by Stephen Geez

In “Narrative Choice Part 1” I started with the basics in narrative choice—voice, tense, and identity. For Part 2 we’ll flex more of the kinds of choices we need to make for our narrators. We fiction-spinners focus a lot on knowing our characters, but too often we default to basic narrators. You can’t begin to know who’s telling your story until you decide what the narrator knows and who s/he believes is listening. The format you choose for the telling is where you bring it together. So what does your narrator(s) know?

Narrator Knowledge

Point-of-View Knowledge: The most popular and arguably most intimate, Point-of-View (POV) narrative chooses one character—or alternates more than one between scene breaks or chapters—then tells the story only with the sensory perspective, knowledge, vocabulary, interpretation, and personal history of that character, whether the character is narrating or the story is being told in…