How to speak your story

So you have a story to write. You've got your characters figured out, you know the direction of your plot, and worldbuilding is proceeding apace. Despite all this, you may be having some trouble getting started. The next big question is: how are you going to tell it? With what voice?

Narration is a vital element of storytelling that sets the tone of your piece instantly. Many of our favourite authors have become beloved through their memorable turns of phrase and the ways they've used narration to build up the story they're telling. Despite this, many writers just start writing without thinking too hard about how it's being narrated, which can lead to a fantastic story feeling lackluster or slightly off kilter.

How do we make sure that we're using narration to bolster our writing and not bring it down?

Picking the right narration

The first step, before you even start writing, is to figure out what type of narration you will use. There are a few different aspects to narrators for you to consider:

1) Perspective

I have already devoted a whole previous post to perspective, so I'll just stick to the highlights here and let you read up in more detail at your leisure. In short, you have:

• First person (I am doing things)
• Second person (you are doing things), which is only used rarely in fiction and won't be discussed in this post
• Third person (someone else is doing things), which might be:
  • omniscient (knows everything and everyone)
  • objective (stays distant from the characters)
  • limited (stays close to the viewpoint character)

Each of these points of view has a different effect on how the reader relates to the characters, and how close they feel towards them. If you want to put your readers in your characters' heads, first person or third person limited would be the most useful. If your focus is less on the characters and more on the events of the story, you may prefer another form of third person.

If you have more than one viewpoint character, you may want to split perspectives between different chapters or sections of the story. This is most frequently done just using third person limited centred on whichever character is the focus of the section, but I have seen plenty of writers using first person for one or all of the viewpoints, and there's nothing stopping you from experimenting with less common perspectives.

2) Characterisation

Once you know the perspective of your narrator(s), you need to determine who they are. Now, if you're already writing from the perspective of a character in the story (either in first or third person), this starts off being pretty straightforward. Most often, the characters providing narration are the protagonists, as they are the one most closely tied up in the plot. However, if you want to keep the protagonist at a bit of a remove while retaining a close narrative perspective, you could make the narrator a close observer of your protagonist—think about Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories or Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby.

Another consideration is the reliability of your narrator. Do they fully understand what's happening? Is their perception clouded by beliefs that are being challenged by the narrative? Do they, perhaps, have an underlying agenda that may motivate them to misrepresent or conceal some of the facts? The reliability of your narrator does not need to be infallible, and many narrators are, if nothing else, limited in their knowledge of their situation.

But, you may be thinking, I don't have a viewpoint character! I'm writing in third person omniscient! And to this I say that you can have a narrator with character without the narrator being a character. You may characterise your narrator as being an impartial third-person-objective observer of the action, or it may be cuttingly sarcastic and highly opinionated (as perfected by Douglas Adams). Depending on your medium, you may even make the narrator a character that interacts with the characters within the story, as in George of the Jungle.

A narrator sitting outside the story is likely to draw its characterisation heavily from the writer, but it is important to remember that writers and narrators are not the same thing. A lot of readers with lower levels of reading comprehension have a tendency to equate the views expressed by characters with the views of the author, which is wholly unhelpful and in many cases flat-out wrong (Lolita suffers a lot from this problem). We know better than that, though, and our ability to not just create our own writing but understand others' work will be better if we remember that narrators are not simply mouthpieces for their creators.

3) Style

A narrator's style dictates the tone of its story more than just about any other technique, so it's important to get it right. The style of narration flows directly from the character of the voice that is delivering it; if the narration is in first person, for example, its style will be the way that the viewpoint character thinks (and probably, but not necessarily, speaks). The further outside of the character's head you get, however, the more options you have.

If you're using third person limited, you could either keep your narrative voice fairly neutral or you could use a style similar to your viewpoint character, which is especially fun if you like free indirect speech (I'll explain what this is further down for those of you not familiar with this technique). Third person objective often defaults to being more neutral, as it's not tied to any specific characters and tends to be unobtrusive. For a more fluid approach, third person omniscient allows you to zoom in on individual characters one moment and zoom out for grand conceptual statements the next.

When you're considering the tone you want to set, genre is a big determiner of narrative style. A high fantasy may call for something grandiose, with a more formal way of speaking, whereas a grittier or grimdark fantasy will probably be rougher and more colloquial; literary fiction is often conceptual and musing, while a cosy murder mystery will be inviting and approachable. Some genres, like noir, have their own distinctive style of narration that is immediately recognisable.

Another consideration is where you want your narrator to sit on the continuum of sincerity and irony. I expect that most stories have quite sincere narration, by which I mean that the narrator is earnest in tone and focused solely on telling the story. An ironic narrator might be sarcastic or satirical in the way they relate events, or they might have their own running commentary to give alongside the plot. As a couple of examples, The Lord of the Rings is on the sincere end of the continuum, and the entire genre of noir is firmly on the ironic end.

I'll follow up this post in a couple of weeks with some examples of some of my favourite stand-out narration, but can you think of some texts that have inspired you in your narrative style, or that have had a big impact on you as a reader?

Making the best use of your narrator

Now that you've sorted out how you're going to narrate your story, you can get started! Hurrah! As you start weaving those plot threads, here are a few techniques that you can use to polish your narration for best effect:

• Free indirect speech: this technique is used in third person narration (usually third person limited, sometimes omniscient), and is where you present a character's thoughts or speech directly, as though it was first person, instead of tagging them with something like "she thought" or "they wondered".
  Example: "Jane slammed the door directly in Roddy's face. He was such a jerk."
• Dramatic irony: this technique is used to tell the reader information that is unknown to some or all of the characters. It is most usable in third person omniscient or when there are multiple viewpoint characters.
• Surprise: conversely, you may want to use unreliable narration to hide information known to the characters from the reader. This may increase tension, or it can misdirect the reader's expectations in anticipation of a later reveal.
• Breaking the fourth wall: this is a meta-narrative technique when the narrator engages directly with the reader outside of the confines of the story, calling attention to its fabricated nature. It's more common in first person or third person omniscient narration with a strong sense of character.
• Allusion: this technique is when you make a reference to another text, person, etc. in your own work. In the context of narration, this might include using a distinct style strongly associated with a specific person or type of writing.
• Slang: using colloquialisms to aid in worldbuilding and character development is a common technique in dialogue. If you're using a more character-centric form of narration, you can pull that slang into the prose as well to heighten the effect.