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7 Steps for Choosing Your Story's Narrator
Chapter 3 “Characters” – Section 8 “The Narrator”
With Links to Supplementary Material
All stories are told by a character in your story—whether you know it or not. Now, it could be that your story is told through the eyes of some sort of god or spirit or unknown invisible force, but there is some sort of being that must be present in order to know and tell of the events that transpired. Today, I'm going to talk about choosing the right narrator for your story, writing style, and genre. Please note that these are not the standard distinctions that you will learn in school, but a far more complex and elemental series of distinctions that I have discerned as a student of writing.
Step 1: Choose what Point of View you wish to write in
There are three key Points of View: first-person, second-person, and third-person.
-First-person narration (where the narrator is talking from their own perspective) has the benefit of being more personal, but is more technically difficult to pull off without distracting the reader from the story.
-Second-person (where the Narrator talks directly to the audience) is rarely used except in Choose Your Own Adventure Stories and stories for Young Adults, where you wish to directly address and explain things to your readers. Second-person also has the added difficulty of its requirement to be blended into first-person narration (when not in a CYOA).
-Third-person narration (the most common form, where the narrator tells the story through the eyes of the characters) is the least finicky and most direct form of Narration. It has the benefit of being the form that is least distracting to the audience, but requires efforts to make it seem organic and personal, instead of dry and cold.
Step 2: Choose the level of knowledge of your Narrator.
There are also three levels of knowledge: limited, omniscient-limited, and totally omniscient.
-A limited Narrator knows only what is going on in their own head, and what they see, feel, or otherwise perceive. This form of narration is wonderful for extremely focused story-telling (think of it like a singular camera recording scenes in one comprehensive shot) but is extremely limited and generally only used in combination with first-person narration.
-Omniscient-limited narration is sort of the standard, where the narrator focuses on telling the story through the eyes of a single character, and knows everything about them. This is effective, again, in tightening your perspective—especially when you only have one protagonist. However, like limited, you will have to make great efforts not to tell a very one-sided story.
-Omniscient Narration is when the Narrator is a sort of god or spirit that knows all. This form is excellent for telling a balanced story, or telling a story through the eyes of multiple protagonists (or even through the antagonist). However, it is extremely difficult, in this form, to not over-explain the story, make it impersonal, make it boring, and to lose focus on the protagonist.
Step 3: Decide whether your Narrator is a Head-hopper.
If your Narrator is Omniscient, it does not mean that you have to tell the story from the perspective of a god who can see and know everything at once. In fact, to do this is extremely distracting, tedious, and impersonal. Instead, what you can do is to create a Head-hopper Narrator. This means that between chapters (or multiple times within chapters along with some sort of divider) your Narrator can play the role of omniscient-limited with as many characters as you like. This creates great freedom for storytelling, without sacrificing a very personal story-telling experience.
Step 4: Choose what point in time that your Narrator is writing in.
There are only two tenses that are generally used in storytelling in this day and age: past tense and present tense.
-Past-tense is by far the most popular, as well as the easier, form in which to write a story. This is when the Narrator is telling about something that has already happened. Unless you have a very specific purpose for doing otherwise, this is the tense you should default to.
-Present-tense is certainly becoming popular. This is when the Narrator tells the audience about what is happening in the story as it happens. It has the potential to increase suspense within a story, as well as to make it seem more real. However, it is extremely difficult to pull off, without making scenes seem long, boring, and with very poor pacing. Perhaps this is because it is such a new and unexplored realm in writing, and one that is still relatively foreign to readers.
Step 5: Choose whether you want to use a present or non-present narrator.
The level of presence in your Narrator ranges from Extreme Presence, to Presence, and to Non-Presence. Each can carry their own level of realism and style, or alternatively distract from the story. It's just a matter of choosing a style that goes well with your characters and the sort of story you are creating.
-Extreme Presence is generally (though not exclusively) the form used when telling a story from the first-person Point-of-View of the protagonist. This means that the Narrator not only makes themselves very noticeable in the story, but can actually change and affect the outcome of it. I've also seen this style done humorously in a non-protagonist in movies such as Winnie the Pooh and George of the Jungle—producing a very funny effect.
-Presence is when the Narrator either makes themselves known or are a minor part of the story, but do not cause much change. This can also be done for the sake of humor, or for making the story seem more real by telling it in a sort of diary form—where the narrator tells what they think about what is going on—such as in “Moby-Dick” or “Dracula.”
-Non-presence is when the Narrator is so absent that it seems like there is no Narrator—that the author is just telling the story directly. This creates a more honest and less biased account of a story, but can suffer from being less personal. It is most often used in sci-fi, in order for the author to objectively explain the story's and world's technical details, free from their characters' ignorance and unrealistic exposition.
Step 6: Decide how trustworthy your Narrator is.
If a Narrator is Present (or extremely Present) or is writing from a first-person perspective, they will be flawed characters who tell the story through their own biases. It is possible to take this bias to the extreme and allow your Narrator to be dishonest with your readers. However, this is one of the most difficult skills to master, as you must give some real and noticeable (yet not painfully obvious) indicators of the Narrators dishonesty, if you do not want your readers to feel cheated by you—the author. Also note that this should NEVER be done in children's literature, and rarely in that of young-adults, as the style requires a very mature level of sardonic appreciation to actually serve your story.
Step 7: Choose how many Narrators you have.
I have seen a few instances where writers have chosen to tell the story through two or more Narrators of completely different forms (the last one I read had a third-person Narrator as well as a first-person Narrator taking turns telling the story, based on whether the protagonist was featured in that chapter). This can give more freedom to your story, but note that it is difficult for your readers to stay immersed in the story, when you keep forcing them to change the lenses through which they see the story. It would be like playing a video-game that was a first-person shooter on some levels, and platformer on others—or a movie that changed whether it was in color or black-and-white between each scene.
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