Storytelling: Narrative Mode and Point of View

This writing craft series will focus on choosing the right Narrative Mode and Point of View.

Telling the right story means telling it from the best POV and with the best narrative modes.

What is Narrative Mode?

Narrative Mode and Narration are easy to confuse.

Narration is the use of commentary to convey a story to an audience.

Narrative Modes in fiction are the methods used to tell a story. Methods that are commonly used include narrative point of view, narrative tense, and narrative voice. This series will delve into each mode, beginning with the one that writers and readers or most familiar with, Point of View.

Narrative Point of View

Narrative POV links the narrator to the story. It reveals who is telling the story and what their relationship is to the story events and characters.

The narrator is often a character, but can also be an unknown observer who conveys thoughts or opinion, or a completely unknown observer who only relates the events without additional commentary.

Writing from the point of view of a character is very common in modern popular fiction, but telling a story from an observer’s perspective is still used, though it is seen more often in literary fiction. It is not often a reader comes across a contemporary book written from the perspective of an observer who offers no commentary.

Point of View

When we talk about point of view, what we’re really discussing is how and by whom the story is being told. Narrative point of view is the perspective through which a story is communicated to the reader, and it can great affect how a story is told and how a reader connects with the story and its players.

There are multiple point of views through which to tell a story, including first person (protagonist or observer), second person (the reader is the character and is addressed directly), and third person (omniscient, objective, limited, and deep).

Each type will have a different impact on the story, including how close a reader can get to the characters, what limitations a particular POV places on storytelling, and what the reader can know through the character.

In the next several posts, I’ll break down each of these point of views and their advantages and disadvantages.