I have no policy, for or against: only a personal style. Which is to say, I use them when I think it's appropriate to; for example, an internal monologue by a locquacious and verbose narrator is more likely to be larded with adverbs than an exchange of instant messages between cops at a crime scene.
I think every first-person narrator in a novel should be compromised. I prefer that word to unreliable.
September could see it. She did not know what is was she saw. That is the disadvantage of being a heroine, rather than a narrator. She knew only that a red light glowed and went dark, glowed and went dark.
I'm really shocked when critics get morally outraged at my fiction because they think I'm condoning what's going on. I never come in as the author and say, "Hey, okay. I'm interrupting the narrator here. I'm Bret Easton Ellis, and I'm the author."
I don't know if you've ever seen this film called Elite Squad, which, actually Wagner [Moura] is the one narrating that. José Padilha, one of creators of our show, that's where the style comes from. It has a heavy narrator. But I thought about it a lot. You [the viewers] have to work for the show, unless you're bilingual. It's a really aggressive type of filming, it's engaging, you've got to read.
I chose the title Dogwalker because that describes me pretty well. I spend a lot of time walking around with my dogs. I'd say the narrator is me in an alternate universe.
I wanted to do a collection where the narrator is constant throughout, so that there's a little unity.
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.
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.
