writing-questions-answered:
Anonymous asked:Hello! I’m worried about my 1st POV unreliable MC. A...
Anonymous asked:Hello! I’m worried about my 1st POV unreliable MC. A lot has happened over the years, and she doesn’t recall certain things, doesn’t make links that would help her understand current situations. Supporting characters come and go, don’t always help. I have thrown in a lot of interwoven foreshadowing via seemingly innocuous dialogue/events, but MC won’t “see the light” until later in the story. What I’m worried about is if my unreliable MC will be mistaken for me, the author, doing the forgetting.
The best way to keep that from happening is to find ways to contradict your character. After all, the contradiction is helpful if you want to illustrate that your narrator is unreliable. There are different ways you can do this. One would be to have another character challenge your character’s notion of something that happened. You can even choose to have your MC dismiss the character’s correction if you need to. The important thing is it illustrates that you, the writer, haven’t forgotten what really happened. Alternatively, you can have your character find or discover information that contradicts what they remember. For example, maybe they remember going to someones party on the 7th, but then they find the invitation and it says it was on the 9th. Once again, you can choose to have your character dismiss this correction in favor of whatever they want to believe. “The invitation says the 9th, but I am sure the party was actually on the 7th. Must have been a typo…” You can also have your character illustrate that they’re unsure of their position. They can think, “I seem to recall the party was on the 7th, but it could have been on the 9th. We’ll just go with the 7th. Yeah. I’m pretty sure that’s right.” Finally, you can correct the character later when they start to put the pieces together. They can look back and see where their mistakes were. As long as it’s corrected then, the reader won’t think it’s the writer who made the mistake.
And, it’s not the worst thing in the world if the reader isn’t sure who made the mistake. In George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, there’s something like that. Sansa’s so-called “unkiss” with The Hound may have been Sansa mis-remembering, or it may have been George forgetting what he’d written. No one seems to know for sure, but that doesn’t make it any less intriguing. ;)
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