Too many writers of fiction don't give the reader enough credit. For me, an ideal novel is a dialogue between writer and reader, both a collaborative experience and an intimate exchange of emotions and ideas. The reader just might be the most powerful tool in a writer's arsenal.
My favorite method for involving the reader is to use multiple limited points of view, letting the characters tell the story.
Limited point of view supplies much of the power of Mikhail Lermontov's 1839 Russian masterpiece, "A Hero of Our Time." By telling the story of the anti-hero Pechorin from three different limited perspectives—a reader of his diaries, a onetime military companion and Pechorin himself, via his diaries—the reader must take the fragments of all three narratives and piece together his own.
In our own time, Tim O'Brien creates a dialogue with the reader in his brilliant 1994 novel, "In the Lake of the Woods," which tells of a politician's professional and psychological unraveling. In it, the author uses doubt in the form of an unreliable narrator to splinter a single point of view, creating many possible interpretations. Readers have to draw their own conclusion.
“ When characters have limited points of view, it's the reader who has to assemble the puzzle pieces into a whole. ”
David Mitchell challenges the reader in a different way. Readers of his 2004 "Cloud Atlas" come to see how the past is constantly rewritten to suit the needs of the present. He maps out six seemingly unrelated limited points of view, spread widely across human history, with each successive narrator interrupting the story being told by his predecessor, yet reinterpreting elements from that earlier narrative into his own story. The reader has to assemble Mr. Mitchell's puzzle pieces into a harmonious whole.
Limited points of view let the writer dispense—and the reader gather—information from various corners of the story. It all becomes a kind of dance, with the writer guiding the reader through the various twists and turns. The challenge is keeping readers in step, while still managing to surprise.
One way is to subvert expectations of what type of novel they're reading. The genre of historical fiction traditionally means linear timelines and a plot orchestrated around big "historical" events, including Shakespearean-scale leading characters. With my novel "West of Here," I sought to undermine expectations by offering readers a multitude of characters—a nonlinear and cumulative take on historical fiction.
The novel is about the rush to create a future for Port Bonita, a small town in Washington state, and about how the past is forever reshaping the future. I sought to ground the book's whole architecture in the small, vividly realized moments of everyday people.
One of them is Ethan Thornburgh, who in 1890 views the town's future as an experiment in capitalism. Another is "Krig" Krigstadt, a descendant of early settlers, who more than a century later sees the town as a failed vision.
By presenting the story through dozens of tiny apertures, rather than one wide-angle lens, I wanted readers to see there was only one true protagonist in the novel: the town itself. All other characters were put in motion to enhance its character and history. Each of us, I wanted to show, echoes all of human history to some degree.
Readers who accept this literary invitation often feel rewarded by their work in piecing together disparate episodes. In writing, I've found, playing it safe and familiar is no way to energize anybody.
—Mr. Evison's novel "West of Here" went into paperback earlier this year. His new novel, "The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving," comes out Aug. 28.