If you don’t feel like actually writing, prepare for writing:
Open your WIP Word doc
Read the last page again
Scribble notes on what happens next
Once you’ve done this, you might just find yourself wanting to continue after all. And if you don’t, no worries. You’ve made it easier to jump back into it later.
Unreliable narrators need to add something to the story. They aren’t an excuse for poor storytelling and inconsistencies.
If you have an unreliable narrator, you should be doing twice as much work in your plotting! At every turn of the story, you need to know both what’s actually happening AND what your narrator thinks is happening.
When you’re right, you’re right. And you’re right.
Not only does the author need to know what’s happening on both layers of story, they need to actually write in clues for the reader to telegraph the lower, “true,” layer of the story so the reader is capable of figuring it out if they choose to read closely. Without that double work, an unreliable narrator cannot perform its literary function.
It is the evidence of the truth, not the lie the narrator tells, that makes a narrator unreliable. Otherwise they are just a liar which the audience is incapable of catching due to the hobbling imposed by the medium. Which means the lie may as well be the truth, making it serve no function as a lie.
Just go read The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner. Read it twice, once to fall for all the tricks, and once to… fall for all the tricks even when you know they’re tricks. You’ll scream a lot the second time, generally to the tune of “YOU LITTLE SHIT” and “HOW DID YOU TELL ME THIS AND I DIDN’T BELIEVE YOU”.
Because see the really big trick isn’t making your reader believe the unreliable narrator’s lies, it’s making them dismiss the truth.
Diplocaulus is an extinct genus of lepospondyl amphibians from the Permian period of North America
Reconstruction by Goro Furuta
Possibly inaccurate as
fossil body imprints suggest the presence of flaps of skin connecting the tips of the head with the rest of the body, as in this reconstruction at the
University of Michigan:
there are only 3 worthwhile things that david cage has ever played a part in producing, and none of them were a part of his shitty ‘vision’ or indeed intentional at all:
- press x to jason
- press x to shaun
- the video of the heavy rain chase scene where he misses all the button prompts and it turns into a looney tunes cartoon whilst someone absolutely loses their shit in the background
