One story building

Last week I wrote a pretty good story! It needs editing in places, particularly in the beginning before I was sure how I wanted to structure it, but overall I'm pretty pleased with the result. Distinctive, well-paced, some conflict, and with that wonderful somewhat inconclusive quality that separates much nonfiction from most fiction. If I can keep that up then on this journey I can at least produce something coherent enough to present to an editor as a strong first draft. I've got plans in place to do another practice interview, then interview a friend of Alice's who's a stranger to me, and then at last hit up someone for a story who hasn't already agreed to the chat.

One quandary that came out while I was writing had to do with who the main character of the story was. We're seeing everything through Alice's eyes; it's her memories, her experiences, her dilemmas. She's the main character, especially in the last couple installments. Yet she gets less direct characterization than Joel or his parents do. Alice tells you what kind of guy Joel is, but she mostly doesn't tell you who she is. I certainly can't tell you more about her than she tells me, because I'm writing this story under the pretense that Alice is a stranger. It's sort of a corollary of how in some first-person novels you can go the entire length of the book without discovering the narrator's name. All you know about Alice is the little she tells you plus what you can infer from how she talks and what she does in the story. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Should I at least introduce her as a blonde white woman in her twenties, single, who's lived in Fort Myers most of her life? Should I let that come out, or not, in the course of the story if it turns out to pertain to it? Or do these basic facts of biography always pertain to any story?

Another quandary: is it fair to Joel and his parents that I'm presenting Alice's judgments of them without a counterpoint? I suppose I could try to get in touch with them to get their sides, but I want these stories to be vignettes, not treatises. I don't think there's anything wrong with presenting only Alice's impressions, with the caveat that I've made the conscious decision to believe my subjects when I can. This credulity is necessary because of my format -- doubt on my part without opposing witnesses is gratuitous -- but it may also be desirable. I'm not going to get a lot of openness from my subjects if they feel like I'm looking for holes in their stories like some kind of itinerant trial lawyer. So I'll be gullible, which fortunately comes naturally to me.

The problem, of course, comes when someone is actually lying to me, or exaggerating to the point of lying. They're still telling me a love story, I suppose, but not a true one, and possibly a slanderous one. This is why I'm always going to use pseudonyms for anyone I haven't interviewed; I'm not interested in being an accessory to libel. If I should catch a major inconsistency in someone's tale, I'm not going to think of it as a lie but as a literary coup. I have to ask them to clarify -- since if their story isn't coherent mine certainly won't be -- but what an opportunity to see how people remember (or choose to remember) the events of their lives! If I necessarily let the subjects paint their own self-portraits through their storytelling, then how interesting it will be to see whether they are realists or impressionists, or whether they gloss over faults or exaggerate them...

Now all I need is subjects!