In my last post I talked a bit about narrative techniques and ways in a which the writer can position the reader. One thing I would suggest avoiding is getting your reader really p***** off by playing with them. There’s a chapter opening in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (I know, I know, an extraordinary book, with many good things in it, but not faultless…). In Middlemarch Eliot has as writer chosen the position of omniscient narrator, which she deploys to great effect, by presenting the inner lives of all her main protagonists to the reader, so that whole slow car-crash of their actions and involvements is seen as tragically inevitable. The heart of the action, though, and the moral touchstone of the book is Dorothea. So when Eliot starts a chapter “Dorothea – but why always Dorothea…?” as though somehow the perverse reader has been forcing her to focus on Dorothea, then that made me (almost) throw the book across the room. It’s always Dorothea because you, Dear Author, have been writing about her – we, the readers, have no choice but to go where you take us…
As a writer, it’s crucial to do one thing (well, it’s crucial to do a myriad of things, but one is what I’ll focus on here): respect your reader. Look at some of the brilliant crime fiction which has been published recently – say Dexter is Delicious, Jeff Lindsay’s new novel about the sympathetic serial killer. Lindsay’s deft play with words and metaphors, coupled with the ironising point of view of a killer with an innocent eye, allows the reader to relish the narrative and trust the author.