I very much like the idea of the unreliable narrator. Shaping my fictions as monologues - by introducing the "I" - allows me to be as unreliable as I like.

Norman Lock

Categorized in : Ideas Fiction Narrators

When I was awarded a fellowship in poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts (for "Alphabets"), I felt myself suddenly (vaingloriously) equal to my Crow, which would be - I knew at once - Rat.

crow would-be art

Theatre aside, my penchant for the extended monologue began with my reading of Browning's dramatic monologues, in high school. My inclination to adopt the form for prose was confirmed by Richard Howard's book of dramatic monologues, Untitled Subjects.

reading book school

I find it only natural for a storyteller to be interested in storytelling and, for anyone who spends the better part of his or her life writing fiction, it is hardly surprising that the pleasures, worries, and mechanics of fiction-making should enter the work.

worry writing fiction

It may be old hat, but I see no reason to close off what is for me a fruitful subject of inquiry, especially so for one, like me, who is very much interested in creating stories and novels of ideas.

inquiry creating ideas

I don't know about ground rules; but I create the world that arrives with the characters or situation or voice in my head that instigates the piece, whatever form it may take.

pieces voice character

My fictional worlds were those of a fabulist, of an intellectual fantasist. I was the lawgiver, and the countries and inhabitants of my imagination were answerable to me. If I wished for a man to levitate; to enter another's story by rowboat or by intoning a sentence or by performing a shadow-puppet play; if I wanted him to become a swarm of intelligent elementary particles and enter the Internet and travel into the past and far into the future, it was so.

intelligent country past

I do seem to favor a deathbed confession as the occasion for my dramatic monologues.

confession dramatic favors