscurity. One asks the reader to interpret the story. The other makes the reader work simply to understand it. And those are very different things.

Have you ever read a book where you could tell the author was aiming for ambiguity, but the story became so unclear that you couldn’t tell what was actually happening? Or have you read a book that left you with unanswered questions in exactly the right way? I’d love to hear your examples in the comments.

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