Establishing Narrative Voice in Your Writing

Narrative voice is what makes a novel. Decisions about narrative voice are some of the most crucial a writer can make. A strong narrative voice can keep us thinking about a character and their fate for weeks as we work our way through their story. The best examples of narrative voice feel like a real person speaking, like a living, breathing human being that could very well exist in the real world. We might want to be friends with this character, we might feel a huge amount of sympathy for them or we might regard them with a certain degree of distaste, but it matters less whether we like them and more whether we want to keep reading their story.

Contents of This Guide

The Elements of Narrative Voice

Narrative Voice: Your Options

First Person Point of View

First Person Narration in East Logie by Helen Taylor

Third Person Point of View

Special Cases: Unreliable Narrators

Special Cases: Second Person Narration

The Elements of Narrative Voice

So how do you go about creating such a memorable narrative voice in your writing? I think there are three crucial elements of narrative voice: point of view, narrative distance and the details. In my view, no impressive piece of writing has been produced by simply making decisions about these three elements and getting started. Ambitious writers will experiment with all three of these elements until they find just the right balance to achieve their aims. It’s a long process, but if you go into it armed with a lot of knowledge, it can go more smoothly. Here, I’ll talk you through the three elements of narrative voice as well as some fantastic examples of each. 

Point of View

Point of view refers to whether a story is told in first (ie, I, we, me) or third person (ie, she, him, they). Some narratives use second person (ie, you), but this is unusual and very experimental. The term point of view is often used interchangeably with narrative perspective, but perspective refers more to the breadth or limitedness of the narrator’s viewpoint.

In general, first person narratives focus on the character’s limited perspective and personal involvement in the events narrated while third person narrators can provide a broader view or multiple perspectives. Some third person narrators have knowledge that characters do not or they may be omniscient, holding all the secrets of the novel’s events. 

Narrative Distance

Narrative distance is a more complex concept. This is how close the reader is to the narrator’s thoughts. On one side of the scale, we have the distant third person narrator, usually found in the classics and especially in works of satire or comedy. Some examples are Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice or Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. On the other extreme is first person narration in stream of consciousness, a very contemporary, often experimental, perspective that forces us into the mind and body of the narrator whether we like it or not. James Joyce’s Ulysses or the much more recent Milkman by Anna Burns are two of the most famous examples. 

Establishing narrative distance is so important to pitching the narrative voice in an appropriate tone that I’ll give you plenty of examples below. Above all, this needs to be a conscious decision and it needs to be followed through with consistency throughout the entire narrative.

The Details

The details are also really crucial to establishing a successful narrative voice. I think the best, most audible, most memorable narrative voices have just the right amount of detail spread throughout. What I mean is the repeated expressions, the ticks, the gestures, the little things that make a character immediately recognizable, ideally within the first few lines of narration. A writer really needs to ask herself over and over, what is the unique way my character would express themselves here? This is what establishes consistency and makes a character believable.

Choosing the point of view that works best for a piece of writing is such a big decision and takes in so many different aspects of the piece that I’ve created this table of most of the different options you can choose from. Many contemporary novels use multiple narrators and these too will in all likelihood be selected from this list of options. 

Narrative Voice: Your Options

 Types of Narrative Voice

Narrative voice spans a scale with one side very distanced from the character and the other deeply embedded in a character’s thoughts. On the distant side, we are meant to laugh at a character or maybe feel distaste for their actions if the aim is satire. This distance is most commonly found in the classics, such as Dickens and Austen. On the other end of the scale, we are placed right into the character’s thoughts and sensations so we have no choice but to empathize with them whether we like it or not. Most contemporary novels sit on the closer end of the scale, evoking enough sympathy and physical experience to make us identify with the main characters.

First Person Point of View

In first person point of view, the narrator is a character in the story and whatever portion of the story they narrate will be told from their limited point of view. In terms of narrative distance, first person narrators can either be moderately close or close. Moderately close narrators can be found throughout the literary canon from Victorian novels to novels published yesterday. They are usually characters who are telling their story for a particular purpose and they are often conscious of doing so. Close first person narrators are a phenomenon of contemporary literature and are usually stream of consciousness narrators. 

Note that I’m not including any distant first person narrators here or in the table: this just doesn’t seem possible to me. But, there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to writing, so if you feel confident experimenting with this, by all means do it.

Examples of First Person Narrators

Moderately close first person narrators tell their stories in organized, logical order. We usually sympathize with the narrator as a character and we are usually aware of their physical sensations at important moments in the story.

My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite is one of the best examples of a moderately close first person narrator that I’ve read recently. It is narrated in a deadpan tone that seethes with irony. The narrator, Korede, is the unwilling aid in her sister Ayoola’s crimes and her voice is very recognizable thanks to her dry sense of humor. When Korede and her sister Ayoola clean up the most recent of Ayoola’s murders, for example, the chapter is set up as a riddle: ‘Two girls walk into a room. The room is in a flat. The flat is on the third floor. In the room is the dead body of an adult male. How do they get the body to the ground floor without being seen?’ Or there is the mention of Ayoola’s ‘small frame, long eyelashes and rosy, full lips,’ which is swiftly followed up with a parenthetical aside to the reader: ‘Her description, not mine.’ These are some of the details that I think really make a narrative voice recognizable and enjoyable to read.

The limited perspective of Korede’s narrative also functions as a really useful source of tension. After murdering her boyfriend, whose surname she cannot even recall, Ayoola says, ‘It’s not my fault, you know.’ Korede answers in her head and to us: ‘But I don’t know. I don’t know what she is referring to. Does she mean the inability to recall his surname? Or his death?’ Korede cannot understand her sister’s motivation or predict her next move. We only have Korede’s perspective on the events so we are never privy to Ayoola’s thoughts, feelings and plans. This allows for a constant atmosphere of worry as Korede waits to find out what her sister’s next action will be. 

In stream of consciousness narration, the reader is fully exposed to the characters’ thoughts and sensations. We are not reading an organized, deliberate narrative as in the previous examples. Instead, we are following the narrator’s inner monologue with all the twists and turns and loose associations we might expect from a wandering mind. These narratives are experimental and they are hard to do in a way that’s really readable. The writer needs to apply a certain micro attention to the details of the narrative that will make this inner monologue seem convincing. 

Milkman by Anna Burns is a very recent, masterful example of stream of consciousness. The unnamed narrator leads us through her life during the Troubles and all of the complexities of interpersonal politics under this threatening regime. What I find especially striking about this novel is that gender politics provides such a strong undertone to so many everyday interactions. When the titular murderer appears to the narrator during her run and requires that she slow down, she explains:

‘He implied it was because of pacing, that he was slowing the run because of pacing, but I knew pacing and for me, walking during running was not that. I could not say so, however, for I could not be fitter than this man, could not be more knowledgeable about my own regime than this man, because the conditioning of males and females here would never have allowed that. This was the “I’m male and your female” territory. This was what you could say if you were a girl to a boy, or a woman to a man, or a girl to a man, and what you were not—least not officially, least not in public, least not often—permitted to say.’

Notice how we move from the encounter taking place at that moment in time to an inner explanation of the encounter to an explanation of gender politics in their city. All of this is told firmly from the point of view of a woman who is very conscious of the potential consequences of not conforming to her gender role. The long sentences, the dashes and all the commas help to pace the reader as she makes her way along this complex mental journey. This portion of the narrative then moves back to the encounter, again to the explanation of the encounter and back to the gender politics of this city. Such seemingly haphazard verbal travels are characteristic of stream of consciousness narration. 

 Third Person Point of View

Third person narrators are not characters in the story. Third person narrators can be omniscient, requiring the furthest narrative distance from any of the characters. Distant, omniscient narrators were regularly used by nineteenth century novelists—famously so by Dickens and Austen—but these work best when writing comedy and satire. In contemporary fiction, it is much more common to find close third person narrators that follow a single character or occasionally transition to follow a small number of characters. The closer the narration comes to the thoughts and sensations of the character, the more limited the narrative perspective becomes. This means that there is a similar problem of writing limited perspectives as there is in first person narration.

Examples of Third Person Narrators

One of the most famous opening lines in the entire canon of English literature is a good place to start to illustrate the distant third person narrator: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ This line, the first of Pride and Prejudice, is dripping with the gentle irony Austen is famous for. She explains further:

‘However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.’

The man’s feelings are of no importance and he is considered a possession: the irony here lies in the lack of truth of this statement. All the mothers in a neighborhood might do everything they can to win the man for one of their daughters and might make strong assumptions that the man’s visit must end in a marriage, but the reality of the early nineteenth-century marriage market is that the daughters are the ones who must put aside feelings in order to make a good match. They will go from being possessions of their fathers to possessions of their husbands. The advantage of the distant narrator here is that she can make these observations about society without putting the words into the mouths of one of her characters. In addition, every character of the novel is a fair shot for this ironic treatment since the narrator does not fully sympathise with any one character, hence the large number of silly men and women in Austen’s novels. As entertaining as Austen’s writing is, this is not how contemporary novels are usually written.

Close third person narrators are far more common today. They can follow multiple characters or a single character throughout an entire narrative. Those that follow multiple characters might be better termed floating narrators as they often move from character to character, portraying the thoughts and sensations of each. The perspective settles with a character for a specific period of the narrative, usually a section or chapter or set of chapters. The first chapter of Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, for example, is told from Shuggie’s point of view. We are shown all of his thoughts and sensations, especially in a scene where he is bathing in water that ‘ran colder than the River Clyde.’ During this scene, he is interrupted by one of the other residents of his boarding house and we are led to feel his discomfort as the man’s ‘gaze slid down over his loose underwear to his bare legs, the unremarkable white hairless things.’ The narrator is so close to the character that the reader might be experiencing these things herself.

For the time the narrator is with this character, only that character’s perspective is experienced. This means that the narrator does not comment on the pasts or relationships with other characters unless it is in the thoughts or dialogue of the character of focus. In this sense the narrator is not omniscient. Taking Shuggie Bain as an example again, the first chapter stays entirely with Shuggie, but the second begins in his mother Agnes’s point of view—with her very physical action of digging her toes into the carpet. After a spell with Agnes, the perspective then moves to Shuggie’s father as a new section of the chapter starts, beginning with the unpleasant smells of a guest house then moving to his hand being clamped ominously over Angnes’s mouth. The shift from one character to another comes at the close of a previous section and at a crucial point where another narrative perspective adds to the build up of story and tension. 

Some floating narrators move from one character to another in the space of a paragraph and without any chapter or sections break. However, this is hard to do well and requires at least several sentences of transition to make the switch. If you decide to switch perspectives mid paragraph, there should be a good reason for doing so and it should work thematically in the piece of writing.

Special Cases: Unreliable Narrators

Truly unreliable narrators are hard to do well, but when they succeed, they can be spectacular. They can be from any point of view and any narrative distance, but there is a sense that the narrative is misleading, whether this is deliberate or not. 

Examples of Unreliable Narrators

One of the more famous examples can be found in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. [Note: spoilers coming.] We are given a third person narrative of a gripping romance between Cecelia and Robbie that is threatened by a cruel and deliberate deception by Bryony, Cecelia’s younger sister. We are then given an extended narrative of how Cecelia and Robbie are reconciled, though estranged from their families, during which Bryony asks them to forgive her. In the final section of the novel, we learn that the previous narrative has been a fiction written by Bryony, now an older woman facing a mentally debilitating illness. She invented everything following her deception and that in ‘reality’ Cecelia and Robbie both died in the war without ever having met again. This sudden, final twist to the story feels like a trick to a lot of readers. During my lecturing days, many of my students have been intensely frustrated by this novel. 

Some unreliable narrators are not deliberately dishonest but rather mentally incapacitated or too young to understand the events of the story. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to Jane Eyre, is an excellent example of this. The first section is told by a very young Antoinette, who is an unreliable narrator due to her innocence. This is followed by Rochester’s narrative of their honeymoon in Dominica, where her mental breakdown begins. Rochester’s lack of sensitivity makes it difficult to determine just how far Antoinette has gone in her breakdown, but he is much more in control of his portrayal of events than Antoinette ever is in the novel.

The third section of this novella, told from Antoinette’s unstable point of view, narrates the events leading up to the famous fire and suicide at Thornfield Hall. It provides Antoinette’s tormented perspective of her marriage to Rochester, her constant feeling of being persecuted and her desperation to escape by any means. Her mental breakdown means it is difficult to differentiate between imaginings and reality. Rhys’s juxtaposition of Antoinette and Rochester’s perspectives puts an entirely new spin on the classic novel, relying on us to have read it in order to see how different Antoinette’s story is from Jane’s and Rochester’s. I would argue that this is one of the most spectacular examples of an unreliable narrator in English literature.

Special Cases: Second Person Narration

Using second person point of view (ie, you) is very experimental and there should be good reason to use it. There aren’t many examples of novels that do this well and when it is done, second person usually only comes into a section or a small portion of the total text. One example that I find really impressive can be found in Human Acts by Han Kang. The first chapter is narrated in the second person as the narrator, a young boy called Dong-Ho, searches for his friend who is shot in the Gwangju uprising in South Korea in 1980. The continual address of you is disorienting and it eventually becomes clear that it is a result of the trauma the boy experiences through witnessing the attacks on the protesters. The uncertainty of who ‘you’ is—Dong-Ho, Dong-Ho’s friend, the reader or some universal witness—is almost dizzying.