Secrets of Writing: Narration

When you have one central character telling a story, it’s common to write it from first person, with the central character playing the narrator. The central character is not always the hero in these stories. Sometimes they are only telling the story of the hero, as they see it.

The rules of exposition apply equally to narration, if not moreso. Narration tells the audience what’s happening in the story, but it needs to serve a dramatic function as well as an informational one. You don’t want the narrating character to be as boring as a math professor. Always remember you are trying to entertain the audience. That has to be foremost in your mind at all times.

But there’s a hitch to doing narration. You don’t want it to draw too much attention to itself. The narration serves to lead us into the key scenes of the story. That’s what its job is. It also opens up the story at the beginning and closes it at the end. But the true story is told through the scenes that are played out. All the narration does is give us context.

Many a writer has made the mistake of having the narration tell us something rather banal, as if it was important. Nothing should be said that isn’t illuminating or interesting. You also don’t want to tells us things point blank. “This is my brother, Joe. He’s the smart one in the family.”

Narration should be told with style. It needs to reflect the personality of the narrator. It needs to possess an interesting “voice”. Every character has their own voice. Their own way of talking. It reflects their background, ideology, world view and attitude. When you choose a character to narrate a story, they should be entertaining, without being distracting. The point of narration is to provide an over view of the story, information we need to understand the context of things. But since every story presents a point of view, when you use a narrator, keep in mind that the narrator is looking at it from a certain perspective. If you use an impersonal, god-like narrator, who isn’t in the story, then it can just be straight information. In which case it should be concise.

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