I almost always use a limited third person omniscient POV. I have several reasons for liking it. For one, it's (in my opinion) the default way we have of processing fiction. We know we're reading a story about someone, not that person's private letters or internal monologue (though these can certainly be the stuff of good fiction, for instance, the epistolary novel like Dracula, or the stream of consciousness works of Joyce, Faulkner, and Woolf). The author is mediating the experience for the reader and it's useful to keep that in mind. The author has access to more information than the characters so we know we're getting the full story. To me this is the most intimate kind of storytelling--first person has, in fact, a distancing effect, since we know we're seeing an author's interpretation of the character's voice. To wit, third person is honest. It is the way stories are told around campfires. I find second person to be highly artificial and almost never used correctly. It is a very rare story that requires it, and when it isn't required, it just sounds wrong.
Do you use present tense or past tense most in your fiction, or do you often switch tense for different stories, and why?
I stick strictly to past tense. Again, using present tense for fiction just sounds wrong to my ear. We tell stories of things that happened long ago, or of things that could never happen. Telling a story in the present tense gives the reader the sense that the author doesn't know how it's going to end. Again, for some stories, that's exactly what you want--but it should always be a conscious choice, while past tense should be the default.
Pick one of your published stories. What combination of point of view and tense did you use for this story, and why?
In my first published novel, Monster Island, I tried to get fancy. There are two viewpoint characters. One tells his story in first person, and one in third person. There's a good reason for this, which is explained at the end of the story. Surprisingly enough the first editor to look at the book passed on it because mixing these POVs was "impossible"! I chose the POVs carefully. One character, the protagonist, is constantly in danger and never certain of his surroundings, and first person helped convey how scared he was. The other character discovered, over the course of the book, how much mastery he had over his situation and so third person felt right--I was telling the story of a character who came to lead an army, and I wanted to distance him, make him seem less approachable. I used past tense throughout, for both characters, because I wanted to visibly assert my authorial control over them both. These kind of decisions often seem simple, even unconscious, but they can have a massive impact on how the story is perceived.
To what extent is the vocabulary and manner of speech of the narration in this story different from your own everyday expression, and what does this contribute to the story?
The two viewpoint characters were relatively close in background--they were both educated professionals born and raised in New York City. I knew they would sound very similar, that is, their speech patterns would be very closely aligned. I wanted to differentiate them, however, to help convey the slight but crucial differences in their characters. So one of them chose his words very carefully--he was always searching for the right words to defuse situations. The other was much more conversational in style, more likely to make dumb jokes or utter thoughtless comments. It's a subtle but important difference.
Did you tell this story with one narrator or multiple narrators, and why?
I needed two narrators for this story for a very important reason. One character is a living human being, a survivor during the zombie apocalypse. The other was a zombie that had retained his mental faculties, and who rose to become a sort of leader of the undead. It was important to me that I had a viewpoint character on either side of the front lines--someone fighting for survival, which is the usual voice in such a story, but also someone behind the lines, someone who could see what the zombies did when there were no humans around. This allowed me to explore my created world in fullness, rather than simply presenting the closed-in narrative of a single protagonist.
Did you make the narrator of this story a character involved in the main action of the story, or did you make the narrator one which is not a charcater in your fictional storyworld, and why?
Both narrators are crucial to the plot and are directly active in shaping its events. There is a great deal to be said for a kind of Dr. Watson character, someone looking over the protagonist's shoulder, or even a frame narrator--the finest example of that would be Johnny Truant from Danielewski's House of Leaves. Both of those narrators allow for crucial distancing effects that shape how their stories are received. For Monster Island I wanted a far more immediate voice, though. The story was about a world where no one was on the sidelines, where everyone was forced to play a part.
What is one of your favourite fictional stories, in which you think is narration is written well, and how would you describe what makes the narration work so well for you as a reader?
House of Leaves is one of my favorite novels and it's all about how narration works and what it brings to a story. It's a kind of deconstructed horror story, where the narrator believes at first that he is simply performing an act of reportage but over the course of the story realizes that he is in fact directly connected to the story he's telling. The really masterful thing about the book, though, is that by performing this act of fractured distancing, Danielewski ends up making his central story so much more terrifying. It becomes scarier the more it is pushed away, because every time Danielewski breaks from the central narrative he leaves us in rapt suspense, giving our imaginations time to breathe--and contemplate--what is happening. This allows our imaginations to run wild with what's going on in the central story (another theme of the book).
Do you usually provide direct access to the thoughts of characters in your stories? If so, do you usually provide access to the thoughts of one character or multiple characters in a single story or point of view, and why?
I provide limited access to the internalizations of my protagonists (and only my protagonists, unless there's a good reason otherwise). I tend not to give their full thought processes, instead only using their inner monologues for emotional emphasis. This helps keep the story focused on the action, and therefore the plot.
To what extent does the narrative style of novels you read have an impact on why you read them, and why?
It's changed over time. I find myself, as I get older, having less and less patience for formal experimentation. As a teenager I loved stream of consciousness works, works set in unusual voices or tenses, works which played with my preconceptions of how stories are told. Either I'm calcifying in middle age, or I've simply been burned too many times by literary pretension. It's rare for me to even pick up a work now that's told in the present tense, and works in second person feel like a chore to read. Of course, some authors can break through that prejudice. McCarthy's The Road is told in present tense, without even proper quotation marks--something that normally gets my hackles up. But the work was compelling enough that I learned to accept these things. My advice to writers, however, remains firm. Third person limited omniscient, tightly focused on a single protagonist, told in the past tense. This is the default for storytelling. If you're going to do anything else, make sure you have a good reason for it. I do want to stress that there are plenty of good reasons--but I feel that an author who chooses, say, second person, or future tense, or some other crazy thing just because it sounded like fun, or they thought it would make their work feel more "literary" or erudite, has already lost control of their work.
Author website: www.davidwellington.net
Website for David Wellington's pseudonym David Chandler: www.ancientblades.com
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