On the way to critique this morning, we were talking about my favorite working assumption: No narrator is reliable. For a while, I was afraid that I was getting into a rut with some of my stories because so many of them had unreliable narrators. So I came up with a good rationalization for this, and I'm happy to pontificate about it any time.
But it's true. People don't know themselves perfectly, and that's a fascinating thing to explore in a fictional character. People don't understand what is going on around them, not expertly, even when they are experts. They miss nuances and they have biases. So fictional characters are not supposed to be "real" and we are not writing about them as though they were, but if humanity does one thing worth capturing, it's that amazing ability they have to think that what they are doing is right when everyone around them is shouting, "no, stop, that's the house where all those teenagers were murdered!" Monumental self-blindness, it's what we do best.
Well, I'm not that way, of course. I'm just a chronicler.
I signed up for the very next critique slot, deadline 2 weeks from this moment. I'm trying hard to keep the enthusiasm and momentum going.
