interesting narrators

I’ve been on a kick lately reading books where the narrator is unexpected or unreliable.

Alice Winters does this well. Hilarious (gay) hit man, who’s almost a twink? Gimme. Villain from a wannabe supervillain family? Yes, please. The lone human (missing some limbs from a vampire attack) in a workplace full of vampires? “So. Much. Amazing,” I said with a groan.

Those characters are all antiheros. They’re not who I’d think would tell the story. The POV makes those stories exceptionally awesome on a conceptual level. (And the author delivers on the story level, too.)

But it’s not only antiheros.

Last night, I finished reading a book where the narrator was suffering from magical amnesia. That’s fun for the reader, especially when his condition wasn’t revealed until about a third of the way through the book. (I’m linking the book and hoping I didn’t spoil anything.) Talk about unreliable narrator.

One of my all-time favorite books—or rather series of books—is the Magnus Chase series. By Chapter One, you know Magnus, the main character, is dead. Suffice it to say, in most books the main narrator is alive. So, get a dead, snarky narrator talking (with a spectacularly diverse cast of characters)? Sign me up. I’ll read it multiple times.

But then I started thinking about the characters in my own books. I’m developing some new narrators now, and I have so many choices to make. Names. Appearances. Back stories.

For me, the most interesting thing to get down in writing is the character’s personality and how they react to things that happen to them, not so much their physical looks or even their name or background. Many backgrounds can lead to the same point in a book. Harry Potter doesn’t have to be a white kid with green eyes and messy brown hair, but he does need a lightning-shaped scar, and he does need to not know he’s a wizard until he’s eleven. The rest is just detail chosen by the author because she liked it or thought it served the story. I think you could still have a Harry Potter story, substituting in a completely different-looking Harry, but still tell the same epic story of good and evil and growing up.

So, I’m at the point where my characters are malleable. Each choice I make is a vote down a certain path, but I keep thinking other paths will still get me to the same destination. And I’m getting distracted. I have to remind myself: my goal is to serve the story and try to reflect the diversity of the world I live in. I just have to make the best choice I can.

Do you have a story with an unreliable or different narrator that you love? Let me know! I’d love to check it out.