Stowaways of the Imagination

Audiences come to a performance with expectations.  If adult students signed into a class called Explorations in Literature can be seen as an audience with expectations, and the particular class to which you refer a performance, you are on the most sound of grounds.  Even if the linkage here fails some test of logic, nevertheless the them will still prevail.

In your memory of this two-hour class or performance, your plan was to provide a fifteen-minute introduction to the author whose work was under examination.  This would include how she came to write the book the class would spend the next hour and a half discussing, followed by your own three or four-minute summary.

You had not gone too far beyond launching into your biographical background of the author when one of the students raised her hand to ask a question, something you encourage.  You nodded recognition of her raised hand.  "Yes?" you said.

The student, well into her sixties, said,rather than asked, "Kill your darlings."

You nodded.  In many circumstances relative to discussions of writing fiction, revising fiction, or the general discussion of story, there is significant sense to what the woman said, even if it had no relevance whatsoever to anything you'd said yet.  "Anything more?"  you said.  She shook her head.

Your presentation followed the menu you'd established, causing you to be met with considerable eye contact from the adults in the room.  No one seemed bored; all seemed engaged.  "Okay,"  you said.  "Questions?"

A few requests for the names of similar and opposite sorts of authors relative to the one under discussion, then again the hand of the first questioner, who again said, "Kill your darlings."

This time, you spoke a few sentences about the wisdom of such behavior, after asking the rest of the class if they all understood the context of the question..  At this point, the woman was right back with her hand raised, the near universal signal for recognition, one you remember yourself employing as a youngster, eager to demonstrate your own awareness of the material at hand but as well to suggest your mastery of it.

"Kill your darlings,"  the woman said.  By now, any doubts you had about the clarity and focus of her intellectual process was confirmed.  She had little other than that to say during the entire two hour length of the class, whereupon she was gone, not to return for the remaining five classes of the series.

Kill your darlings is one of the two or three most frequent admonitions writers of narrative fiction hear.  The others, arranged in your estimated order of frequency are:  "Show, don't tell," and "Write only about things you know from direct experience."  By your estimation, one not involved in the practice of writing fiction could crash a writers' conversation, utter only these three admonitions, then come away leaving no doubt of one being a writer.

You have told rather than shown, you have not only let your darlings live, you have concocted more of them, and you have with some frequency writing about things beyond your immediate experience, perhaps in the spirit of sincere experimentation, perhaps also because you are a smartass, but also to see if you could get away with doing so to the point where neither editor nor reader would call you out.

These three memes emerge as the Holy Trinity of storytelling.  Taken one by one to the dissection table, flayed and filleted, they offer enormous sense.  Story is action incarnate.  When you tell "He ran," or "She sped," you risk thrusting the narrative back from its kinetic state to its descriptive one.  There are enough risks even when you execute well that you've come to understand the need for some form of live preserver to throw at the drowning sentence.  Thus, "He ran as though his life depended on it, and the more he ran, the more he saw his life did depend on it."  Thus also, "She sped until the muscles in her legs began to threaten cramping and the thin coating of sweat on her forehead began to crest over her brows."

You may have spent so much time concocting an explosive metaphor or simile which you then detonate in the midst of some unsuspecting sentence or action, completely upstaging the main action going on at the time.  When you go back to revise, you may see the total effect your darling had on the remainder of the text, but then you'll have had the opportunity to hear a statement not uncommon to parents with two or more children, "You love her/him more than you love me."
As a side note, the one and only time either of your parents laid so much as a hand on you in response to one of your torts was the time your mother slapped you for accusing her of loving your sister more than you, a fact, by the way, even you knew was untrue.

As to writing only about things you've had direct experience with, you well know not to go there.  When was the last time Jules Verne managed to get twenty thousand leagues under the sea much less span the world in eighty days?  When had Edgar Rice Burroughs or Ray Bradbury flown first class to Mars?  They had to do it tourist class, which is to say writers' class.

In one way or another, we are all of us stowaways who travel not only from port to port, historical era to futures of our own devising; we are able to inhabit the four-wheel drive housing of individuals with much greater intelligence than our own or perhaps more of a nihilist streak or even a murderous intent.  We often have to improvise, leaving us scant time to pack our bags or make proper reservations, put up with outrageous conditions at the other end.  But do not for a moment think we take all this lying down.  We extract our revenge for the slights, bedbugs, and being ignored by writing about our travels and the way we were received.

You've Been Ignoring That Empty Cardboard Carton for Way Too Long

From time to time, a story will appear in which an animal of one sort or another will speak in a human voice, with human diction, and quite possibly as well with human personality traits in addition to the animal's animal voice.

The more successful among these tales and storied are, in your opinion the Uncle Remus Brer Rabbit and Fox stories, E.B. White's by now iconic Charlotte's Web, where your favorite is a rat named Templeton, George Orwell's satiric romp, Animal Farm, Alice's misadventures in Wonderland, and the remarkable tapestry that is the sum the life in mythical Coconino County, the comic strip Krazy Kat.

The authors of these dramatic ventures did not waste much time explaining why or how animals talked.  Instead, they began with animals saying things, conversations much like those of humans.  In one of the more memorable comic strips where animals talked, the gimmick was that only young master Calvin could hear his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, talk.  The rest of us knew, as realistic adults know such things, that animals do not talk, thus Hobbes was only a figment of a boy's imagination.

The trouble--if indeed it is trouble--starts right here.  Or perhaps there, way back to the times of a writer named Lucius Appuleus (125 AD--180 AD), who wrote a novel in which a human happened to have been overheard by a god in the act of blaspheming the goddess Isis.  Result:  the human is transformed into an ass, who now must work his way back to being a human again, much in the same way Dorothy Gayle found her way back to Kansas after experiencing the quaint charms of Oz.

Neither you nor the multitude of readers who fancy animals of one sort or another in their novels are too eager to put up rationalist restraining walls at the borders.  An animal wishes to talk, well and good, you say.  An animal wishes to make complaints or appear in a satiric statement directed against the human condition, well and good.

In similar fashion then, you've carried on conversations with animals, real, among the living, among the no longer living, and among the imaginary interstices of your imagination.  As well, you've engaged in discussions with things less animate, such as a bain marie stock pot of considerable capacity, in a severe and grimy state because considerable innards of chickens clung to its sides and had to be removed.

Your form of address is often with a measure of respect as a recent one directed at a large corrugated box in which an article of clothing arrived:  "Well, what am I ever to do with you?"  Your theory here takes in the possibility that a person overhearing you in your conversation with the box would not say, "Oh, there goes Lowenkopf again, consulting a cardboard box," rather that said eavesdropper would share your quandary, even to the point of pondering the how, where, and why of your conversation with the same curiosity as you.

How easy it is to deny intelligence to inanimate things while delegating intelligence to things that have no interest in an intelligent response or, for that matter, any interest at all.  Yet, you do both, deny the potential of intelligence to things that do not appear to interact with you and gloss over information from sources that may well be reliable but hold no inspiration for you.

Such connections with inanimate objects and animals keeps us open to the potential within them and you for some form of communication.  This state at once reduces the potential you might have for feeling the emotional angst of loneliness, strengthening in fact your belief that it is possible to feel a form of connection with the Cosmos.

Yes, emphatic beliefs on the extent and power of your response to a thing, however inanimate or thriving with life it bears when you first become aware of it.

Beginnings Are Easy, Endings Are Hard

When your exercise lifestyle was built around distance running, there was something as exciting and exhilarating about the first step of a ten-mile run as the first sip of a cold, bitter pale ale on a sweetly Summer afternoon.

When the addition of titanium to your hips made running such extravagant distances a memory, and your exercise lifestyle switched to swimming, there was a special, commemorative moment when you pushed off from the wall, then felt your body find its natural level in the glide before your first stroke of arm or kick of feet.

When the implications of a new idea grips you in a bear hug, then lifts all hundred eighty-five pounds of you off the pavement, or when the chemistry between two characters becomes so crackling with static electricity that you have no choice but to shove your own concerns aside, then plunge into discovering what they're up to, you are in a similar position of that first step in running or that early glide in swimming.  

You are at that remarkable, buoyant, charged place called beginning or starting point.  The world, for all its misanthropy and artificial barriers, becomes transformed into the teen-age equivalent of romanticism, the twenties and thirties equivalent of the kind of challenge you knew you were meant for, the middle-aged sense of just enough confidence to get you launched into the dark, hooded unknown, the later-in-life thrill of still finding your way to the starting line--any starting line, with all the implications that come with an enthusiastic new beginning.

The great, often hulking comic actor, Samuel Joel "Zero" Mostel, is credited with having said close to the time of his death, "Dying is easy, comedy is hard," a credit that may have been apocryphal, even though it is the sort of things Mostel would say.  In the same spirit, you venture "Beginnings are easy.  Well, easier.  Endings are hard."

You have written your share of endings, but you have written far more beginnings, meaning there are notes for projects scattered among your work area and somehow into the kitchen, where they are mixed with piles of unfinished books, New Yorkers, literary journals, and reviews.  When you were eighteen or so, borne aloft by a subscription to The New Yorker, you somehow managed to read each issue, cover to cover.  As the years progressed, you met more and more persons with unread copies at their night stand, so much so that you wonder if there are persons today who manage to read each issue as it arrives.

Finishing things is difficult.  Some of the things you have not finished still rankle, behave in mindful metaphor as a pebble having worked its way into your shoe.  There is one story you sometimes put yourself to sleep at night trying to finish, refusing to believe it has not been finished because it was not really a story.

Beginnings seem to come to you like a sandwich of irony and enigma, where you feel driven to fit a pattern of scenes in motion, drawing the characters and you into what are at the outset unspeakable calamities.  At this point, you're faced with trespassing beyond the boundaries you've set for yourself, forcing yourself to become, just this last time, an overachiever.

There was often a point, when you were running, when you heard a voice telling you that today didn't look so good for ten miles; you'd have to settle for two or three, at best a mild sweat.  But somehow the second wind kicked in or you'd forget your promise of only two or three.  Before you knew it, you were up to five or six, which still wasn't ten, but a hell of a lot better than two or three.

In similar fashion, some manuscripts contain more than a thousand or two words, some beginning to thicken, send forth the news that you might in the next day or two get a first draft, which would be as awful as first drafts are supposed to be because in them you are finding out things about yourself that are the equivalent of a jab to your ego as the occasional second or third grade fear that you would not get to the boy's room in time and would have to suffer the consequences and urine scald.

Beginnings set things in motion.  Middles stir them up into circumstances beyond your threshold for fear or pain of humiliation or embarrassment or simply fear of the dark or being left alone.  "They will now and then,"  your older sister said of your parents, "forget you or appear to have forgotten you,"  She will tell of the time they forgot her, left her waiting at school, her fear and anger playing games with each other within her mind.  "But they will forget you because they are human and humans do forget once in a while, and once in a while, things happen to grown-ups over which they have no control.  And so you will wait and grow angry at them and not understand why, days later, you are still doing things that will cause them to be very much aware of you.

Having a sister like that for as long as you had her has made a big difference in your ability to handle things, in particular endings.  When endings come to your beginnings, there is a real sense of parents having remembered you waiting.  One by one, fellow students and playground leaders depart, asking you if you're okay.  Of course you're not okay.  You are in that helpless childhood place called abeyance, and when your parents do come to pick you up, even though you will have once again been comforted by your sister's advice, you are somehow going to show the world that of all the places you could be, the only place worse than New Jersey and Florida, where you were also in a sense waiting for the closure of getting back to California, is abeyance.

You have some record of endings, of finishing things, and you also have a record of some things left hanging, even if the manuscripts are long gone.  The endings nevertheless await, because the beginnings were so easy.  

An Operatic Pizza Delivery Boy and a Receptionist with a Sexy Voice

When you stop to consider the number of characters you've brought out of the shadows and onto pages of the various novels and stories you've written, you're confronted with a connection you hadn't realized:  Characters in this sense are like the persons you encounter in Real Time; the more you know them, the more likely you are to remember them.

The lesson to be learned here has to do with the need, both in Real Time and in story, to get to know these individuals in ways that resonate within you, to make efforts to secure awareness of persons from Real Time and from story.  On occasion, one individual from either world will step out to greet you, causing you the need to ask for a clue.

"I was the disgruntled cop in that story you wrote about an actor who was forced to live for a while in an AMC Pacer."

"I was the person who tried to get you to publish a novel I wrote while I was an inmate at the hospital that has now become Cal State, Channel Islands."

With those relevant details in mind, you can recall both the character from the story, and the writer, whom, at the time, you feared might not be able to engage with the editorial process to the degree you'd have liked.  Such thoughts also serve to remind you of two of your favorite characters, both as individuals and as generalities for use in introducing students to the concept of characters within story.

Like many of the characters you've offered roles in your stories, both of these were the result of incidents you experienced.  The first came when you were in a class at the University of Southern California Master's Program, The Professional Writing Program, leading a discussion on, of all things, character.  Your classes ran in the evening, usually the 4 to 6:40 time frame, meaning that it was not unusual for one or more students to bring dinner to class.

While you spoke, there was a brisk knock at the door, followed by the appearance of a rangy young man with an abundance of curly dark hair.  He held a pizza box in his hand, raised it, then asked, "Anyone here order a pepperoni pizza, extra cheese?"

In many ways, the pizza is a form of currency in universities and colleges.  You've grown used to seeing pizza boxes and their contents in the main library, class rooms, hallways, the coffee shops, and in- and outdoor study areas.  The young man, his pizza, and his question seemed in perfect harmony with the ambience of the university, except that his voice had what impressed you as a trained resonance.

"Are you by any chance--" you began to ask.

The pizza delivery man brightened.  "--his Majesty, the King of France?"

To which you replied: "'I am that,'
Bowed stiffly, and removed his hat;
Then said, "'Excuse me,' with an air,
"'But is it Mr Edward Bear?' "

To the stunned amazement of your students and the delight of the pizza delivery person, you learned that he was only "sort of" the actor you'd assumed, rather a singer with operatic career in mind.  The incident stayed with you to the point where, when you speak of characters now, you are at pains to remind students how they must know what everyone wants before he or she can enter the story, even the young man delivering pizza.

"Does he intend delivering pizza all his working life," you ask, "or is this a temporary job to support some incredible dream?  And if he intends to deliver pizza all his life. what special skills or attitudes does he bring to the task.  You had no idea this pizza delivery person from long ago was familiar with the Winnie, the Poo materials, no more than he had any reason to believe you would be.  

The other favorite character type you think of from time to time is a young woman, of about the same age as pizza delivery youth, with an attractive full moon of a face, perhaps a bit overly made up.  She was a receptionist at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club when your great friend, Digby Wolfe, was a member.  You frequently met there for lunches or for afternoon iced teas to go over writing projects while Wolfe relaxed between sets of tennis.

A number of Wolf's show business friends, such as Walter Matthau, Jack Lemon, and Shirley McLaine haunted the club, including the actor Gilbert Roland, who had been a great favorite of your mother.  From time to time, as you indulged the club's excellent Ceasar Salad or iced tea, the PA system would come alive with a tonal flourish, followed by the voice of the receptionist, announcing--announcing--drawing out the announcement so that to a significant extent, the chatter and bustle of the tennis club came to a halt as all and sundry waited to hear for whom the incoming telephone call was for.  

After a while, you got to know the receptionist, who knew--or said she accepted the facts--that her looks were not meant for the screen, but her voice was.  "Some people I know,"  she said, stopping for a long, dramatic pause,"make a respectable living doing voice over narration and recording Books on Tape."

Even these minor characters are not to be treated as throw-away.  In their appearances, they want things as much as the protagonists and antagonists,  For their brief moment on stage or page, they should have the opportunity to upstage the protagonist or antagonist, drawing attention away from them, directing it to their own urgent, questing humanity to the point where the reader/audience is nourishing some unspoken hope that they will return.

The Latecomer's Guide to Fiction

For the sake of this argument, you will need characters, at least four, perhaps five or even six.  These characters are to be diverse for the argument to have any value you can take away for future use and for the sense of having learned something in this instance.

In consequence, you arrange a cattle call, a diverse group of individuals from thirties through sixties or perhaps into a wiry, edgy seventy.  No cliches, please.  All ethnicities welcomed.  LGBTG welcomed, as well, biracial ok.

The fun begins as you articulate these individuals, wrapping coils of individuality about their essential armature.  You begin to recognize, if you haven't been too careful, how these made-up individuals share similar core values, have strong preferences for, say, mac and cheese, or for Cesar salads without anchovy.

No good.  Not yet.  you want polar opposites, their potentials for chemistry leading you to suspect the chemistry will be charged with negativity or suspicion, perhaps even overt bias.

After a time, if you've done your casting well, you recognize how this negative chemistry among your ensemble, even though they were all direct products of your imagination, leads you to "hear" a particular tone for the narrative, the words you will use to describe their behavior, and the words you will under no circumstances use.

With that in mind, you might even have two or more recognize a grudging--repeat, grudging--respect for one or two others in the ensemble.  You put some time and thought into this form of ambiguity where someone who is, for instance, a homophobe, comes to the grudging state of respect, bordering on acceptance, of another character who is open with his or her gayness.

As a part of the argument on which this exercise of casting an ensemble of characters is based, you now add one final character, male or female, your choice of race and sexual preference, your added choice of whether this latecomer is an agreeable or disagreeable sort, helps little old ladies across the street or kicks at stray dogs. 

This latecomer is a key element in much fiction, the complete stranger or a person who used to be from here, but has gone elsewhere, seeking and finding a modicum of success, but now forced back here, to the place of birth, where she or he fit well with one aspect of the local society and continues to be regarded that way by the other locals among the cast.Guide to 

Beyond the potential for a spirited story, this cast needs a plausible reason for spending time together, otherwise their very differences will seem managed.  Work-related is a good place to start.  Or perhaps patients and staff in a rehab hospital.  Possibly students and faculty, passengers, not to forget a going-on seven-hundred year old framework, pilgrims on their way to a cathedral in southeast England, intent on paying their respects to the remains of an early Christian martyr.

Next step:  Set them in motion.  Give them an assignment, a goal, a task.  Now begin to apply the pressure of deadline, micromanagement, excessive critical response to their behavior, overt suspicion that they may be unfit to accomplish the task assigned to them.  Then continue to apply pressure, culminating on the metaphoric equivalent of changing the dimensions of the field on which they are playing.

Now cause one of the ensemble of characters to take a stand that will cause additional rancor among the members of this imaginary cast.  You have stacked the dramatic deck for maximum rancor, suspicion, and alienation.

The argument starting this cattle call for characters is a battle you've faced since your late teens.  You have to this day severe difficulties thinking story from the plot outward.  This is the argument you indulge each time those five of words, "Wouldn't it be interesting if--?" come tumbling out of the pockets of your curiosity, just before laundry time.

How, your argument begins, could such an exercise not produce a significant enough eruption or discovery to result in a story?

Just Friends

Early in the game, your best understanding of a friend was someone a teacher had to seat you apart from.  Distance was only a temporary solution.  If there were real chemistry, the anticipation of it expanding was a powerful draw.  

The way you saw it, you were well aware of the mischief your curiosity and enthusiasm brought you on your own.  In a sense, you knew or were driven to levels of excitement and investigation from which you launched an adventure that might have you arriving at home or school later than expected, thus consequences, lectures about promptness and responsibility.  

You even had a growing awareness of the price you'd have to pay for such things as forgetting to honor time commitments, or coming home with some injury serious enough to cause concern.  

To take matters from merely being young to the dawning of greater sophistication, you understood that your presence was likely due to the fact of an older brother who was dead before you appeared.  You understood how, well beyond your control, your promptness and safety meant more to your parents than to you.  

In effect, your absence or forgetfulness was a reminder of someone you never knew and never would know.  In further effect, you were at pains to investigate potentials for adventure, discovery, and risk wherever you could find them.  As an example of this sort of adventurousness, the walk home from grammar school, using the detour of two specific blocks of a single-dwelling neighborhood where each house had a detached garage.

You knew of eight or ten such homes with detached garages, homes not usually occupied at that time of afternoon.  This gave you free rein to find your way to the garage, use a nearby wall, tree, or shrub to assist you in reaching the roof of the garage,  The ideal single-dwelling home with a detached garage had a nearby area covered with grass onto which you could direct yourself after leaping from the roof of the garage.

On good days, two or three jumps per garage before moving on to the next house on your route.  By the time you got home to greet your mother, you'd had as many as twenty-five leaps from the rooftop of various garages, more often than not with no serious smudges of grass or mud on your knees.  The occasional skinned or bruised knee was easy enough to conceal, obviating the need to lie about how you came to get it.

A friend, or a group of friends were individuals you could count on for the chemistry that would take you beyond your singular pleasure of jumping from the tops of garage roofs.  The chemistry often involved role-playing games based on current reading or evening radio serials such as The Lone Ranger, Captain Midnight, and Red Ryder.  

You had two standards to rely on for the ways you'd expand your lone boundaries.  You had to outdo some feat by a character you'd read about or heard on one of the radio serials.  Imagination counted.  A risk had to be more than dumb, it had to be imaginative and something that might result in you being elevated to the lead actor status in the next day's or week's round of play.

Friend meant someone who had imagination, a clear disregard for personal safety, and an admirable sense of nonchalance after an act of daring-do.  One particular friend, Max, who lived some distance from you, excelled in acrobatic feats inspired by Tarzan and Robin Hood movies.  Max was worth the long walk home, which also gave you the opportunity to walk off some of your more notable failures and, thus, skinned elbows, hands, or knees.

Friend involved someone who extended your own tastes in reading or, as in the case of Gabe, had musical tastes that paralleled yours to the point where you were each, again with studied nonchalance, listening to the then classical AM radio station, KFAC, until one or two in the morning, trying to find a composer or composition or both the other had not heard.  

Gabe thought he'd remain unchallenged for some time with his discovery of the Hungarian composer, Zoltan Kodaly, and his memorable folk epic, Hary Janos.  But then you heard Erik Satie's Gymnopadie, and the competition was on again.

To be sure, boys would be boys; friendship extended to include not only the ability to tolerate various alcohol concoctions but to find places out beyond the mainstream where alcoholic beverages were sold under what you considered romantic circumstances.  At that time, romantic circumstances meant places such as cowboy bars, biker bars, and working class taverns and saloons where young persons such as yourself might find the adventure of being challenged.

Friends now have come to include characters, man, women, children you set in motion like a wind-up toy in some existential maze you've created in order to observe their behavior.  You push at them the way you pushed at your own self back in your pre-teen years, first in the Los Angeles of your birth, then the shabby back alleys of your parents' home towns in New Jersey, onward to Fall River and Providence, then the humid crush of Miami Beach.

You dare them to jump off garage roofs, construct river rafts, invade drinking establishments, and compete with their brother and sister characters in ways that will replicate the chemistry you experienced when you engaged with your early cadres of friends.

For what it's worth, you ran a Google search on Max, who has retired from a career as a gym teacher.  Gabe is a ranking player with a major symphony orchestra now and once spent two years with one of the major jazz bands of the fifties and sixties.

And you?  You are pushing characters and ideas to the edges of boundaries, then calling out, "Jump!"

Who's on, First? The Unreliable Narrator

Three bag ladies are standing in the parking lot of a Trader Joe’s market, a common enough sight in most cities.  Now, two men, Mac and Ben, push their shopping carts out of the store, into the lot, where the bag ladies are standing.  Mac and Ben have the satisfied look of guys who have earned big points because, for once, they’ve spared their wives the effort of shopping.  This would be time for a celebratory beer at the nearby tavern, except—

Except that one of the three bag ladies stops Mac.  “Before this day is over,” she tells him, “you will be named regional vice president of your company, and, ultimately, president.”

Not to be outdone, another of the bag ladies tells Ben, “You will never make vice president, but you will become regional sales manager.”

The third bag lady seems distracted, begins looking for her cat.  Soon, the women make their way off, through the maze of cars, leaving Mac and Ben to shake their heads in wonderment.

“Wow,” Ben says.  “Regional sales manager.  And you—President Mac.”

“The thing is,” Mac says, before they head off to the comfort of their intended beers, “ how they seemed to know about our work status.”

Sound familiar?  Think: Mac equals Macbeth, while Ben represents Banquo.  Think: Macbeth comes to Trader Joe’s, because next scene has Mac arriving home to find his boss waiting for him with news of his promotion to regional vice president.

Maybe those three bag ladies knew what they were talking about.  They did in Macbeth, because they were identified as witches and because, as the play develops, their vision proves out.  They were telling it as they saw it, but so far as Macbeth and Banquo were concerned at first, they were unreliable narrators.

By the time we’ve moved into the modern era, we’ve had encounters with scores of unreliable narrators, of all ages, social rank, education and profession.  Some of them, such as the teller of Agatha Christie’s famed Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?,  the principals of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, and the first character of Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train were deliberately holding back on information.  Had we known this information from the get-go, the story would have had a different outcome.

Other narrators were at times blinded by their naiveté to the point where we as readers could see things they missed.  We saw enough to make us wonder about the characters’ overall ability to report with accuracy.  Poor Mr. Stevens, the narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s engaging novel, The Remains of the Day.  For most of the narrative, he didn’t have a clue.  Even when he got a clue, it wasn’t enough.

Let’s go for an even greater extreme in narrator reliability.  Even though he’s never less that a sweet, bright kid, how reliable are we going to think Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, after we begin compiling his activities these past few days?  This brings us to a question writers must consider in their portrayal of any character:  Does the character’s seriousness of intent mean we should trust the character’s take on Reality?

No questioning the narrator’s sincerity in Edgar Allen Poe’s memorable short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart.”  Yet, from the first sentence, he seems all too aware of his status as a narrator:  “TRUE! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why WILL you say that I am mad?”

Two subsequent examples of first-person narration after Poe’s story, arguably Charles Dickens’ finest work of all, Great Expectations, and Mark Twain’s magisterial Huckleberry Finn, present us with two young men who have no reason for using what Twain called “stretchers.”  But can we, after careful, deliberate reading, sign on to the notion of these narrators’ reliability?

In a sobering test, can any of us recall with certainty the last time we read a book in which the narrator was absolutely reliable?  For those of us who tell stories, who among us is so certain of the last time one of our narrators was reliable?

Let’s look at some of the standards for reliable narrator:

1. Always tells the fact-based truth
2. Always tries to see the accurate representation of the historical background in which the story takes place
3. Leaves value judgments to the individual characters as markers of the characters’ personality

Considering these and other similar traits of the reliable narrator, we arrive at the confrontation facing all accomplished writers:  Reliable narrators are more often dull than not.

Neither readers nor writers want dull characters.  Even if a story calls for a character to be dull, both reader and writer want a memorable dullness, a quirky reliability.  So now, the truth is out.  Whether we are reader or writer, if we are forced by a story to deal with normality, we seek an abnormal normality.  More’s the point; we will not be satisfied with normal normality.
What a wonderful palette of opportunities this offers the writer for constructing characters to filter their stories through varying shades of reliability.  The effect on the reader will be stunning.  Here’s how to get started with the matter.

1. After you’ve finished your first draft of a short story or novel, determine where the story actually begins—not necessarily the first scene you wrote—and where it ends—not necessarily the last scene you wrote—then make a list of all your characters.

2. Rank these characters in order of their reliability.

3. Go back through the entire manuscript, looking for places where each of these characters could have been made to seem more or less reliable.  Consider from mythology Cassandra, daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy.  The god, Apollo, wishing to seduce Cassandra, gave her the gift of prophecy, but when she refused his advances, Apollo “edited” the gift to the point where no one would believe her prophesies, even though they were accurate.

4. Check to see if your story would have a better effect coming from a more reliable narrator or one less so, remembering the admonition “Well, less is more, Lucrezia,” from the Robert Browning poem, “Andrea del Sarto.”

5. Don’t be afraid to experiment.

6. Every time you read a story new to you, ask yourself how much you trust the narrator’s vision.

7. Look at the world of reality about you to see how much of it you trust and how much you find unreliable.

8. The next time you tell a story, remember:  the dynamic in which each character is seeing things as though he or she believes it.

9. Remember, you are only as unreliable as your last draft.