Uncle Josh Notices a Narrative Choice

During many sessions with The Story Engine Deck I find the stories can get a bit dark, or threatening, or just not ending up in a happy way. I also have a tendency then to not tell the story of that character in that character’s voice. I look for an outsider who can tell the story.

I think this has to do with my love of Raymond Chandler and hardboiled detectives. I see them as narrators of other people’s stories. Philip Marlowe does not have a story in The Long Goodbye, but he lets us know what happens to Terry Lennox, Eileen Wade, and her husband Roger. I like the style and the voice and my first serious attempts at anything longer than a vignette was a pastiche of hardboiled detective fiction. I hadn’t actually read any, it was a trope from the cartoons I was using at the time.

So now when I get a prompt like “an heir wants to dedicate his life to a cellar but he will lose all that he loves” I can trace the downfall of this person, but I don’t want to stay in their head for any length of time. So I come up with the “detective” who can discover this person’s story and maybe save the day, but maybe not.

I did sell my short story “Live Feed” based on this model. My “detective” is a computer programmer in an information dystopia. The narrator, Murdock Collins, has no real struggle, because he has a client.

I don’t read a lot of stories that work this way. At the last Orycon I was in a session with Richard A. Lovett called “First Page Idol”. I read another story of mine written in the same way. The “detective” in this story was Satan (yes, that one; no, not the way you think about him) and it is in first person. The narrative driver is a young man who has fallen under the influence of a demon and Satan steps in to help, so from my writer’s perspective, the young man is the driver of the story, Satan is just a snarky narrator. But Rick kept asking me what the narrator’s problem was, what was he fighting, and I had no answer because that’s not how I saw the story. He kept pressing me and I think I now have a problem my first-person narrator has to sort out.

As for this new prompt, my plans for this narrative focus are fairly cruel and I’m going to mess with his mind, creating an unreliable narrator. My hope is to tell the story through another pair of eyes which would make it clear what was going on without having to figure out how to confuse the reader enough to trigger the “unreliable narrator, what’s really going on” thought but not confuse them enough to say “maybe this guy should try writing in is native language first.”^[1]I joke that I only speak two languages, English and Princess Bride quotes, but that is not chronologically true. My first language is Star Wars quotes but it doesn’t sound as funny. The balance is difficult, so I don’t always want to try.

But maybe my style is fine, I just need to find the audience. After all, I sold one Murdock Collins story. Of course, if I don’t submit my stories anywhere it’s all for naught.