How to Use Loose Ends and Unreliable Narrators

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now here's your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. Episode 7, Loose Ends, a look back at our first six episodes to answer some questions, go a little deeper into a few of the topics, and we'll be exploring unreliable narrators.

Okay, welcome back to the show again this week. As always, I appreciate that you're out there listening. It means a lot to me that you're there and especially that so many of you are taking a few minutes to send me an email or make a comment on the website just to let me know that you're out there listening and that you're enjoying the show. I appreciate that a lot. Today, we're going to go ahead and slow down just a bit and do what I'm going to call a loose ends episode, which is really just a look back at the first six episodes of the show. We've got some listener questions that are beginning to pile up, so I wanted to take a little bit of time to address those.

And don't worry, we are going to be exploring the craft topics in more detail. So I think there's going to be some good information here for you today. We've had some good response to the show as far as people asking questions, wanting more clarification or examples on some of the topics. And I just love that. I've even had people that are pushing back a little bit against some of what I'm saying, which I think is great. I actually love that.

It shows that you're involved and that we have strong opinions about this craft that we love. You know, when I say pushback, that's probably too strong of a word. It's all been great conversation, and I'm looking forward to sharing a little bit of that with you today.

Understanding Unreliable Narrators

The first thing that I want to tackle, though, is I want to kind of set up how I want to approach some of the feedback that I've gotten. And I want to talk about unreliable narrators. Now, to most of you, I would guess that this is probably already a familiar concept. Just in case it isn't, I want to illustrate it just very quickly. And I'm going to do that through an example. I'm working on a novel right now.

It's called The Giant Life of Emmett Mills. I'm about, I would think I'm a little over the halfway point with it. I'm just at that point where I've lost all perspective on it. I don't know if you go through this where you are so intimately involved with something for so long that at some point you kind of throw your hands up and you say, you know what, I don't even know if what I'm writing makes sense, if it's compelling. I need somebody else's eyes on this to just give me that fresh perspective. For me, that's my wife.

And she's great at this. So she sat down with the first half of The Giant Life of Emmett Mills and read through it. And then I just spent, you know, 45 minutes to an hour just asking her specific questions about it, just getting her general feedback about it.

But one of the things that came up for me is that I was asking about this character in the book. Her name is Beth, and she's actually the ex-wife, maybe just estranged wife. I'm not sure how separated they're going to be at this point.

But her name is Beth, and she's the ex-wife at this point of the main character. And I was really interested to see how she was perceiving this character. And my wife thought about it for a bit, and she says, you know, she's really kind of a bitch. And I said, oh, no, I'm not writing her correctly. I've got something really flawed in my story because she's not, you know, she's not supposed to come across that way. At least that's not who I understand her to be.

But as I thought more about that, I thought, you know what, I think I've actually got this right. At this point in the story, about halfway through, I kind of want people to see her that way. And here's the reason why. The entire book is written through the first-person perspective of the main character. And this main character sees his ex-wife as kind of a bitch, at least to this point in the story.

So I kind of had to take a step back and say, you know what, it's okay that readers at this point in my story misunderstand who this other character is because they're having an authentic experience through the eyes, through the experiences of the main character. And that's what I want to accomplish. That's an unreliable narrator. We have a storyteller who is seeing the world the way they see it, which isn't always the way that world actually is.

So that, just so you have a reference, is an unreliable narrator. And I think one of the powers of, some of the effectiveness of using an unreliable narrator is it gives us another opportunity for how we can have our characters grow and change within our story. Like this character, Beth, at this point, the way I've got it written, she doesn't change that much. There is an arc for her, but it's not dramatic.

But when we see it through the eyes of the main character, it really is dramatic. It's not so much that Beth changes, but it is more that the way the main character sees Beth changes. And I think that accomplishes a similar thing for the audience.

So it provides a great way for our characters to grow. It provides a great way for our audiences to be surprised by the story when they finally realize, oh, wait a second, this person isn't seeing the world clearly and now I am. It's a neat reveal moment that we can put in there.

So unreliable narrators, I encourage you to try it if you haven't. Like I said, it's very common in creative writing, so this is probably old ground for you. But here's why I wanted to cover unreliable narrators at the beginning of this loose ends episode. And it's because I want you to see me as an unreliable narrator as host of this podcast.

So what do I mean by that? What, I can't trust what you're saying? Well, yeah, to an extent, you can't trust what I'm saying. Just like we pick up a book and experience the world through the biases and the character of that character, you are getting kind of my view, my biases on creative writing.

And so that's something important to keep in mind as we talk about these things every week. You're seeing these elements of craft filtered through my own strengths, my weaknesses, my opinions, just as we are when we have guests on the show. I mean, we've had some great guests and I've got some more great guests lined up for you that I'm really excited about.

But I think it's important for us to remember that when we're hearing about craft from them, we're hearing from an unreliable narrator. They're seeing things the way that they see things. That's a little repetitive, but I think you know what I mean. And I want to give you an example of this because it's one of the episodes that I gotten the most feedback on. And it's the episode called Keeping Your Characters Alive. I think it was episode two, if you wanted to go back and listen to it.

But in that episode, I talked a lot about how we absolutely must keep our characters consistent. We can't have them doing things that aren't consistent with who they are or it destroys that illusion of reality for our readers. And I did get a little bit of pushback on that. And again, it was very friendly pushback. Pushback is a little heavy of a term for it.

But I had people asking me things like, but how can a character change if we're not going to have them act inconsistent at some point? Or how are they going to surprise us as readers? They pointed out that real people aren't consistent. And that's true. I mean, just look at the people that we know around us. Look at ourselves.

How often do we do something that isn't consistent with who the people around us have come to know? So that's true. That's that's a great point to make. And here's why I brought up unreliable narrators. My bias when I approach character consistency is that the story often tries to write me rather than me writing the story.

In other words, I'm going to take a character and I'm going to make them do something for the sole sake of moving the story forward rather than developing that character in some meaningful way. And there's a real difference there, I think. And even when we have characters do something that is seemingly inconsistent with who they are, when it works effectively, we'll find that that has been set up in that character.

So, yeah, it's consistent. But when we think about it, we kind of say, you know, I can see that character doing that or I can understand why in this moment this character acts inconsistently. So when you're listening to that episode, you're seeing my bias come through in the way that I approach keeping characters consistent.

Now, does that mean that you discount what I'm saying? Well, maybe that's your right and that's your bias, of course. But I think there's value in it still to see it from another perspective. I mean, hopefully as fiction writers and creative nonfiction writers, we understand the value of seeing something from another person's perspective.

So just I want to encourage you to keep that in mind as you're listening to this podcast. Really, as you're getting any kind of writing advice, whether it's this podcast, another podcast, whether you're reading books on the craft of writing, if you're attending seminars, classes, workshops, writing groups, whatever, it pays to keep reminding ourselves that we are experiencing somebody else's perspective on the way they approach their craft. Whenever I am reading a book, going to a seminar, taking a class, I approach it from the mindset of I'm going to take whatever it is I can use and I'm just going to let the rest go. You know, I'm not going that we are learning about writing. We have that same opportunity to see the way somebody else approaches craft from a different perspective and take away something from it.

Another one, and I see this a lot in writing workshop type settings or writing classes, are people who just say, I don't do writing prompts. You know, I have plenty of things to write about. I don't have any problem coming up with ideas. I don't want to waste my time doing writing prompts. Well, why the hell not? I mean, really, is there nothing that you can learn from experimenting with a topic or a theme that you wouldn't usually write about?

I mean, one other analogy is kind of like a soccer player who won't do drills because he's already got a game he's going to play that weekend. I mean, can you imagine the soccer playing showing up and saying, you know, I don't need to practice today because I've got a game this weekend. You know, it's the opposite is so obviously true there that it makes no sense for a writer to say, I don't need to practice this drill or I don't need to practice in this way because I'm already working on a novel.

So just just some perspective things. And again, I'm an unreliable narrator. So if you don't agree with those perspectives, let them slide and just take whatever value that you might be able to take from it. You know, it just might be the things that you are most opposed to that will help you improve the most. I encourage you to look at that. What kind of writing exercises do you kick back against the most?

Do you resist the most and take a moment and honestly ask yourself, is it because I'm uncomfortable with writing that way? Is it because it pushes boundaries for me and exposes some of my limitations? And if that's the case, that's all the more reason for undertaking those challenges and for exposing yourself to those new situations.

Addressing Listener Questions

So this discussion leads to the first question that I want to address. And this question honestly surprised me a little bit. It probably shouldn't have, but it came from more than one of you.

So I do want to touch on it today. And I'm going to basically paraphrase it as this. Is this show for genre fiction writers or for literary fiction writers? You know, it kind of has this undertone of make up your mind. Which side are you on? You know, are you a genre fiction guy?

Are you a literary fiction guy? Make up your mind. And my answer to that is no. I'm not going to make up my mind between the two just for the reasons that we talked about. You know, genre fiction writers can learn a lot from literary fiction writers. And the reverse is also true.

Literary fiction writers can learn a lot from analyzing and studying and reading genre fiction. I'm not going to make a distinction on the show. In fact, in the past, you'll see that I've tried to pull examples from kind of both sides, from genre fiction and from literary fiction. And I think that serves us all better. You know, there are more similarities than there are differences. To me, it's a little like religious bickering to me.

I mean, you know, why do you have Presbyterians arguing against Lutherans, arguing against Baptists and things like that? Well, yeah, they all have these little differences, but my gosh, don't they have more in common than they do in conflict? That's the same way that I look at fiction writing. Whether you're writing genre fiction or writing literary fiction, we've got more in common. I mean, we're all sitting down trying to get these same 26 little black letters down on white paper to get the stories out onto paper the best way we can. We've got so much common ground that I'm just not going to go there.

I'm trying to do the show so that if you're a genre fiction writer, there's things of value here you can take away. If you're a literary fiction writer, there are things of value here that you can take away. And I don't touch on it a lot, but also the creative nonfiction aspect, which really is telling true stories using the elements and the craft of fiction writing. And it's the same thing there. We're all trying to accomplish the same thing. We've all got more in common than we do that separates us.

And I've probably overblown this. This makes it sound like there's some big fight going on behind the scenes or going on with my listeners. And it's not that at all. I've had awesome feedback on this. I've just kind of had people, I think, more curious where I'm coming from so that they can kind of put the advice and the approach in perspective. And that's where I'm coming from.

Exploring Mise en Scene

I'm not going to choose. I'm sitting on the fence and I'm going to approach it that way. So moving on here, we had quite a few questions on the application of mise en scene.

Now, this was the show a couple of weeks ago talking about the film technique of making everything in the scene count, you know, making everything in the scene do something, do something productive in the scene, whether it's lighting or props or setting or characters, dialogue, everything has to come together to deliver what Al Hiefcot called last week a unit of communication. And I really didn't have questions too much on what mise en scene is. It was more on, can you give us some more examples of what that looks like in writing? It's a little easier to get our minds around, I think in film, but what does that look like in writing? And I want to combine this with some other requests I got for people to want to hear more about my project.

Now that that surprises me to hear a little bit. I mean, I'm flattered by it and I'm happy to share about it. So I'm going to tie the two together a little bit.

So I'm going to talk about a very specific way that I've used this element of mise en scene in my project. And we're not going to go real in depth here, but I do want to just give you one example. One of the major themes of the novel I'm working on is redemption and redemption in a very specific way. It's talking about how we can fail at what we initially thought we were supposed to do in life, only to find that meaning in something else, generally something unexpected and therefore kind of redeem ourselves.

So what I do is I try to weave that theme in everywhere that I can and I try to make sure that I do it subtly. We talked a little bit in the mise en scene episode about being overly heavy handed with this and it can come off really forced. So it's important to have it subtle and by pointing all these out, um, it's not going to sound subtle, but hopefully it comes across that way in the novel.

So here's just some of the ways that I'm weaving that into my story. First of all, my main character's name is Paul Carter. Um, hopefully just a typical sounding name, but I think on a subconscious level, there's meaning within those names. You've got Paul who is the biblical Apostle Paul. That's kind of, um, the, the meaning that I'm leaning on for his name.

Now the story isn't, isn't religious. It's not biblical, but the name Paul, at least to me and I think to many others, resonates a little bit with this quality of redemption. I mean, you've got Paul who was well known as, uh, you know, the, the, uh, I can't think of the word, but he was working against, uh, the church, you know, he was working against the early church and then he goes through this conversion process and becomes the, the great promoter of the church.

And so we have that playing out there, that initial failure at what he first tried to do, which is to tear down the church and then that redemption as the person who then goes on to promote it. So I'm leaning a little bit on that with the first name, Paul and Carter, who do you think of when I say Carter? Well, uh, if you're like me, I think of Jimmy Carter, you know, the president. And I think that name too resonates that way. He generally, it's thought that he hasn't been one of our great presidents.

Now I'm sure there are people out there that will disagree with that and maybe history, you know, history seems to be a little kinder to presidents the farther away from them we get. But generally he wasn't seen as a spectacular president and yet he's gone on to accomplish just amazing world changing, uh, things, um, after his presidency and in a way redeemed himself. So that's just one way I approach that really subtle meaning in the name Paul Carter. I'm trying to speak of redemption in that name. The story itself is, um, is the story of a of a guy, Paul Carter, who thought he was meant to be a world championship, uh, bike racer and he fails at that pretty miserably. And the story is really talking about how he comes to terms with that and how he defines how he finds a contented life after blowing his one shot at his, at his dream.

So really the whole story follows this, uh, follows this line of redemption, but it's, it's in every detail that I can get it into. Uh, he works now at a bike shop. He owns his little bike shop in the story and the backstory to this bike shop, um, even speaks to this idea of redemption. It was the backstory is it was originally built in the sixties to be this, uh, posh little getaway on the Oregon coast for famous actors. Uh, but whoever was building it pulled out at the last minute and, and it kind of ended up being this hodgepodge of seedy little businesses that have been in it over the years. I mean, there's been kind of a dive bar.

Uh, there's been a secret brothel in there. It's been a dingy, smelly secondhand store. You know, it's been So with these character developments kind of underneath the surface, I don't think when somebody reads my novel and comes across these things, you know, separate from each other and in the course of the telling, I don't think they leap to the surface and have readers saying, oh, okay, this supports the theme of redemption. They play under the surface, and yet somehow they build that sense of redemption into the piece.

So that's what we're trying to do with mise en scene. So with every opportunity, I'm looking for ways to put that theme into my story in ways that aren't obvious, but still register on some level with the reader. And that's only one theme. You know, I've actually got two or three that I'm working with in the story, plus elements of character development, elements of just the mood that I want scenes to have. And all of these lean on the same technique of mise en scene, of just finding little ways that everything in the scene can work together to accomplish that. You know, Alan Heathcock last week talked, actually talked about this specifically.

He talked about how as part of his preparation to write, he'll often go find movie scenes that capture the same mood or the same development that he's trying to bring out in his fiction. And he'll rewrite that scene from a movie as if it's fiction. And what he's actually discovering in that process is the mise en scene of that scene. He's discovering how the lighting, the sets, the angles, the dialogue, the actors, their movements, their facial expressions, how all of that worked together to create the message of that scene.

Overcoming Writing Challenges

So if you haven't listened to Alan Heathcock's interview, it was last week. I just love the guy to death. I mean, the insights that he can give us on creative writing is amazing. We're going to move on a little bit here from mise en scene. And I want to get to what is actually the most common question that I've got on the show that people ask me to talk about. And the question is basically, how do I make myself sit down and actually write?

I was going to go into this today, but I've just secured an interview with the man who literally wrote the book on this. So I'm going to put you off just a little bit. Thank you for asking that question. It's one that I certainly struggle with. And just from the number of people who've asked it, a lot of us do.

But I want you to hang on about a month and I think I'll be able to get him on the show. We just need to get our schedules to align. And I think it's going to be a really informative interview for you and some great hands on techniques for that. Instead, to kind of placate you on that question, we are going to make our wise word at the end of the podcast relate to this question.

So I'm not going to leave you hanging. Hopefully that'll be enough for now and you can hang on another three or four episodes for that interview to get into it a little more in depth. So our wise word today comes from a listener. His name's Colin McClung, and I've had the pleasure of emailing him back and forth a few times this week. And his his advice relates to this question of of how to get ourselves to sit down and write and is actually going to come in in two parts here. I want to share both of them because they're both, I think, are really powerful.

He mentions here first that he recently listened to an interview with Chris Bojalian. I'm not sure I'm saying that right. B-O-H-J-A-L-I-A-N, Chris Bojalian, about his book The Night Strangers. An insight he provided for writers was to begin the next day of writing one page back and edit that before beginning on the blank page.

Now, Colin goes on to say that he thinks that's an interesting approach because it allows the writer to get in that flow again, but it doesn't bog him down too much in the editing process for too long. He says in a way it puts your mind in a deep state of concentration and then lets up kind of like a good mental stretch before the run. I love that, Colin. Thank you for sharing that. And it's an interesting technique. It's not one that I've tried because I tend to I tend to get too involved once I start editing.

I'm kind of in editing mode and it's hard for me to switch back over to writing mode. But I think if we try this intentionally, if we say, OK, I'm I'm just going to go back and quickly edit through one page before I start writing. I think I think that really could work. And it's something I'm going to try this week. It's kind of my own personal writing challenge for this week because part of my challenge in sitting down. Well, I'm going to talk.

I'll wait on that because it relates more to the next thing that Colin shared with us. So I'm just going to let that one sit there and you can think about that how you will. But when I was talking to Colin, he went on to to to tell me about how he used to tap dance, which, first of all, awesome. I mean, I can't. That's such a cool skill.

So congratulations on that. But he says when I used to tap dance, whenever he was working on a new step or a routine, he'd stop his practice just before he got that step down. And the reason he did that is it was important for him to not get it down because he wanted that anticipation, that motivation, that excitement that goes along with getting that step down. He wanted that to carry over until the next time so that he was motivated to go back to it.

And so he he's kind of thinking through the idea that this could also work for a writer. He mentions he's got a novel right now at one hundred forty five thousand words. He's in his eighth full revision of that novel. He's got another one that he's working on at one hundred and thirty thousand words. And he says every day I stop at a point that excites me. Otherwise, I'm sure at some point I would have lost motivation.

And I really relate to this. When I sit down to write, I generally write longer than I had planned to. I generally write more than I had planned to.

So here's what I do. If I'm going to write for two hours and I sit down, I'm at two and a half hours and I'm just cooking along. The ideas are popping and I'm having a great time. Then I'll keep going until I hit a rough spot. As soon as I reach a problem in the text that I'm working on, I look at the clock and I say, you know, I've been doing this for two and a half hours. I was only going to write for two hours today.

I've already done enough and I'm going to stop for the day. Really easy to do when we've reached a challenging point in our writing. But what that sets us up for that next day is that we know as soon as we sit down, we're going to be right into a problem. We're going to be facing that challenge that that shut us down the day before.

Now, hopefully in that day, we've kind of been stewing on it and thinking about it and maybe have solved that. But all too often I haven't all too often. I know when I sit down again, I'm going to be starting from a tough place.

So I love Colin's advice here to stop at a high point, stop when we're excited, stop when we're getting that sense. Oh, I can't wait to write this next thing. Maybe try stopping there. And maybe that next day it's that much easier to sit down with that excitement, with that motivation to pick up and write that scene and then and then roll on through that next 30 minutes, hour, two hours, six hours, however long you write for.

So thank you, Colin, for sharing that. I appreciate that so much. If anybody else out there has a wise word like that, a piece of advice, either that works for you or that you've heard from someone else. I hope you'll share it with me like Colin did via email or better yet, you could do it on our voice message line so we can get your voice on the show. You can find information to do that at the website the show's website. Just click on that.

Weekly Writing Challenge

Talk to us link and you'll see how there you can get in touch in touch with us. So our weekly challenge this week, I want you to try. I'm going to go ahead and call it Colin's tap dance method.

So sit down to write this week. And when you sense that you're excited to write what's coming next, I want you to try this. Just stop. Stop writing right there. If you need to jot down a few notes about where you're headed with it, fine.

But try stopping there and see if you're not motivated the next time you sit down to write. Maybe see if you're not a little more. See if it's not a little easier to sit down and get those words to start flowing again.

So next week, I can't wait for next week. I'm just so overwhelmed with this podcast. It's it's doing things I never dreamed it would, or at least never dreamed it would for years down the road.

But next week we've got Pam Houston on the show. If you don't know Pam, she's the author of two collections of linked short stories called Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat. She's also written novels, Sightound and Contents May Have Shifted and a collection of essays called A Little More About Me. Her stories have been selected for volumes of Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Awards, the Pushcart Prize, the Best American Short Stories of the Century. She's a winner of the Western States Book Award, the Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction, and the Evil Companions Literary Award and multiple teaching teaching awards.