Linda asked a good question in a comment yesterday. She'd like to get to know McQuaid better (hey, wouldn't we all?). "I'm curious though," she says. "how is this done? Do you change the story teller with each new chapter, or maybe a few chapters from China, then move to McQuaid?"
I've been thinking about this for months, ever since I decided to move away from a strictly first-person narration in China's series. The problem, the way I see it, is that not only do I have to manage the shift from one viewpoint character to another, but also from one narrative style to another. You all know what China's voice sounds like, both when she talks and when she thinks, and how McQuaid sounds when he talks. But how does he sound inside his head? I had to figure that out.
And then I had to figure out how to move from one of these tellers to another without a jarring shift. When China tells her story, she tells it first-person. So my first thought was to do alternate chapters with both view-point characters in first person. I experimented with that, but it didn't feel right to me--and it was hard to make the styles so distinctive that a reader could pick up a chapter in the middle and know right away that it was McQuaid or China without some narrative cue.
And then, while I was on tour in Minneapolis, I picked up a police procedural called The Tarnished Eye, by Judith Guest. Her point-of-view (POV) character is a detective named Hugh. Hugh's story is told in third person present tense. So you get a chapter-opening paragraph like this: Hugh is out of bed at five-thirty, catching the alarm before it goes off. He dons a clean uniform, making a mental note to tell Karen to send yesterday's to the cleaners. No, she'll do it without his prompting. He looks over and she is lying on her stomach, eyes open, watching him.
I like this. It's immediate and close to the POV character (because it's present tense), and it's inside him (because it's limited third-person). It's stylish and different enough to call attention to itself. But it's also low key, to match Hugh's even, low-key cop-style character. (In the rest of Guest's novel, other chapters are told from the point of view of the murder victims, mostly in present tense, third person--which didn't entirely feel comfortable to me, especially when it came to the ordering of the chapters. But I could see why Guest decided to use this technique, as a means of pulling the reader into the victims' experience and creating some sort of empathy with them.)
So I've adopted this third-person present tense style for the McQuaid chapters, which will probably take up about a third of the book. (I figure I need to keep China's voice fairly dominant, since it's her series, and readers are used to hearing her tell the whole story.) Here's an example from the current draft. McQuaid and China are sitting on the porch, having coffee. She's finally agreed to listen to the work he's been doing on the investigation into her father's death:
McQuaid likes the denim smock and yellow tee shirt his wife is wearing tonight. It makes her look young and vulnerable—a word she would never use to describe herself. China thinks of herself as tough twenty-four/seven, even when she’s feeling tender. He’s glad she’s agreed to listen to what he has to say about the progress of the investigation so far. That’s all she has to do, just listen. He knows how hard she’s tried to put her father out of her life. She has a point. As far as McQuaid is concerned, Bob Bayles was a first-class jerk, start to finish.
For me, there are two big shifts here: seeing McQuaid from the inside, and seeing China from the outside--neither of which has been done elsewhere in the series. Feels kinda risky, but also good. I'm liking the challenge. I'll try to post more about this as I feel my way along here.
Reading note. "There are so many selves in everybody and to explore and exploit just one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person." --James Dickey
