Who’s telling the story?

When a writer sets about creating a novel, one of the first major decisions they have to make is who will be the narrator. Who is telling the story? The choice of narrator(s) is an important one because it sets the tone, or ‘feel’, of your story. The two main types of narrator are ‘first person ‘ and ‘third person’. There are others, but they’re not so commonly used.

In the first two parts of my Happy Deathday series, I employed the first person narrative, where you use ‘I’ (or ‘We’). Set in an underground breeding colony where people are monitored day and night, I wanted to create an atmosphere of fear and claustrophobia. The reader is inside the character’s head, seeing events from their point of view and experiencing their thoughts and feelings in a very personal and intimate way. It’s most successful if the reader likes the character and forms a bond with them. However it can be limiting for the writer, as it restricts the action to one character. You can widen the reader’s experience by employing more than one first person narrative and this is what I decided to do, having my two main characters, Sarah and Jonathan, tell the story in alternate chapters. If you’re very brave you can use several first person narrators, but this is fraught with difficulty, because you have to give them all a different ‘voice’, so that the reader can tell them apart and not get confused.

In Viral City (Happy Deathday: Part 3) the story takes place in the city of Resurrection, a place undergoing dramatic and far-reaching changes. I needed the reader to be able to ‘access all areas’ and, to do that, it was essential that I changed the narrative to third person. This achieves a widening out of the action but, because events are viewed from the outside, the reader is kept at a distance. It’s often more descriptive and gives an overview of what’s happening. The downside is that it is inevitably less intimate. I really didn’t want to lose this element that I had worked hard to create in the first two parts. So what’s to be done? Well, you can create the ‘feel’ of a first person narrative by having chapters, or sections, of your book told from the point of view of a single character. You concentrate on what’s happening to that person, their thoughts and feelings. If you then do the same thing for several characters then you’ve immediately made the novel more personal. I focused on five main characters and the story is told from their points of view.

Of course, you’re overall aim as a writer is to tell a good story. If you do, then it won’t matter what narratives you’ve used or not used. In the end, the reader’s experience is the only thing that counts.