Building the strongest narrator for your novel
What’s good, y’all? Happy Black Poetry Day. Today, I figured I would talk about something that some of us forget about when writing. I want to talk about the narrator.
This is all my opinion, of course, so take that for whatever, but I think the narrator is more important that a lot of us think. The narrator is a character, should be a character. This only aimed, obviously, at mostly non-first person narrators, but some of it still applies.
I’ve come to use four questions when writing a narrator, and things I look for in what I’m reading.
Who is this narrator?
What do they want?
Are they a fully developed character?
Who are they talking to?
First, I don’t mean that I need to know that the narrator is a character in the story. I mean that I need to know a little about who this narrator is as an entity. It needs to have a little personality, whatever personality matches the tone. The voice it has is telling the whole story, so I want to know it feels it has stakes in the outcome and not that it’s some floating thing recapping a story.
Second, I’d like to know why this narrator is telling this? It’s not necessarily what they want, but they’re telling us the story for a reason, and I’d like to be able to infer a sense of that from it’s personality, voice and tone.
Third, I feel like a narrator needs to a be a fully developed character, whether any of it is shown or not. The narrator should make us feel who they are through their telling and their little tics.
Finally, who are they telling this story to, or for? A narrator has to be talking to someone, for the most part. Unless you’re going experimental, the narrator is talking to someone or something. Who or what is it? And I don’t want it to be a disembodied voice speaking to anyone who will listen. I mean, unless you’re going somewhere with that, and then I’m all in.
I don’t necessarily want any of the above to be overt, just kind of baked into to who the narrator is as a whole. I think that gives your narrator a depth that can really drive a story, something that can hold a reader and a give a writer a little more space to play.
That’s it for me tonight. See y’all next time!