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Unless your twenty-year-old female narrator is an unrelenting hipster who scours vintage stores for 1990s classics, don’t place her in a dated IZOD shirt. Chances are one of your readers will be from the location in your tale and will be all too happy to call you out. Same goes for the South, or Southern California, or the Midwest. If your characters are picnicking under a blooming tree in summer in Salt Lake City, that tree better be a golden acacia or something else indigent to the area. Make sure she runs to town and commandeers a payphone instead. We didn’t have cell phones yet in 1982, so when your 45-year-old female character is recounting memories of a rape in junior high, don’t have her frantically calling her parents from the car. The Bridges of Madison County is much more believable and romantically scene-setting. If your story is about two widows finding love again in 1995, their first date will probably not take place at a screening of The Usual Suspects. If your narrator is the grandmother of one of the teenagers, her rendition of events will be much more emotionally complex than, say, if the town mayor were the narrator. Suppose your story is about a young group of teenagers who get into a vicious car accident that traumatizes a small town during Thanksgiving break. DistanceĬonsider your narrator’s place within the story at large. Eight Important Considerations and Common Mistakes 1. If at any moment they feel the need to stop the flow of words to question a line of dialogue, a peripheral fact, or a small piece of scene, we risk losing them all together. We expect our readers to partake in the world of make believe we are creating for their entertainment, pleasure or discomfort.īut in our imaginary worlds, it is important that the reader can see and feel himself in the shoes of our narrator, as wild and wonderful as they may be. How Does a Reliable Narrator Relate to Fictionįiction is its very nature asks a reader to suspend belief. If your narrator is a removed third person talking to us about the lives and deeds of others, they should speak from a reasonable distance that provides a balanced portrayal of all other characters in the story. The same goes, to a lesser degree, to a limited third-person point of view. If your narrator is speaking in the first person, you are letting us know that this character is intimately involved in the tale, and all thoughts and actions should ring authentically true from that perspective. This requires him or her to have a breadth of knowledge about all the characters and events contained within. What is a Reliable Narrator?Ī reliable narrator is able to tell a story in an impartial and accurate fashion.

That experience gave me a memorable lesson about the importance of the reliable narrator. My fierce, emotional tale was instantly deflated by the wrong set of pool toys. When the group reviewed my piece, I was shocked when one woman completely ignored the heavy traumatic notes of the story in lieu of saying, “Pool noodles didn’t exist in 1978.”īut she was right.

Then I wrote the intense meat of my scene, which I recalled frame by frame from memory. My sister had been there, so I placed her at the top of the water slide about to scream joyously all the way down into the peanut shaped pool. My grandmother had been there, so I placed her on a lounge chair in her famous cat’s eyeglasses. My grandfather had been there, so I placed him in the swimming pool aloft on plastic noodles drinking a beer. The emotional aspects of the scene were vivid in my mind, but the background details of the day-the weather, the people, and small atmospheric cues-were not. I wrote a piece about an incident that took place in a swimming pool during a family barbecue, in which a little girl’s babysitter attempts to drown her. Our first assignment was to write a short story based on a true event from our past, only fictionalized. Here’s how it happened to me, and how you can stop it from happening to you. Yes, that very device which is supposed to keep you afloat.

In one of my recent writing groups, my dramatic tale of a girl being drowned was sunk by pool noodles.