I guess the thing I always had to be aware of was what had happened in a previous chapter before writing the next one — making sure I knew how it had to logically affect the character who would “tell” the next chapter. Sort of like the concept of continuity in a film. There I am again, realizing the cinematic touches that do likely apply to my work sometimes.

The novel I just recently completed is written in third person through the viewpoint of a main character, and it, too, was fun to write because I like the story and the main character. Maybe a future novel will take me back to multiple narrators. It all depends, really, on how you come to realize your story can best be told.

As for approach, at the end of each chapter I first determined which character logically came next on to the novel’s stage and then I decided how they would view the events that had just happened in the previous chapter. How I made those decisions, of course, is not so easy to articulate. As I created and established each of the four main characters, I learned who they were and how they would react in certain situations. I got to know them and that helped, along with my subconscious, to help guide them through scenes and to determine their behavior and dialogue. I’m a believer, like Hemingway, in the wise counsel of the subconscious, and I see it, like he did, as a spring that bubbles up and supplies ideas and directions.

I worked with Stu Dybek in the MFA program at Western Michigan and I recall he said my work sometimes has a cinematic touch. I think that’s true enough. When I approach a scene I do tend to think in terms of what a camera would see and how things are positioned. I try to “see” the scene as I do it. I wrote the screenplay version of one of my other novels (Not Famous Anymore) just before I wrote Well Deserved. Maybe that was an influence somehow. When you write a novel you really are something like a film director, if that makes sense. I see Well Deserved as a film, too, and have been thinking for some time about writing a screenplay version.