Narrators: An Itch of Writing Guide

And why choosing your narrative setup is so much more than "first person or third person?"

It’s one of the basic decisions you have to make before you can start on a first draft: through what lens will this story be told? I talk about this as your ‘narrative setup’, because your decision has many more implications for your storytelling than just ‘first or third?’ But that also means your choice has many more possibilities, and they connect with decisions about point-of-view, tense and structure.

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Your story always has a narrator

It’s impossible to conceive of a narrative without there being some kind of narrating consciousness behind the arrangement of the words: a storytelling entity by no means the same thing as the human whose name is on the title page.

So the first big decision is whether that consciousness is embodied as a character in the story - an internal narrator - or is outside the story: an external narrator. Plus - are you going to play ‘you’, ‘we’ or other games with them?

Photo by Sivani Bandaru on Unsplash

1) Internal Narrators

A narrator inside the story says things like ‘I run down the road and jump on a bus’, or ‘I didn’t know that Jasmine had got married until Khalid told me’ - so the shorthand for this setup is ‘first person narrator’.

But where they are standing in relation to the main events of the story is still up for discussion, and there are pros and cons to each possibility:

• A MAIN CHARACTER AS NARRATOR, telling their own story.

  • The reader is as closely involved as possible in the experience and fate of the MC, which is probably the whole point of your writing it.

  • If you’re a beginner, or not confident handling point-of-view, it’s the easiest setup to keep on track with:

    • Just ask yourself regularly, ‘Can my MC know/think/feel/see/smell/touch this? And, being who they are, do they do that?’ If not, don’t write it.

  • The story will be told in their words and built out of their subjective experience of the events: the reader’s default is to go along with this, but of course this kind of narrator may be inadequate, or even unreliable.

• A SECONDARY OR PERIPHERAL CHARACTER AS NARRATOR telling a story centred on a main character who is someone else (think The Great Gatsby).

  • The reader has a perspective on the main character which is refracted through the secondary-character-narator’s different, equally subjective consciousness - which is, after all, how we experience everyone in real life except ourselves.

  • The narrator’s life, fate or sense of self needs to be bound up with the MC’s - otherwise the extra work and involvement you’re asking of the reader isn’t rewarded with that more exciting depth of perspective.

  • It’s a classic way of dealing with real (historical?) people as characters, if you feel inadequate or squeamish about writing as if we can know what was going on inside any other real person’s consciousness.

Either way, you’ll need to think about these:

• PLOT- AND STORY-BUILDING: locking everything to a single, internal narrator can make these either easier or more difficult, because the decisions about what to put in are made for you by that basic point-of-view question.

  • If you need the reader to know/think/feel/see/smell/touch people, things or events, but the narrator wouldn’t, then you have to figure out how to transmit these things.

  • But you’d be surprised how much the reader can pick up on non-viewpoint characters’ thoughts and feelings, given the right actions and dialogue (we do this watching plays and movies, after all!)

  • Characters telling each other things helps, but readers are quick to pick up when a letter or a conversation has no convincing motivation within the plot for happening, but only the writer’s need for the reader to know something.

• PAST OR PRESENT TENSE, with an internal narrator, makes a huge difference. (More about this here.)

  • If you’re in past tense, your narrator has the storyteller’s freedom to tell their story as they choose.

    • You can exploit the full possibilities of psychic distance, because there is separation (in time) between this character as a narrator, and as an act-or in the story.

    • Their storyteller’s freedom can include describing, contextualising, colouring, explaining or making assumptions about what was going on in other characters’ lives and heads.

    • The storyteller is also free to be ignorant, obtuse or imperceptive about things (‘inadequate’), or even to lie (‘unreliable’).

    • You may choose to restrict that freedom by only including things which it’s likely that your narrator could have come to know, think or understand in the gap of time between the events ‘then’ and them telling the story ‘now’.

    • If your narrator is narrating events they were not present at, thinking of your narrator being external for those sections (see below) can be helpful.

  • If you’re in present tense, it’s trickier and more limiting: to maintain the illusion that the story is being told in the ‘now’ of immediate events, you are restricted to what your narrator knows/experiences in that moment.

    • You can’t exploit the full possibilities of psychic distance, because there is no separation in time between this character as a narrator, and as an actor in the story.

    • If you need to convey context - e.g. the character’s past or wider knowledge, the current setting or world events, their hopes for the future - you will need to pause the now-now-now of action before it’s convincing that they would be thinking about this stuff.

    • I think of this as a Say As We Go narrator - or in my grumpier moments as ‘goldfish tense’.

    • If the narrator is deluded or dishonest, it’s hard to get the reader to figure that out

• NARRATIVE SUBJECTIVITY: If the narrative encourages the reader to pick up on how subjective this lens is, we will experience the story with a double awareness: involved with the MC’s (or the narrator’s) subjective experience but aware it’s not the whole story.

  • Encouraging the reader to develop that double awareness is usually about making the voice more strongly flavoured and the subjectivity clearer.

  • The narrator’s subjectivity becomes part of the characterisation: we get to know this character not only by how they act, but by how they experience the events and people of the story.

  • Our sense of reading through and between the lines towards the wider, more objective picture engages us more strongly, binding us more closely to the story and what might happen as the subjective character and the wider context interact or clash.

2) External Narrators

Narrators ouside the story say things like ‘She runs down the road and jumps on a bus’, or ‘Ismail didn’t know that Jasmine had got married until Khalid told him’ - so the shorthand for this setup is ‘third person narrator’. If they ever say ‘I’, it’s as a storyteller, addressing the reader directly.

But where your narrator is ‘standing’, in relation to the main events of the story, is still up for discussion, and there are pros and cons to each possibility:

a) The external narrator who never admits the reader to any character’s consciousness or viewpoint

• This ‘third person objective’ is rather a dry wine: John Gardner describes it as having a ‘savage sparsity’ best suited to short fiction. (Think Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants)

• As with a script, the narrative is never coloured by any character’s subjective experience of what’s happening: only dialogue, action and setting are evoked.

• It’s entirely up to the reader to infer character, motivation, psychology and emotion.

• This ‘desirable difficulty’ for the reader can end up being very powerful indeed.

b) The external narrator who is locked to specific characters’ experience.

• This ‘third person subjective’ can be very similar to having an internal narrator (think Wolf Hall), just with third-person pronouns. The reader has little sense of the narrator as a separate entity, but only as a conduit for each viewpoint character’s/’ point-of-view and experience.

• Often described as ‘close third’, and the close is crucial: you’ll be telling much of your story in free indirect style.

• Exploiting the subjectivity of voice and point-of-view for each viewpoint character hugely enriches the characterisation, and the pleasures of double-awareness for the reader: as with internal narrators, we read between the lines for other ways to understand what’s happening.

• These limitations can create a sense of ‘pettiness and unseemly familiarity’, as John Gardner puts it, compared what’s available through a wider, more contextual and (sometimes) objective narrator which isn’t always locked to one or other point-of-view.

• Past vs present tense make less difference because the narrator is not a character, and even in present tense isn’t tied to any character’s ‘now’, but can step slightly aside to convey context without a jolt.

• Point-of-view slips may not be so easy to spot when your draft wasn’t tied to an ‘I’. Mentally flip the pronouns into first person to check.

• NARRATIVE LOCKED TO A SINGLE CHARACTER

  • The restrictions can be helpful, or a hindrance, for plotting.

  • The reader is closely involved in the experience and fate of the MC; if the MC is not the viewpoint character, we’re closely involved with both.

• NARRATIVE LOCKED TO TWO OR MORE CHARACTERS, turn by turn

  • Allows for more story-strands, subplots and settings. This larger canvas makes story- and plot-building

    • easier: less struggle to convey things the viewpoint character doesn’t know

    • trickier, when you need to withold something from the reader without them realising

  • Different viewpoint sections can have very different voices, thanks to free indirect style, which

    • strengthens characterisation

    • helps to keep the reader anchored intuitively with the current viewpoint character, and not get confused

  • It’s up to you when, why and how you move from one point-of-view to the next. More on moving point-of-view and avoiding the dreaded ‘head-hopping’ here.

c) The external, ‘knowedgeable’ narrator who knows more than any single character does.

• This kind of narrator goes by many names:

  • The classic creative writing terms, which I think are often unhelpful: omniscient (though omniscient-ish would be more accurate); limited omniscient (a contradiction in terms trying to express that they’re always locked to one or other viewpoint character); sometimes authorial (but the author might have written a narrator who doesn’t align with themselves at all)

  • A S Byatt prefers ‘knowledgeable’ narrator: they know a lot, but the writer chooses what they know, and which heads they go inside and convey to us.

  • John Gardner talks about the ‘essayist’ narrator, who is ‘virtually a character’ in the story: opinionate, subjective or even unreliable. A variation is the ‘teller of tales’, as in Angela Carter or Isaak Dinesen: the spinner of yarns conveying their own (perhaps magical) truth.

  • Ursula le Guin talks about ‘limited’, ‘involved’ and ‘detached’ narrators, which covers most of the possibilities of both internal and external.

• Makes plotting easier: the narrator can know anything, and convey whatever context or events that you want the reader to know.

• Can go deeper into characters than they can themselves: an external narrator can evoke or explain for the reader what characters don’t know they are thinking and feeling.

• Psychic distance is the tool you need for handling the moves to and fro between narrator’s-eye-view, and your viewpoint characters’. Don’t go home without it.

• When you can tell anything, any way, it can be a bit boggling:

  • How do you choose viewpoint characters? More here.

  • When you need to hide things from the reader, how do you make sure they don’t notice you withholding?

3) ‘You’, ‘we’ and other games

• ‘We’ - first person plural: a story told (it’s implied) by several people, without specifying who did what when. (Think The Virgin Suicides and others explored here)

  • Jenn Ashworth blogged on This Itch of Writing about her journey towards ‘we’ for her novel Fell, and I can do no better than suggest you read that post.

• ‘You’ - second person: there are several kinds of narrative which use it:

  • Mentally addressing a someone as part of ‘interior monologue’: I assume you go downstairs first thing in the morning, probably earlier these days now that I'm not there to urge you to stay in bed. That someone may not even be present in the story.

  • Addressing an actual (if implied) character in the scene: the peerless example of this Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, but if I say any more it would spoil the book for you. Just read it.

  • Addressing the reader: Anne left on Monday. On Tuesday evening John changed the locks. Well, what would you have done? Here the narrator is making their act of storytelling explicit as an ‘essayist’ or ‘tale-teller’ narrator might, implying that you, the reader, is sitting there listening.

  • Generic ‘you’: the casual, colloquial way of saying ‘one’, always somewhat implying ‘I’. You go downstairs in the morning and she isn’t there; you go to feed the dog and he's gone; you go back to bed, and it's empty, because she's left. Much (but, significantly, not all) of Joseph O’Connor’s wonderful Ghost Light is written like this.

• Metafiction and other games, where a novel makes reference to other fiction, and/or to its own nature as a constructed thing, fiction being ‘the lie through which we tell the truth’, as Camus put it. It’s a game as old as the novel itself, Tristram Shandy being a classic example; Wikipedia has a list.

  • Narrators have a role in some but not all such games: reminding us that they are narrating - truthfully or lyingly - and acknowledging their very fictiveness.

  • The narrator can also draw attention to the novel as a constructed thing (I did so myself in a gentle way, in A Secret Alchemy). If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman are two classics.

  • Metafiction by definition punctures John Gardner’s ‘fictive dream’, which most fiction is trying create in the reader. A famous example is Jane Austen’s ‘tell-tale compression of the pages’, at the end of Northanger Abbey. So there will always be readers who don’t get it, or don’t get on with it.

  • But we still need the narrator to create the ‘fictive dream’ - we need the writer to learn and work with the craft of telling stories so the reader can make the trust-fall of reading ‘as if it really happened’ - so when it’s broken we feel the shock or the joke.

  • The narrator has a role in making it work: the more secure readers feels in the storyteller’s hands, the more we’ll go with them as we do with a good theatre production ‘breaking the third wall’: we willingly enter the fictional dream they build and just as willingly laugh as they puncture it.