I write three completely different styles and sub-genres of crime fiction, and the narrative style varies depending on what suits the book. The Constable Molly Smith books (From Poisoned Pen Press) are in the style of the traditional police procedural/village format. A multi-person, third-person POV works best, I think, to show the situation from many angles and how individual characters are responding to the situation.
The Klondike Gold Rush books (From Dundurn Press) are primarily first person, as they are quite light-hearted. It’s much easier to write comedy in first person – you can poke fun at your protagonist without appearing to be mean-spirited. The protagonist in these books is intended to be somewhat, shall we say, confident in her abilities, so I think she might be a bit over-bearing if presented in third person. On the other hand, because of the time and the setting of the books, I needed another character’s POV to go to places that a woman of the times would not. So the character of her 12 year old son and the NWMP officer are in third person.
My newest standalone, More than Sorrow, is one person, first person POV, because I am attempting to achieve an intimacy between the reader and the character.
Do you use present tense or past tense most in your fiction, or do you often switch tense for different stories, and why?
I always use past tense. I find present tense very rarely works in fiction.
Pick one of your published stories. What combination of point of view and tense did you use for this story, and why?
I’ll pick my forthcoming book, More Than Sorrow (Poisoned Pen Press, Sept 2012). The main part of this book is almost exclusively first person POV, past tense. The book is standalone suspense, a modern Gothic. I am hoping to achieve an intimacy between the reader and the character. The character is a journalist wounded in an IED explosion in Afghanistan attempting to recover at her sister’s organic vegetable farm. She suffers from TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) and her injury is central to the story and to the character’s actions and development. I never considered telling it in anything but first person, because first person is the best medium to give the reader a glimpse into what is happening inside the woman’s damaged brain, and her attempts to deal with it.
I said ‘almost exclusively’ because there are a couple of very short passages in which we see Hannah Manning, the protagonist, as others see her. Damaged and struggling.
There are, however, flashbacks in this book to a Loyalist woman, a refugee from the American Revolution. This story is told in third person, deliberately to avoid confusion with the main story.
As in all of my writing, the tense is past tense. As a reader, I find that present tense unless done extremely well, can be off-putting and have an air of unnaturalness about it.
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 character in this book is a modern middle-class Canadian woman, same as me. Her speech and vocabulary is therefore very similar to mine. I have written books where the narration is historical or for someone much younger than me, so it was a relief not to have to worry about the character’s speech patterns or words. In the flashback sequences, the narration is slightly more formal than I would use, as the character is a well-educated, upper-class woman of the 18th century. Care needs to be taken that the language is formal but not so stilted or proper as to be off-putting to the modern reader.
Did you tell this story with one narrator or multiple narrators, and why?
In this book there are two narrators for each section of the book (18th century and contemporary). That, I believe, leads to an emotional intimacy between the character and the readers that is difficult to achieve if other characters keep popping up.
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 character in your fictional storyworld, and why?
The narrator(s) is the central character. We see all of the action and all of the other characters exclusively through her eyes. Again, this was necessary to achieve a strong degree of emotional intimacy. The reader (I hope) can really feel this woman’s pain and her terror that she will never get well.
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?
In all of my books, whatever type, I provide direct access to the thoughts of the POV character at the moment. Whether it’s Molly Smith worrying that she’ll never make a good cop, or Fiona MacGillivray reflecting on her tumultuous past, or any one of my other characters worried that they’re making a mistake, or even what to make for dinner, I believe that the most important action of fiction is to give a glimpse into another person’s mind.
To what extent does the narrative style of novels you read have an impact on why you read them, and why?
Narrative style is critical. I don’t usually read a book for the action or the dialogue, but for the characters and what they have to say.
Authore website: http://www.vickidelany.com/
