Street Cred: Reliability of Narrator, Character, and Story

Street cred is the passport to the reader's entry into narrative. Without it, writer, characters, and story are left stranded somewhere between the bookshelf and the remainder table. It is the necessary condition for a tale of any length and for the individual characters who appear in it.

Narrative and characters must impress the reader with the reasonableness of the circumstances and potential for the results inherent in them. If the characters do not strike that flinty spark of being plausible, no splints or crutches of story will hold them for long.

The reader must believe in Jean Valjean's desperation that drove him to steal the loaf of bread and as well in Javert's determination to see justice done according to his vision if it. When George tells Lenny of the life he might have led instead of the life he is leading because of his promise to care for Lenny, we must be convinced of the integrity of George's promise and the ticking time-bomb that is Lenny if we are to have any chance of a stake in the outcome of the Steinbeck novel, Of Mice and Men. We must partake of Ahab's rage at the whale and the inexorable force resident in the whale is Moby-Dick is to be for us anything more than a simple, ill-fated adventure.

What better place for this credibility to begin than within the heart of the writer, that metaphoric-rather-than-anatomical place where emotions and dreams reside alongside that remarkable muscle whose job it is to pump Life's blood through the body. Not enough to say the writer should feel the conviction and essence within a narrative and the issues it depicts, the writer must experience the story to the point where the choice of every word is affected. If a word--any word--is to survive the second draft, it must earn its keep in the writer's inner cache of awareness, where the human condition and the writer's personality conflate.

There is more yet at stake; the writer needs to put to work the awareness of rules of language and the love of words with an approach that transcends mere descriptiveness and decorative trope. Language must transport the reader and convey feeling and nuance rather than show off vocabulary, the verbs and nouns revealing the undersides of the text, like stones turned over and examined during an archaeological dig. From the artfully implanted implications of the events and responses to them, the reader is able to glimpse then construct the dark side of the relationships so carefully protected by each character from others.

When such nuance is not present, readers tend to think of the narrative as one-dimensional, which by any account is flat, uninteresting. The moment there is a hint of a character doing one thing and meaning another or reacting in a way that provides the reader with some hint of a rebellion taking place just below the surface, the dimensions of the narrative increase, heightening the potentials for those necessary ingredients, tension, suspense, and curiosity.

In its most remote, academic pose, Street Cred is spoken of as willing suspension of belief. To be willing is to have considered the options, then made a choice. Good enough, so far as logic goes, but to suspend without thinking about it is to begin by caring, them to become concerned, then invested.

A Twofer

expectations--the results each character foresees when venturing into a new scene, a guiding compass as the character is being borne along on the stream of narrative within scenes or connecting them. A character without expectations in a scene is the equivalent of the scenic backdrops found at tourist attractions, where one inserts one's head and is photographed as a comic memento.

Every character wants something; this is the passport to cross the border from joke or anecdote or vignette into the landscape of story. Accordingly, imagine the tourist character equipped with a fanny-pack right out of the L.L. Bean catalog. Along with that character's desire, rolled neatly and resting on top of history/backstory, attitude, and feelings about the other characters in the story is expectations. That character expects the next scene to be an occasion of achievement, boredom, surprise, humiliation, frustration, severe reversal, sexual opportunity, inspiration, or challenge. These will be delivered in such a way and by appropriate characters to send the story forward, leaving as emotional residue an identifiable counterpoint. Expectations are the qualities that give dimension and life to story, allowing the character to do what characters are intended to do--react. The character need not use all the tools in the fanny-pack in every scene, except for expectations and the personal sense of having been in or lived through some situation or encounter before entering the present scene. Without these two possessions, the character is sure to be turned back at the border.

willing suspension of disbelief, the--a term coined by critic-poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge to account for the inertia of skeptical disbelief a writer must overcome in a reader in order to have his narrative accepted as real. With so many books being published and so many sources apparent for short stories, readers are daring writers to be more convincing, at pain of not pursuing a story to its conclusion. Sophisticated readers have come a long way from the early days of the novel and short story; they know the characters are inventions of the author. But they also know that a skillful writer can make them forget this fact, empathize with fictional beings, root for their favorites, and experience severe distress when their favorite characters experience reversals.

The trick here is to make the reader forget that the characters on the page are inventions. One way to do this is to quickly present characters in their attempts to solve the problems and reversals of fortune with which they are afflicted. Another way to accomplish this goal is to show characters setting off on a quest, a perilous journey, or a new venture in which they will become at accelerated risk. Yet another approach is to endow the character with some physical or emotional flaw which they must struggle to overcome. Johnny Tremaine, the young, eponymous apprentice to Paul Revere, experiences an accident early on; molten silver is spilled on his hand, permanently fusing his thumb to his palm. In Tracy Chevalier’s novel, The Girl with the Pearl Ear Ring, a young peasant girl is forced to take a job as a maid when her artisan father is blinded by an exploding kiln.

Every short story and novel, regardless of how fantastic or quotidian, has to cope with this problem: Does the reader believe implicitly in the characters and situations? Step One in this remarkable alchemy from the dross of initial concept to the gold of finished work begins with the writer believing in the characters. From there, the author must portray characters behaving in ways that are feasible to them so that the reader not only does not question them and what they do but as well begins hoping none of the obstacles are too big to be overcome. Thus by indirection, the key to overcoming disbelief is vulnerability; no matter what the characters are vulnerable to--greed, love, fear, confusion, ambition--that vulnerability becomes a wedge that lifts the fence of plausibility, often just enough to allow the reader to crawl through.