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.

This post is the first of a new, occasional series of Itch of Writing Guides to the big issues in writing, setting out what’s involved to help you decide what’s best for your story.

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 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: