The Unreliable Narrator

So you’ve got this great story in the works. Excitement, tension, wonderful characters. But someone has to tell the story. Which of these characters should it be? Let’s pick one. The villain? The hero? The secondary character?

Ah, I have it. Let’s call our narrator Ezra. Now Ezra has been misunderstood and victimized his whole life. He’s ready to make a change, and not just for himself, but for poor, misunderstood victims the world over. So he gathers his courage. He plans. He collects resources. He sacrifices everything he has for the greater good. He is a hero, or will be when it’s all over.

The day arrives. Ezra kisses his cat farewell, grabs his bag of tools. He gets into his car, drives to the nearby police precinct and bravely blows the entire building sky high with everyone inside.

Ah hah! So not the hero then. But he sounded like the hero. Courage, sacrifice, greater good. Aren’t these words we usually use when speaking of a hero? Of course. To Ezra, he’s a hero. To the mass population he’s a monster.

Ezra speaks from his experience and his tainted view of the world. He sees the police as an evil entity, destroying his freedom and that of others. He sees himself as the champion, saving all those other misjudged victims(criminals)from having to answer for their unorthodox activities(crimes).

You can’t believe anything he says because chances are he’s not seeing the world as it actually is. He is completely unreliable.

This isn’t bad writing, or even bad characterization. Unreliable narrators are some of my all-time favorites. They lead you along. They make you believe in their world. They give you the gift of walking in another's shoes and understanding them no matter how misguided they may be.

Now this doesn’t only apply to villains. Your hero can also have a very tainted view of the world. They may see everything too rosy or too dark. Too black and white or too grey.

The trick is to allow the true world to be visible to the reader. You must allow the reader to be able to read between the lines or see past the narrator’s blinders. This takes the reactions of other characters to your narrator and using the world’s standard moral code to do your work for you among other things.

Sometimes you don’t even know the narrator is unreliable until you find yourself questioning their thoughts or actions. Hey, you totally thought Ezra was a good guy. Right? Right!!??

If done with skill and subtlety, the unreliable narrator makes a wonderful character filled with depth and interest. If used to your greatest advantage, the unreliable narrator can give you the greatest twists and surprise endings of all time.

The Fine Art of Injuring Your Characters

Way back in the first draft of R.A.G.E. about a third of the way through the book, my characters had a moment between themselves where they thought they’d throw my tentative, new-writer outline out the window and have it out with each other. The result: a very fine, sweet-ish character was shot.

I had no intention of allowing this to happen but when it did, instead of reining the rebellious characters in, I went with it. It worked out fine. I managed to write my way out of it while the incident added depth and a whole lot of tension to the remaining book. It was, for all intents and purposes, a fantastic turn of events—for a first draft.

Since then I have spent hours and hours of time and energy either worrying if I got the details right, or researching and researching to make sure this incident is not only plausible, but realistic. It might have been all well and fine if I could have just sent her to a hospital and skimped on the details but since the characters had hijacked the story and added this piece of flavor, there was no way I could get my character to a doctor soon enough to be able slide over the specifics. Therefore: stress, rewriting and RESEARCH.

To put into perspective the kind of research necessary to make this work for my manuscript let me detail what was involved.

1. Where did the bullet enter her body?

Easy? I think not. My character has to deal with this injury for several hours after it happens and she has to be conscious for most of it. Not only conscious but able to function to a certain degree. So I looked at the obvious places i.e. any place but the torso and head. Then I had to narrow down the location even further by eliminating places with major arteries and nerve clusters. I didn’t want to cop out my using a hand or a foot. The characters wanted her to be shot then by darn it was going to be bad…only not too bad. I finally settled on a delightful little place that would cause a major problem but leave her able to function. You want to know where it is? Well you’re going to have to do what I did and plow through books on anatomy, muscle and bone structure, central nervous system and the circulatory system. Or you could just read the book when it comes out. *wink, wink*

2. What kind of gun and bullets were used?

Well the gun part was easy. My characters are military. Army Special Forces to be precise. The character wielding the weapon is of low rank and thus has only the most basic military weaponry. An M-16? No, too unwieldy for the location of the shooting. It had to be a military grade 9mm Berretta. This worked out well for several reasons. The 9 mil is fantastically accurate but doesn’t have the stopping power of other, heavier handguns. Therefore if you’re going to get shot by a shaky-handed private with poor aim, the Berretta is the way to go.

The bullet issue on the other hand has been a bit of a dilemma. Did he have standard full metal jacket rounds used for shooting on the range or, since they were on their way to a military operation, had they been issued armor-piercing or hollow-point rounds? For the sake of saving a very fine character from dying I settled on the full metal jackets.

3. What kind of reactions and symptoms should the character present in the face of such an injury.

This one has been a work in progress. This in the one that needs the most detail and constant updates until you can get the injury resolved. But careful now. Too many updates and your readers get fatigued, too few and they wonder if your character is really still injured.

I started with the basics: blood loss, shock and pain. It worked but was it entirely accurate? What tiny details was I missing? I finally cornered a good friend of mine at book club the other night. She has been a registered nurse for many years and currently teaches nursing at a UVU. I laid out my character’s injury and what she needed to accomplish before she could receive medical attention. Suppose she had access to some medication, what would help her the most in her situation? She would need first aid for shock and other characters would have to watch her constantly for reoccurrence. Would a basic field bandage work to slow blood loss? Etc. It was quite a long discussion.

4. Did the bullet remain in her body or did it exit?

Exit. It had to be. A bullet retained in the body would be too excruciating and cause her to fail before she could make it through the scene. This one question was the one I wrote and rewrote many times before I settled down and did serious research on her injury. It was really the question that completely encompassed the other three. The right kind of weapon, the right kind of bullet, the right place for entry and her resulting symptoms had everything to do if the bullet exited or not. Once I identified this as THE problem the rest came fairly easily—if you can call massive amounts of research easy.

I’ll admit that I have become a great fan of injuring my characters. It provides wonderful tension and realism to a scene that may be missed if you’re afraid of hurting your imaginary buddies. This works especially well for action/adventure novels or really anything where a weapon is involved. Often times it’s easier to make our characters Superman so we don’t have to deal with the above research, but even Superman had Kryptonite.

Be warned though, an injury done wrong it will annoy readers who know better. This actually goes for any research. Our last book club book was thrashed during our discussion because of some very inaccurate details concerning medication a character was taking. There are several nurses in our club and the sloppy research ruined the story for them. It made everything else the author said less believable

Do your research! And if your characters must injure each other make sure they do it right. Like they say, a bullet is easier to put in then take out. Or research out, as point in fact.

There could be a death. It might be murrrderrrr.

Following the serial killing train of thought, I ran into a huge problem today. I need to kill someone. No honestly, there's this guy and he's lying there on the concrete bleeding from his head and I just know that my next actions are going to trend toward murder rather than salvation.

Yeah, yeah. Of course I'm talking about a character (since if I were to kill actually kill someone, I probably wouldn't blog about it. Probably.) but it doesn't make it any easier. I finally get past this enormous month long block, typing away on my WIP only to be stopped by something like a character bleeding on the concrete. Now this character I don't just love, but adore on many levels. He's one of my favorites and I'm not even sure his entire story has been told. So when I say that I probably need to identify him as dead or alive in the next paragraph, you'll understand my dilemma. I honestly didn't even want to go there. It wasn't a part of any outline, notes or visions for the work. It was just one of those !@#$ moments where the characters and situation takes over and what I have is a bleeding character who may or may not make it through the paragraph.

I guess you might consider it a curse (or a perk, I know there are some weirdos out there) of writing that you have created these wonderful characters, named them, groomed them, given them feelings and life and then in one moment of crap-the-character-hijacked-the-story-again, you find them dead. Writers are killers. There's no way around it. Death is a part of the circle of life and if characters aren't facing mortality in one form or another (i.e. every other chapter usually with M-16s in my books) they are probably not exploring the full scope of their character arch. So we hurt characters, we kill characters, and we throw them into horrendous situations just to see them get out of it. What kind of monsters are we!!

Ahem . . . okay back to bleeding character #1. Without knowing the story, I need votes on what to do. Kill said, interesting, well-loved, not-quite-completed character . . . or let him live to die another way? I mean day. I mean, honestly he might make it. Who knows. It's the climax. A lot can happen.

Book club and Serial Killers

I seriously have the most awesome book club in the universe. This month was our annual book club retreat which took place at the Silver King resort in Park city. Imagine spending the entire night (ahem, okay only until 5 am or so) talking with your best buds about reading, writing and everything in between (and eating lots of snacks of the sugar and doughnut variety). Now add that our fearless book club leader managed to secure the author of our book as a guest for the evening and you have the most FRAWSOME book club ever!! (Yes we are attempting to kill each other with kitchen utensils. Last one standing got an ARC of Mr. Monster--yeah, I'm reading it right now.)

The book choice this month was I Am Not A Serial Killer by Dan Wells, a local Utah author. Now not only is this book amazing (no really, the protag is the most interesting and complex protagonist I've ever read) but the author is likewise amazing. The very fact that he took an entire evening to discuss not only his novel with us, but also talk writing and publishing with the few writers in our club says a lot about a person.

Okay, enough gushing (I'm not a gusher by nature but every once in a while I get the urge). One of the things Dan said really stuck with me. I'll have to paraphrase since I wasn't taking notes.

"Anyone can make a living as an artist. If you put as much time and energy as a doctor does in building a career, you can be just as successful. Unfortunately there are not programs designed to guide an author step by step into the industry as there are in other fields but if you consider yourself a writer and work everyday toward making it a career, you can't lose."

Well, I've decided I'm an author. Of course I must be a mother first, but as a sanity-saving supplement to my life, I will be putting in the hours as if it were a career, not just a hobby. Good things are coming my way, I can feel it.