I was not aware of how much I loved 'Canoa' until I saw it after doing 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' and realized that my voice - over about the story's historical context - that narrator - came from 'Canoa'.
It's a rare memoir that can tell a story that seems brand new, but Nina Here Nor There does it. This one-of-a-kind narrator undertakes a quest that is unmistakably timely. But in its yearning for awareness and connection, this book feels timeless.
One naturally identifies to some extent with an "I" female narrator going through something that you recognize whether you've gone through it or not.
My narrators tend to be women with low self-esteem, so I can send them to charm school.
Fatal human malice is the staple of narrators, original sin the mother-fluid of historians. But it is a risky enterprise to have to write of virtue.
Lauren Kirshner creates a first-person narrator you never stop rooting for. . . . [Where We Have to Go] highlights Kirshner as a new novelist to watch. A very strong, original debut.
But music doesn't sum up my approach to literature - even in Vain Art of the Fugue. To 'fugue' I had to invent 'trap-words,' or words that would force the narrator to turn around and start his path anew.
The only difference between the narrator of contemporary affairs and the ordinary historian is that moral judgments about the present provoke fiercer reactions and have more immediately practical implications than moral judgments about the past.
Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.
I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.
We see everything from the narrator's point of view, so exposition about the world is limited to what impinges directly on him and the story he's telling. Considering how old the world is, we learn very little about its history, which I think is a good thing.
By definition, memoir demands a certain degree of introspection and self-disclosure: In order to fully engage a reader, the narrator has to make herself known, has to allow her own self-awareness to inform the events she describes.
Narrator: You had to give it to him: he had a plan. And it started to make sense, in a Tyler sort of way. No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.
Once I got interested in organized crime, and, specifically, Jewish organized crime, I got very interested in it. I have learned that, like my narrator Hannah, I'm a crime writer in my own peculiar way. Crime with a capital "C" is the subject that I'm stuck with - even Sway is about "crime" in a certain way. The nice thing about crime is that it enables you to deal with some big questioO
When the reader and one narrator know something the other narrator does not, the opportunities for suspense and plot development and the shifting of reader sympathies get really interesting.
In a thriller, the camera's an active narrator, or can be.
So a lot of what you see in the Baroque Cycle is me wanting to be one of those guys. In the case of Anathem, I needed something that was more formal, less flashy, as if it had been translated from the classical language of another planet, but enlivened with slang terms that a teenage narrator would enjoy throwing around.
If you have a single narrator, a person like an "I" - "'I' did this" and "'I' did that" - it automatically solves the most difficult problem in writing.
Even while I was working on the novel I would also write short stories as relief, just to be in a wieldier world that could negotiated more easily and more quickly. In the novel, I even changed the narrator from a man to a woman.
First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.