Professor Mitchell

I was very fond of David Mitchell's 2004 novel, Cloud Atlas, with its six short novels of various genres cut into one another, and I'm very eager for the new one, Black Swan Green, which sounds relatively pedestrian but nothing is so straightforward in his books. The added benefit to the release of a new David Mitchell novel are the David Mitchell interviews that eventually pop up everywhere. They all tend to contain these wonderful nuggets that almost serve as a miniature, momentary writing classes. For example, this bit from an interview in The Scotsman:

"I feel comfortable operating within stringent restrictions in all the books," he says - "a list of things I can and cannot do."

I ask him to give me an example and he picks up Black Swan Green, which is told entirely in Jason's voice. "So, if you write a book in the first person, you can't give any information to the reader that the protagonist doesn't know - unless you smuggle it either through the narrator's stupidity, or, in the case of Jason, this device of him not knowing what he knows."