Taven Moore's Blog, page 51

[Perry] Write What You Know

As a writer, I know there are times when you’re sitting there staring at a blank document. You’ve tried to get what’s in your head out onto the page but it’s just refusing to come out quite right.

I know that there are times when you’re editing one of your pieces and you cringe at how contrived some of your plot elements seem to be.

I know there are times when your character dialogue sounds wooden and hollow and no amount of thesaurus-ing can liven it up.

For those times, I will say to you the following words.

Write what you know.

It’d advice that I picked up from a turn of the century writer, Jack London. In his semi-autobiographical Martin Eden, the protagonist bemoans the fact that everything he tries to write sounds hollow and contrived, whereupon he yells at himself. Telling himself that he can’t hope to capture nature and the world with his pen if all he’s ever known is the city he grew up in; the tiniest corner of the world.

London followed that advice. He went out to become an oyster pirate. He voyaged to Japan on a sealing expedition and he went up north to the Klondike during the great gold rush.

When he writes of these things, there is a power and resonance to his words. His words become real in a way that can’t be imitated off the cuff.

But this is a pretty vague example, isn’t it?

Let’s bring this a little closer to home.

That’s a scene near the beginning of a game called Heavy Rain. And from watching it, I’m 100% sure that SOMEONE on the team that designed that scene lost their child at the mall. Someone on the design team has experienced that panic.

Someone on that design team has woken in the middle of the night in a cold sweat as their mind played out the event to a nightmarish conclusion.

I have friends with children who have a hard time watching that scene, even if it’s just from a game. It’s just too damned real, everything from the slight accusation in the wife’s voice to the rising panic of the father as he desperately mistakes a random child as his son.

Now I’m not saying that you need to go out and lose your kid in a mall,go out on a seal-hunting expedition, or only write about the everyday world to write well, but by injecting various facets of your own personal life experience into your writing, you can fake that sense of authenticity.

Maybe you narrowly avoided a car accident on the way to work today. Do you remember the sudden adrenaline dump? The way your hands trembled with the aftershock? How about the mix of heady relief and irrational fury?

Channel that! Have a character narrowly avoiding being shot in Victorian England or have them narrowly avoid being mauled by a Jovian dragon while sailing the storms of Jupiter.

Maybe one of your friends have a very distinctive way of speaking? Have one of your characters utilize that same mannerism, whether they’re a teenage werewolf with a lisp or an alien life form from another dimension that talks like he’s from the ghetto because that’s how it learned the language.

You don’t have to write events or people in your life exactly as they occur, but by poaching some of those elements and slipping them into your writing, you might find that your story gains a degree of realism that may otherwise be lacking.

Related posts:

Paying Yourself to Write
Do You Have Time to Write?

Go to College To Get a Job, Not an Education

College vs Education

These days, it seems like you go to college to get a job, not an education.

I read all these newspaper stories about recent college grads unable to find a job, and the details indicate that they majored in something difficult to market. “Higher Education” institutions will happily take your money and teach you things about political science or classic poetry or whatever the heck “Liberal Arts” is … but the prospective job pool for someone with those degrees is rapidly shrinking into something more resembling a puddle.

You almost have to decide what kind of job you want, and work backwards to find out what major would get you there.

University

University is expensive.

If you have an interest in anthropology or creative writing but you plan on being a programmer, you’re not really encouraged to take those classes. Sure, you get a few electives to play with, but nothing that would really let you sink your teeth into the information. Even aside from that, courses depend so heavily on exams and grades that you spend more time worried about memorizing facts than drinking in new information.

You need a diploma to get certain kinds of jobs, and it’s really not worth while for you to rack up more debt by staying to learn more things.

Result

The result of this mentality is a rushed, incomplete education.

I’ve taken nighttime college courses since graduating in an attempt to increase my knowledge on certain subjects and it was even worse than I’d remembered. Rush, rush, rush, and it’s okay if you don’t understand it so long as you finish it in time to get a good grade.

Technically, I have a certification in Linux administration for a LAMP server setup, but I still only know the most basic Linux commands.

Education

Before you think I’ve gone all doom and gloom on you, I’d like to point out that I have gotten a pretty impressive education on a number of topics within my fields of interest, all without paying the exorbitant prices for a college course.

I’ve learned about square foot gardening and taking care of apple trees and dog training and horse training and novel writing and cooking and exercise and organization and home renovation and calligraphy — so many varied and different topics.

My teacher was the internet and the library.

We live in the future, folks. A future where teachers can write down their lessons and publish them in a book or on a website. A future where anyone with access can reach this information and learn from it, with very small barriers to entry.

Yes, I have paid for some of these “classes”, but never even close to the kind of money I’d pay for a college course, and always with much richer benefits than if I had a time limit and a set of exams I needed to pass to “prove” that I’d learned something.

We live in a world where it’s easier and more accessible to learn something outside of a classroom. All you have to do is be curious enough to find a book or do a search for the information.

Job

I still went to college and got that expensive diploma. I love my job and it was worth the student loans to be able to secure it.

You

What do you think? Do you agree or disagree?

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An Animated Lecture on Public Education

Revamping a Very Old Story

aka: In Which Teenage Me Weeps In Angst

Once Upon a Time

When I went off to college, Steven and I used to write letters to each other.

One of his letters contained a couple paragraphs of story and was accompanied by a note saying he thought it’d be fun for us to work on something together. My reply took the first two lines of his first paragraph and turned it into two chapters of story. (Note: he’d intended that I add on to the end. We’ve had our fair share of miscommunication.)

We spent years polishing the world. We made maps, came up with cultures and societies and species. Every once in a while, we even came up with characters, and ONCE we even made a plot! (gasp)

We called that world Taven, and it was our first shared love.

Now

Over a decade later, I finally feel prepared to start writing those stories.

Unfortunately, teenage me wasn’t a very good writer. Current-day me has written novels and short stories and webserials and gone through writing classes and learned to read critically …

The stories and characters I had so carefully laid out are falling apart under more advanced scrutiny.

Good and Bad

This is good! Better that it fall apart now, before writing begins, than halfway through the book.

But at the same time, I feel like I’m losing something precious.

Questions

“Why does …?” we ask, and we need to do more worldbuilding.

“What if …?” we ask, and suddenly we’ve wiped entire beloved characters from the face of the novels, and the leaning jenga-tower of our plot crashes down around our ears.

“If that’s true, then … “

“When does …”

“If we don’t have that, then we don’t need this, which means …”

Hard

It’s hard. Harder than it should be, even knowing that it’s necessary.

Harder than building something new up from scratch because we spent ten years, waiting for the day when we’d start writing these stories as novels to share with other people.

The only thing I can compare it to is when I was a kid and I realized I had to stop carrying around my beloved Littlefoot stuffed animal, because I wasn’t a baby any more.

Better

The final books will be better than what teenage-me had planned. Teenage-me didn’t understand plot arcs or pacing or promises or stakes. Teenage-me hadn’t read enough books to recognize a tired trope when I saw one.

Loose planning, for a “some day” book is easy and fun. It’s daydreaming and fingerpainting and jangling the keys on a piano.

Now’s the time for actual planning.

You

Anyone else with me?

Anyone out there have a long-cherished story, only to find that you needed to cut out some lovely bits in order for the whole story to thrive?

 

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[Perry] "Read This"

Gather round children.

It’s time for a story.

Goody-goody gosh, right?

A while back, a good friend of mine, Matthew, called me out for a cup of coffee with a story.

So Matt was standing in the bookstore, calling me for book recommendations. When he got off the phone with me, a man that had been eavesdropping on his side of the conversation began to talk to him.

Now this guy, according to Matt, was…a big guy.

Okay, that’s not quite accurate.

According to Matt, this guy could have been the “man with no life” from South Park’s World of Warcraft episode.

Anyway, this guy took it upon himself to preach the word, telling Matt about this amazing novel that he just had to read…except he couldn’t find it on the shelves.

Being the nice guy, Matt told the man that he’d keep an eye out for the novel and left as soon as he could get away.

Picking up a couple new books, Matthew sat down at the Starbucks in the store to peruse his new purchases. He’d been there for just a few minutes when a book came flying out of nowhere, landing in his lap.

Looking up with a, “What the fuck?” he saw the fat man from earlier who just pointed a big, fat finger in his face and said two words.

“Read this.”

And then the fat man walked away, never to be heard from again.

Matt looked at the book that a complete stranger had just dumped onto him and thought to himself, “Of all the nerve…” but then figured, he couldn’t just ignore a move as ballsy as that.

So Matt bought the book.

A week later, he called me out for a cup of coffee.

Once Matt was done telling me his story, he stood up, dropped a thick novel into my lap and stuck a finger in my face.

“Read this.”

Then he walked away.

At first, just like him, all I could think was, “Cheeky bastard…”

But after a move like that, what was I to do?

I took the book home with me to read.

Two days later, when I finished the book, I knew there was only one thing I could do.

I called up another friend of mine out for coffee with a copy of the book, ready to drop into her lap.

That book was The Name of the Wind.

You’ve had them too, haven’t you?

Sure you have. Books that were so damned good that you just wanted to shove them into someone’s hands and stand over them to make sure they actually read it?

What’re some of your “read this” books?

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[Perry] Using An Unreliable Narrator

In Which Your Muse Is Not A Fairy

Traditional Muse

Traditionally, the muse is treated as an external force, fickle and impatient.

It is up to her, whether she appears to you and grants you a brief moment of inspiration, like a fairy doling out wishes.

*Record Scratch*

/thwaps you upside the head with a star-tipped wand

Snap out of it.

Writing is work.

Writing is amazing, glorious, riding a rainbow unicorn through a jellybean rainbow work sometimes, but it’s always work.

You CAN NOT sit around and wait for a muse to find you.

If you’re waiting for inspiration, or time, or life to slow down, you’re going to miss the boat.

This is a difficult lesson to learn, mostly because sometimes you DO get struck by creative lighting out of the blue. It happens, and it’s so incredibly magical that it becomes tempting to believe that ALL creative pursuits should feel that wonderful all the time.

If you wait for your “fairy muse” to find you, you will

Never finish what you start
Produce very little completed work, and what you DO write may be disconnected scenes that are impossible for a reader to follow
Ride the emotional roller coaster of “I am AWESOME and I can write anything!” followed by “Holy geriatric pixies, I’m the worst writer EVER.” so often that your friends and family members will dread hearing you talk about your latest piece.

Use Your Muse

On the upside? If you stop treating your muse like an external fairy and instead treat her like a part of yourself, you can stop waiting for her to grace you with her presence and start tapping your own fount of creativity.

The first step is banishing the image of your muse as someone who grants wishes or visits you on their own schedule.

The best way to banish that image is to replace it with a different one — and I think there’s value in everyone finding their own mental portrait of their muse.

My “muse” is Buckethead. She’s somewhere between 5 and 10 years old, is always covered in cookie crumbs, and wears a bucket over hear head. I don’t know whether I picked her or she picked me, but there’s no removing her now. She is a never-ending fount of creativity, constantly seeing the world from strange angles and chiming in with ridiculous imagery and songs to brighten up my day.

Why is this a useful image for me?

Because Buckethead is always with me. Not only that, but I know I can’t demand things from her the way I would an adult. I have to coax and tease and reward her when she helps me. I can give her a problem to solve, but I have to give her time to solve it and I can’t be mad at her when I don’t understand or like her response.

Some folks see their muse as animals or birds, others as shapes or clouds of smoke.

My muse likes to pretend she’s a train and loves to sing My Little Pony songs while I’m supposed to be paying attention in meetings.

TLiDR

The Lesson is, Dear Reader, that you should never be sitting idly, waiting for a visit from the spirit of creativity.

The creativity lives INSIDE of you, and you can actively seek a connection with it so that even when writing is WORK, it’s also joy.

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Buckethead : Meet My Muse
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Creative Drought

More Flash Fiction

Putting up a few more little twiddles.

Shadows In The Water

This was actually pinfic, but I can’t find the pin I based it on. Some people inherit blue eyes or freckles from their family. The men in this family inherit something entirely different, and far more sinister.

Chess

A game with Death … and an unexpected twist.

Gutter’s Swamp

Sometimes having a supernatural ability is really just a giant pain in the social life.

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[Perry] The Power of a Good Threat

The following post contains some instances of harsh language. Those who would be offended should immediately escape to this safe corner of the internet which will show you why you never to say ‘no’ to panda.

Do you know why the movie Taken was so popular?

It wasn’t because it was a completely revolutionary idea because it really, really wasn’t. The plot was serviceable but nothing spectacular.

Similarly, the characters were fairly one-dimensional and none of them actually grow or change throughout the course of the movie.

The reason why Taken was so popular was because of this scene.

They put that scene in the trailer and suddenly with the use of a fantastic threat, the movie vaulted in popularity. Everyone wanted to watch Liam Neeson’s transformation from the more dramatic roles that he’d done before into this ass-kicking icon.

All this, on the strength of a good threat.

See, a good threat’s like a punch in the gut when you’re not expecting it. A good threat can add that vital pinch of spice that hooks the audience…or it can unintentionally turn the movie into a comedy.

A good threat can be the only thing you need to turn your main character into an intimidating force of nature that no sane person would dream of messing with. It could be something to keep in mind if you find that, while writing, your main character isn’t coming across as scary enough or isn’t being taken seriously by the other characters in the story.

A good threat sticks with you. It echoes through your head and it makes you imagine situations you can deliver that same line and watch your enemies back away with ball-shrinking fear…

…No? It was just me?

…Okay >.>”

You can’t tell me that good threats don’t stay with you, though.

C’mon.

Dirty Harry? When Clint Eastwood delivers the line, “Did he fire six shots? Or only five?”

Man, I only wish that I could be that bad-ass.

Or how about Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction? The whole “Say what again, I dare you,” line followed by his bastardized Bible quote? You can’t tell me that didn’t get to you. That kind of writing will put hair on your chest, no joke.

I have to say though, one of my favorite threats ever…I still get chills right down my back every time I hear Daniel Day-Lewis waving a bloody knife in the face of his would-be assassin, screaming “You see this knife? I’m going to teach you to speak English with this fucking knife!”

*shivers

Those were some of mine.

So tell me, if you have them, what’re some of your favorite threats?

 

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[Perry] Using An Unreliable Narrator

Power

On Forgiveness

Forgive, Or Else

If you’re going to stay sane as a writer, you must become forgiveness.

You cannot simply know or understand or practice forgiveness. It must become entwined with your very essence and become a defining characteristic of who you are.

I say this not because you have no other choice, but rather because it seems like the only other options lead down a bitter, angry spiral of harsh liquor and ever-hardening hatred.

Forgive Yourself

There is a very real chance that you will never live up to your own expectations.

You will tell yourself that you will write for at least an hour a day, or at least 500 words a day. You will probably not meet this goal.

Forgive yourself.

You will tell yourself that the thing you just finished writing is utter rubbish and you should be a better wordsmith by now.

Forgive yourself.

Forgive yourself, because otherwise, you will rapidly become jaded about your abilities. You might convince yourself you should not even be writing, if you cannot achieve these “simple” goals.

The best and most widely accepted piece of advice on writing is that you should write. If you cannot forgive yourself, you will stop writing.

Write because you love to write, and not because you have set an arbitrary, lofty goal after which point you shall count yourself a “Proper Author.”

Writing is not a goal. Rather, it is a journey that never ends.

Forgive The Publishing Industry

There is a very real chance that you will be rejected by the publishing industry.

Forgive them.

Let go that seed of resentment. Do not soothe your soul with the bitterness of superiority or the sourness of martyrdom.

“Clearly, they have no vision. They only publish garbage.”
“I am doomed never to succeed. After my death, they shall find my unpublished manuscripts and thousands shall weep for the stories I did not write.”

Forgive them.

Perhaps you are not ready. Perhaps your story is not what they were looking for. Perhaps they were having a bad day. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Let it go, because otherwise your heart will become as bitter and sour as your reactions.

There is no one true path to Becoming Published and it’s at least one part lottery to two parts skill.

Get a new lottery ticket, and let the old one go.

Forgive Your Readers

There is a very real chance that some people will not like your writing.

As a matter of fact, there is an excellent chance that some of those people will hate your writing with such burning fervor that they will spew vitriol all over your amazon pages, goodreads, blogs, twitter, and every other channel they can find.

Forgive them.

Forgive the readers who silently dislike your writing, because everyone has different tastes and their displeasure is not related to the quality of your writing.

Forgive the readers who loudly and violently dislike your writing, because that sort of hate rarely has anything to do with you, and that kind of hate deserves pity rather than gasoline tossed on a fire.

Forgive them, because once you start to despise your readers, it becomes nearly impossible to stop, and you might miss the quiet adoration of the person who loves your work, and for whom your writing is the quiet balm to their own soul.

Write the stories you want to read. Once you’ve done that, the readers who dislike your writing are no great loss — the true tragedy would be to lose a reader who would love the stories of your heart, but you have written something else entirely. (example : writing paranormal romance because it’s “popular” when your heart longs to write historical fiction.)

(Side note: love and trust your critiquers – the people you have chosen to give you feedback on your writing. It is incredibly difficult to grow as a writer without constructive criticism. Forgive them as well, of course, but pay more attention to what they say than you would a random reader.)

No related posts.

Yoga the First

Yoga

I love doing yoga. I love the easy, relaxy poses that everyone things are all frou-frou and girlypants, and I love the difficult, heart-pumping stuff that brings strong men to their knees.

I believe yoga is a fantastic way not only to unwind/relax/focus, but also to stretch out muscles that our modern lifestyle tends to ignore … causing a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering in later years.

I’m trying to convince my mom to get into yoga, and I figured I could share my emails to her with you guys. And I do mean “guys”. Mr. Moore yogas with me, and he’s one of the unstretchiest guys out there. He’s seen MASSIVE improvements in his back pain and flexibility since doing them, and both of us feel a much-needed relaxation from doing these.

Starting Out

Since we’re following along the path I expect my mom (a very non-yoga person) to be taking, I’ll be starting out with the easy, relaxy poses and gradually getting into more difficult poses.

You’re going to think it’s dumb, probably, but the end result of basic yoga should be that you feel relaxed, so I’m going to give you the start and end stuff for our yoga routine and when you’re ready for more, I’ll add in a few moves.

This should honestly take you less than ten minutes a day. I recommend doing it either in the morning after waking up or just before bedtime.

1. Breathe

Sit comfortably. If you cannot sit comfortably on the ground, you can sit in a chair. This isn’t a stretching pose, it’s a relaxing/calming one and I always always start yoga with it. I actually do this one at my desk at work several times throughout the day.

I’m going to make this one seem more complex than it is, because you probably don’t know what a yoga breath is yet, so there’ll be a lot of text. Do not be frightened.

A “yoga breath” is a deep breath in through the nose — not full to bursting, but deeper than you usually breathe. Slowly inhale, then exhale also through the nose in such a way that you can hear the breath in your head (it might sound like ocean rushing. I hear this kind of in my throat/mouth rather than in my nose). If this feels weird, just do deep breaths and you’ll be fine. Most yoga poses should be done WITH the breath … meaning that you’ll do one thing while inhaling and another while exhaling. The breaths take longer to do than a normal breath, so a typical yoga pose is measured in “breaths” rather than time. I’m going to recommend six yoga breaths for each pose. It’s a good balanced number that’s often challenging on some of the balance-style poses.

This first “pose” (Breathing) you can do for as many breaths as you like. At work, I try to do three — doesn’t take long, I’m not wasting time, and I feel a lot more rejuvinated after it than really seems possible. Also, I’m not twisted into a pretzl on the floor of my cubicle and nobody knows I’m doing it. =]

So yes. Back to the pose. Breathe.

Sit comfortably. Gently lay your hands on your knees. (Palm up or down doesn’t matter. And no, you don’t have to put your thumb and forefinger together and say “OOOOHHHM” unless you really want to. Do at least six yoga breaths when you’re doing this as part of the routine.

2. Cat Pose

This is one you don’t do in mixed company. *wink*

This one is moving with the yoga breath. Get on your hands and knees in a comfortable position. Start with “neutral spine” (which just means kinda flat and loose). On the inhale, arch your back DOWNWARD, and your head and neck upward (look upward). On the exhale, transition smoothly into arching your back UPWARD, with your head and neck down.

This is a great starter pose, and your back will thank you for it. You’re just stretching the spine a little, and gently stretching some of your back muscles. This should not hurt or feel strenuous at all.

[image error]

3. Mountain Pose

Stand up, legs comfortably apart (not together and not wide). Put your hands together in sort of a “prayer” pose. (Alternately, you can have them all the way down at your sides, palms facing forward. The point is just that they’re DOWN, since they’re going to transition UP on the inhale).

Start standing comfortably. Now, before you begin the pose, correct your posture (everyone has bad posture these days). Pull your shoulders back (yes, you will feel like you’re jutting your boobs out. It feels weirder than it looks. It just LOOKS like you’re not slouching. Menfolk? Same goes for you, only with “pectorals” instead of “boobs”.). Now (and this is an odd one) also thrust your hips forward just a little. You’ll feel the transition, and you should be straight and strong from your thighs through your hips.

This is your “start” and “end” pose for Mountain. Mountain’s another that moves with the breathing and that shouldn’t hurt or even feel strenuous.

From start, INHALE. As you do, draw your arms up and around from the sides (arms straight), like you’re drawing a big circle. The end of your exhale should find your hands overhead, arms still straight, with the palms together. (As dumb as this sounds, I ALWAYS feel pops and stretching when I do this one. It’s just swinging your arms overhead, but there you have it). Also as part of this transition, your hips should shift so that your butt is jutting out instead of pushing inward, giving your spine a nice curve.

So! Recap. Inhale, drawing a big, stiff-armed circle around your side to meet at the top while your spine relaxes into a strong, butt-jutting curve.

Then, for the exhale, reverse all that. Arms wide circle down and back to the prayer hands at your chest, and hips back to jutting forward instead of curving back.

That’s All For Today,  Class!

I’m going to stop there for now. Those are three “poses” (honestly, the first one’s kind of just to help you clear your mind, but it’s just lovely) but it’s a lot of text and instructions and I don’t want to overwhelm you.

Try doing these once a day for a few days, to get into a routine. Next time, I’ll probably add neck rolls (okay, those aren’t technically yoga, but they’re SO NICE) and standing forward bend and maybe a big chunk of time on the various ways to do Corpse Pose. (tee hee. They can call it “Final Resting Pose” all they want.)

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[Perry] Using An Unreliable Narrator

Another guest post from Perry, who is well on his way to earning co-blogger status (it’s mostly a certificate made from an old cereal box and drawn in crayon … VERY prosh).  Loved this one, and I’ve adored all the movies he’s got listed where the unreliable narrator is done RIGHT.

~Tami

* * *

The following post contains spoilers for the movie Total Recall (original and the recent remake). Viewer discretion is completely unadvised.

So I recently caught the Total Recall remake in theaters and given the inevitable comparison between that and the original version (with Ahnald), it sparked a few thoughts that I wanted to share.

Do you know why an unreliable narrator works?

…Wait, scratch that. Do you know what an unreliable narrator is?

Just for a quick recap, an unreliable narrator is a story-telling device where the main viewpoint of the story is one that’s compromised. Either the viewpoint of the story (usually a person/entity/thing) is knowingly lying to you or unintentionally misdirecting you because they themselves don’t know the truth.

Some notable examples of this device used effectively in film would be something like Fight Club, or The Usual Suspects, or Memento.

The original Total Recall was a great example of this. The story is set in the future where an everyday kind of guy goes to a place called Rekall which offers to implant memories into your brain to help you get away from the day-to-day. So our hero, Hauser, decides to be implanted with memories of being a spy…except in the middle of the implantation procedure, there’s a problem due to the discovery of previously erased memories. Hauser then discovers that he was an undercover agent all along and gets embroiled in a struggle to fight for the rebels from Mars.

Throughout the movie, and past the ending, the audience shares in Hauser’s doubts. Is all this really happening? Was he truly an undercover agent all along? Or is everything we see just part of the Rekall and it’s all taking place inside his head?

The movie ends before that becomes clear and in a large part, that’s what made it successful. A clear argument could be made for either case, leaving it up to you to decide what sort of story you wanted it to be.

Fast forward to 2012 and the recent remake.

The movie essentially follows the same plot. There’s no Mars this time, but there are still rebels, and there’s still an everyday guy named Hauser who’s sick of his job and there’s still a place called Rekall, offering to implant you with fake memories.

What it ALSO has, are scenes that Hauser is not a part of…and that immediately destroys the point of having an unreliable narrator.

See, the point of having an unreliable narrator is so the audience can see the story through their eyes and therefore, share the characters difficulty in figuring out what’s real and what’s an illusion. The second you introduce things happening without the main character (a scene where two other important characters are talking about what to do about Hauser), you eliminate the unreliability.

Sure, you could claim that “well, this is what those characters would be doing if this WAS all inside Hauser’s head,” but that’s a cop-out and we all know it.

Effective use of the unreliable narrator is the equivalent of tapping your audience on the shoulder and then smashing them in the face with a chunk of wood that has the words, “ASTONISHING REVELATION!” burnt onto it.

If you include scenes that the main character’s not a part of and can’t be aware of, you’re essentially telling your audience when to duck.

If you take the wonderful example The Usual Suspects left for us and included a scene that was NOT  told to us by Kevin Spacey, you’d be depriving yourself of the chance to smack the audience in the face with a bit of wood…and, really, who wants to pass that up?

So remember, if you choose to use an unreliable narrator, stay with them throughout the story.

Stay inside their restricted viewpoint in order to keep the audience guessing as to what’s going on until the right moment.

…and start practicing that home run swing >.>”

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