Create small habits in the beginning that change abruptly for no obvious reason. For instance, the character always eats eggs for breakfast. One random morning he eats Frosted Flakes.
I'm not sure what the ostensible purpose would be for that, since I would imagine there would be some sort of parallelism between what the character and reader notices. However, if you wanted to do that, I would have the character themselves attribute their unusual behavior/feelings to some perfectly explicable source (ex. irritation at some usual activity but blaming a migraine or some other temporal ailment) until it's too late.
I think it also depends on *what* exactly is possessing them, and the methodology by which it occurs.
Is this main character the PoV character? I’d do two things ramping up in intensity as you go. You can flavor these how you want since it’s your story, but I’d do it with a horror-esque tinge:
1) first establish the characters core personality, perhaps with a routine or inconsequential but important trait, like “really likes dogs.” As the possession progresses, show them becoming less of those traits, but *subtly* overtime. To keep the dog analogy, maybe they start off petting every dog they see. Later, they smile at dogs, but keep their distance, progressing to ignoring dogs, to finally outright saying they hate dogs or barking annoys them or something. It needs to be a very subtle and gradual change. Don’t highlight it too heavily or the readers will catch on quick.
2) If it’s their PoV, have then start forgetting things. Minor things at first, then major things, including full memory black outs as it gets closer and closer to full possession. Like start it with mundane things like “oh I thought I put that in my bag, but it’s on the desk there.” Then take it up a notch, have them misremember things that happened in the plot, and have other characters correct them.
Basically, you want to make sure you pace it very well and make sure not to linger on the evidence she’s possessed for too long. One good way too is to have something traumatic happen and scapegoat their behavior on that. A character in a piece of media I like was possessed for about a year, but right before he was possessed he lost his ability to use magic, his immortality, and his best friend. For the first couple of months, he did seem different, but everyone wrote it off as grief. The turning point that got me (and most everyone) against him and thinking there might be something else going on, though, was that he completely blew off his husband. It was a small scene, and it was framed as “oh he was just busy and needed to get some files to a different character and had no time to chat.” But it was the **way** he did it, with how rude and standoffish he was to his husband, that clued everyone in. The beauty was then going back and looking at all of his other suspicious actions and going “ok…maybe it wasn’t grief.”
Show the character behaving in atypical ways but give an acceptable excuse. They don't want to talk about their fave topic? Well, they're busy and stressed and sure maybe they would've "dropped everything" for it in the past but mayybe they're just really stressed or the effect is cumulative. Or if we get the character's POV then the character should have certain ways of thinking about things and framing their actions and over time the actions might be what you expect but the thoughts surrounding them are somewhat different. Basically, the character should be OOC but never *fully* OOC.
An example of this is Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy. He's a minor character but I was a bit taken with him in the first book, then in the second, he wasn't blatantly behaving differently but just differently enough that he somehow wasn't as interesting to me as he had been in book 1. Turns out, >!he was eaten at the end of book 1 and replaced by the wizard who ate him!<.
Consider: The READER should know that it's happening, even when the other characters don't. This is called dramatic irony, and it's a super important way to create suspense and keep the story interesting.
Doing something that the reader doesn't notice is the same as just telling them a boring story.
You think you don’t want your readers to notice, but you actually DO want them to notice. You just don’t want them to be able to understand the explanation for what they’re noticing until you reveal it.
Some spoilers for the Light Novel series/anime *Shakugan no Shana*, that employs a twist somewhere along those lines: >!The main character Yuji Sakai has embedded within him a mystical artifact that essentially grants him immortality (a bit more complicated then that. Turns out that he's already dead at the beginning of the story, a casualty of the supernatural war the series revolves around. But the artifact revives him every time he should normally just fade out of existence). The original light novel has him regularly wrestle with an "inner monologue" that encourages him to become more ruthless. In the series' final arc, it's revealed that this voice actually belonged to a being that was sealed within that artifact, and over the course of the adventure, it's now convinced Yuji that it has the solution to ending the war once and for all. Accepting its reasoning, Yuji allows himself to be taken over by this other consciousness, and he goes from the series' co-protagonist to its final antagonist. The anime adaptation flubbed this plot twist by omitting the "inner monologue" - quite common for anime adaptations, but turns out that it was heavily plot-critical this time, and so the twist became a complete ass-pull instead.!<
Change the details as time goes on or just be less detailed to convey the loss of time and awareness.
Start with pleasant long descriptions or doing the gardening or whatever. Then slowly take it away. Then when it's noticed again the plants are dead or overgrown
The only sure way for the readers to not notice something is if you don't tell them. With a large enough audience, someone will always guess it. I would suggest, in general, to not consider your readers some kind of adversary or rival you have to outsmart. They are there because they want to enjoy your story, not because they want to compete with you in some way. And for some, the enjoyment comes from guessing correctly what will happen.
So, either give some clues and reward the keen readers that noticed them or say nothing and have it become a plot twist that surprises both readers and characters.
One trick to hide something from your reader is by having somebody, who is obviously deranged, say it out loud. If we know that a person cannot be trusted, we tend to dismiss everything they say.
Spoilers for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 4, episode 2:
>!Buffy is a freshman in college. Her roommate, Kathy, is extremely annoying — but in a way that is normal for college students. Buffy dreams of some ugly creature sucking away something, probably parts of her soul. Kathy reveals in a conversation that she also had such a dream. Buffy gets less and less like herself, and it's extremely noticeable. For example, she gets angry of stuff that she would normally dismiss with a joke. At some point, Buffy gets so frustrated with Kathy, she comes to a conclusion that Kathy is herself a demon, and she should kill her. Buffy's friends are very concerned, and try to interfere, but Buffy evades them and goes to fight Kathy.!<
>!It turns out that Kathy IS a demon, just masquerading as human. It was HER who was sucking off Buffy's soul (her statement that she had the same dream was a lie). And that account for most of Buffy's strange behaviour (the other part is, well, being a college freshman). But, since we know that something is wrong with Buffy, we dismiss her idea that Kathy is a demon without much thought.!<
There is no way to do this without it seeming like a Deus Ex Machina. If you don't include clues to her possession, it will come out of nowhere and readers won't like it. But if you include clues throughout the story and set it up properly, keen readers will notice.
Instead of going for "I didn't see that coming!", aim for "I *should* have seen that coming!"
Create small habits in the beginning that change abruptly for no obvious reason. For instance, the character always eats eggs for breakfast. One random morning he eats Frosted Flakes.
Okay thank you!
I'm not sure what the ostensible purpose would be for that, since I would imagine there would be some sort of parallelism between what the character and reader notices. However, if you wanted to do that, I would have the character themselves attribute their unusual behavior/feelings to some perfectly explicable source (ex. irritation at some usual activity but blaming a migraine or some other temporal ailment) until it's too late. I think it also depends on *what* exactly is possessing them, and the methodology by which it occurs.
Is this main character the PoV character? I’d do two things ramping up in intensity as you go. You can flavor these how you want since it’s your story, but I’d do it with a horror-esque tinge: 1) first establish the characters core personality, perhaps with a routine or inconsequential but important trait, like “really likes dogs.” As the possession progresses, show them becoming less of those traits, but *subtly* overtime. To keep the dog analogy, maybe they start off petting every dog they see. Later, they smile at dogs, but keep their distance, progressing to ignoring dogs, to finally outright saying they hate dogs or barking annoys them or something. It needs to be a very subtle and gradual change. Don’t highlight it too heavily or the readers will catch on quick. 2) If it’s their PoV, have then start forgetting things. Minor things at first, then major things, including full memory black outs as it gets closer and closer to full possession. Like start it with mundane things like “oh I thought I put that in my bag, but it’s on the desk there.” Then take it up a notch, have them misremember things that happened in the plot, and have other characters correct them. Basically, you want to make sure you pace it very well and make sure not to linger on the evidence she’s possessed for too long. One good way too is to have something traumatic happen and scapegoat their behavior on that. A character in a piece of media I like was possessed for about a year, but right before he was possessed he lost his ability to use magic, his immortality, and his best friend. For the first couple of months, he did seem different, but everyone wrote it off as grief. The turning point that got me (and most everyone) against him and thinking there might be something else going on, though, was that he completely blew off his husband. It was a small scene, and it was framed as “oh he was just busy and needed to get some files to a different character and had no time to chat.” But it was the **way** he did it, with how rude and standoffish he was to his husband, that clued everyone in. The beauty was then going back and looking at all of his other suspicious actions and going “ok…maybe it wasn’t grief.”
Ooh thank you i'll do this
Show the character behaving in atypical ways but give an acceptable excuse. They don't want to talk about their fave topic? Well, they're busy and stressed and sure maybe they would've "dropped everything" for it in the past but mayybe they're just really stressed or the effect is cumulative. Or if we get the character's POV then the character should have certain ways of thinking about things and framing their actions and over time the actions might be what you expect but the thoughts surrounding them are somewhat different. Basically, the character should be OOC but never *fully* OOC. An example of this is Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy. He's a minor character but I was a bit taken with him in the first book, then in the second, he wasn't blatantly behaving differently but just differently enough that he somehow wasn't as interesting to me as he had been in book 1. Turns out, >!he was eaten at the end of book 1 and replaced by the wizard who ate him!<.
Consider: The READER should know that it's happening, even when the other characters don't. This is called dramatic irony, and it's a super important way to create suspense and keep the story interesting. Doing something that the reader doesn't notice is the same as just telling them a boring story.
You think you don’t want your readers to notice, but you actually DO want them to notice. You just don’t want them to be able to understand the explanation for what they’re noticing until you reveal it.
Some spoilers for the Light Novel series/anime *Shakugan no Shana*, that employs a twist somewhere along those lines: >!The main character Yuji Sakai has embedded within him a mystical artifact that essentially grants him immortality (a bit more complicated then that. Turns out that he's already dead at the beginning of the story, a casualty of the supernatural war the series revolves around. But the artifact revives him every time he should normally just fade out of existence). The original light novel has him regularly wrestle with an "inner monologue" that encourages him to become more ruthless. In the series' final arc, it's revealed that this voice actually belonged to a being that was sealed within that artifact, and over the course of the adventure, it's now convinced Yuji that it has the solution to ending the war once and for all. Accepting its reasoning, Yuji allows himself to be taken over by this other consciousness, and he goes from the series' co-protagonist to its final antagonist. The anime adaptation flubbed this plot twist by omitting the "inner monologue" - quite common for anime adaptations, but turns out that it was heavily plot-critical this time, and so the twist became a complete ass-pull instead.!<
I think you should go the intrusive-thoughts route. Then they become more and more frequent.
Change the details as time goes on or just be less detailed to convey the loss of time and awareness. Start with pleasant long descriptions or doing the gardening or whatever. Then slowly take it away. Then when it's noticed again the plants are dead or overgrown
The only sure way for the readers to not notice something is if you don't tell them. With a large enough audience, someone will always guess it. I would suggest, in general, to not consider your readers some kind of adversary or rival you have to outsmart. They are there because they want to enjoy your story, not because they want to compete with you in some way. And for some, the enjoyment comes from guessing correctly what will happen. So, either give some clues and reward the keen readers that noticed them or say nothing and have it become a plot twist that surprises both readers and characters.
One trick to hide something from your reader is by having somebody, who is obviously deranged, say it out loud. If we know that a person cannot be trusted, we tend to dismiss everything they say. Spoilers for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 4, episode 2: >!Buffy is a freshman in college. Her roommate, Kathy, is extremely annoying — but in a way that is normal for college students. Buffy dreams of some ugly creature sucking away something, probably parts of her soul. Kathy reveals in a conversation that she also had such a dream. Buffy gets less and less like herself, and it's extremely noticeable. For example, she gets angry of stuff that she would normally dismiss with a joke. At some point, Buffy gets so frustrated with Kathy, she comes to a conclusion that Kathy is herself a demon, and she should kill her. Buffy's friends are very concerned, and try to interfere, but Buffy evades them and goes to fight Kathy.!< >!It turns out that Kathy IS a demon, just masquerading as human. It was HER who was sucking off Buffy's soul (her statement that she had the same dream was a lie). And that account for most of Buffy's strange behaviour (the other part is, well, being a college freshman). But, since we know that something is wrong with Buffy, we dismiss her idea that Kathy is a demon without much thought.!<
There is no way to do this without it seeming like a Deus Ex Machina. If you don't include clues to her possession, it will come out of nowhere and readers won't like it. But if you include clues throughout the story and set it up properly, keen readers will notice. Instead of going for "I didn't see that coming!", aim for "I *should* have seen that coming!"
ginny weasley from harry potter is a good example