How to be a reliable narrator
The narrative-driven method makes me write by responding to why. But how will I know if my answers are correct?
If I were to start narrating a story, you’d believe every word I wrote only if I believed them myself, if I successfully convinced myself with a plausible narrative told reliably.
Note: Make sure you’ve read part 1 and part 2 of this collection.
I can comfortably imagine a story where a man is sitting at the computer. I also believe he received an email from a woman named Grace, someone he began corresponding with almost daily after that first message. They developed a friendship in the following days, writing daily, often multiple times a day, asking each other if they’d read a given book or visited a city where some story had taken place. These progressively got more ridiculous. At first Adam asked if she’d been to Salamanca, maybe even visited the Tormes. Grace followed up by asking if he’d been to New York, where many of her favorite characters had lived. It didn’t take them long to inquire about Liliput, Wonderland and Joyce’s Dublin. It took them even less to start wondering what it’d be like to visit these places together.
I can imagine a plausible narrative where those circumstances unfold. And if I believe it, telling it becomes easier, I’ll know what happened next because it will remain believable to me, I will have convinced myself of its truth, however fictional it may be. And then I keep asking why.
Why would these two be in this situation? What’s going on in their lives? Once again, the possibilities are endless, but the moments where I’m forced to ask why are the points of inflection, the points where I’m called to imagine possibilities.
This is how I’ve learned to extract threads of fictional truth from a starting statement such as A man sitting at the computer.