What are the advantages of writing with more than one narrator?
First, just being able to know two or more characters extremely well. There is a different experience, I feel, that the reader (and writer) can have with a ‘viewpoint character.’ When you’re inside a person’s head, it’s a whole different world. And I think it’s fascinating to see how the same situation can be viewed so differently by two different minds. But additionally, in all three of the books we have been discussing (Pay It Forward, Love in the Present Tense, Chasing Windmills) the use of multiple viewpoints takes on a whole new dimension. Because in each of these books, the reader knows something very important, something that even the other characters don’t know. In Pay It Forward, the reader knows that the concept is spreading and taking on a life of its own. But even its creator, Trevor, doesn’t know this for most of the book. In Love in the Present Tense the reader knows what happened to Pearl, even as Leonard and Mitch struggle with their own best guesses and intuitions. And
