Found Documents and the Missing Page

Craft

I have spent plenty of time digging through municipal records. When a file is incomplete in the real world, it is usually because a clerk in 1974 spilled coffee on the ledger, not because of a cosmic conspiracy. In a lot of the weird fiction we post here, we see a similar pattern: a found diary where the most important page is conveniently torn out right before the reveal. There is a distinct line between a narrator who is genuinely confused by their circumstances and an author who uses the epistolary format to hide a plot hole. One builds a specific kind of atmospheric dread; the other is just a shortcut to avoid doing the legwork on the internal logic. If the archive is unreliable, it should be because the person recording the events was flawed, not because the author forgot to figure out the ending. How do you distinguish between a narrative gap that serves the atmosphere and one that just masks a lack of planning?