Reflection

If you haven't read the story starting with the first post in July yet, please do so now. None of this is going to make sense if you haven't read it. I am crawling into that story, pulling apart what I did and why.  This is primarily a selfish venture because thinking about this stuff helps me improve. I also hope that through learning the details in the nuts and bolts of my little tale, you will be better equipped to see how storytellers manipulate your sensitivities in movies, books, TV shows and comics.

Quick review; the assignments were to maintain a twitter persona, write one paper about the tastes, feels and smells of food, one paper about making a tough decision, one short story, one paper with a quest, and one twitter confessional. The restrictions of the class, along with my own self imposed restrictions, served to limit the kind of story that I could tell. I wanted to link all of the assignments into one arc with a twist ending; the twitter confession would be that the tweeter is not the person (s)he has been claiming to be. This meant that I had to plan all of my writing assignments from the start, which was good. The short story was stewing in my head before I began work on the first paper.

I wrote the small writing exercises from a young woman’s perspective, and the short story and confession from a young man’s. Both perspectives were in first person, something I have never tried before. The choice to do so lay somewhere between luck and intuition, but it worked quite well. First person is more immediate than third, enabling the reader to experience the actions and dialogue more closely. One of the other students pointed out that at the end of the short story, it forced him to be closer to the young man than he was comfortable with, which worked for my purposes. It also meant I never had to give the characters names, which I think is important but I don’t know why. The parameters of the first writing exercise dictated that the woman would be sensory oriented, which meshed well with the urgency of the third paper. The male, however, tells his story from the past tense, which allows him (and the reader) to reflect on the events he describes.

The hardest part to write was the short story and final confession. If you don’t know me personally, let me assure you that I am not anything like the stalker in my story, except perhaps for the wry sarcasm. It was difficult to consistently live inside the head of a narcissistic, irresponsible creeper. I had to write and rewrite paragraph after paragraph, and the confession, many times because he kept coming out too nice. I had to work to maintain his unapologetic arrogance, but I hope that it doesn’t show. If you can see the effort the writer put into his work, he’s doing it wrong.

I usually have a good idea of what I want to say in my stories before I start writing them, but I didn’t for this one . I just wanted it to be entertaining, preferably with a surprise ending. I knew I had to litter the story with clues, but I was concerned about leaving too many and giving the ending away. I was sure when I wrote that first draft that I had given just enough that when he made the move to drug and kidnap the woman, it would be a believable surprise. My instructor disagreed. I added many more clues, and then some more, but my instructor thinks that the final draft still has that twist. I think this is where the real message of this story lies.

There is a powerful urge to believe the narrator. The notion that the person telling the story is the bad guy is so foreign and remote that the reader completely ignores all the indicators. In this case the narrator was the bad guy, and he told you so time and time again. My first draft showed self contradiction, lack of morality, obsessive behavior and an absurd degree of vanity. My second and third drafts underscored the previous clues, and added a few more strong instances of stalkserish actions. I really do think that you can see the end coming a mile away, if you are cynical enough and are paying attention.

This isn't to say that my perceived  moral to the story is only applicable to other stories. Unreliable narrators are everywhere; politicians who want power, news media that want to sell ad spots, your bum of a cousin that wants to "borrow" some cash, the list goes on. Don’t trust them just because they are smart, or likeable, because they tell a good story, or a story that you want to hear. Look at the facts, frame them against other things you know to be true, and make your judgments from there.

That, and don’t cheat on your college exams. Someone might kidnap you and hide you in their basement.