My Name Is Red

Great fiction is all about providing a different perspective on the world—taking readers outside of their own heads and looking at things in an entirely new way. And you can’t get much further outside your own head than going outside your own species, right? Literature is rife with examples of books featuring non-human narrators. Done poorly, the device is alienating, […]

Experimenting with the “voice” telling a story is a fundamental tool of the fiction-writing trade. Narrators come in a wide variety of styles, from first-person intimate, to unreliably distanced, to godlike in knowledge and perception. The way a story is told is just as important—sometimes more so—than the story itself. Still, most narrators are more or less conventional. They […]