Before you write the first sentence, there’s a decision that colors everything: who’s saying it.
“At 8:14 I walked into the square and the case was empty.” “At 8:14, Alex walked into the square and found the case empty.” “That morning, while half the town slept off the dance, nobody noticed the glass case. Nobody but the baker, who had his reasons for keeping quiet.”
Same scene. Three different books.
First person: from the inside
“I.” The reader lives inside the character’s head, with their quirks, their blind spots and their bad jokes. You get a lot of closeness and a voice with personality. In exchange, you can only tell what the narrator knows, sees or imagines. If they weren’t in the room, they can’t tell it.
That sounds like a limit, but it’s a great tool for mysteries: the reader finds the clues at the same time as the character. And gets them wrong, right alongside them.
Hint: first person asks for a clear voice. If your narrator sounds like the manual for a washing machine, try third.
Close third: over the shoulder
“She,” “he,” “they” or the name, but told through one character’s eyes at a time. It’s almost as intimate as first person and a bit more flexible: you can pull the camera back a little, describe the character from outside or switch viewpoints between scenes.
It’s one of the most common choices in fiction today, and for good reason: it’s forgiving.
Hint: within a single scene, stay in one head. Jumping from Mara’s thoughts to Alex’s in the same paragraph is dizzier than three rides on the festival carousel.
The external narrator: the one who knows everything
A voice that isn’t any of the characters. It can step into every head, know what happened three hundred years ago and hint at what’s coming (“She didn’t know it yet, but that would be her last night alone”). There’s something fireside about it.
You gain range: a whole town, lots of threads, a bit of irony. You lose some intimacy, and it takes a steady hand so the camera doesn’t seem to lurch around. There’s also a quieter version, third person without a fixed point of view, which watches from outside and says little about what anyone is thinking.
One narrator or several?
With one, the story is more focused and secrets keep themselves. With several, the reader knows things the characters don’t, and that creates a different kind of tension.
Wanted: One Dragon, Sunday Plot’s sample novel, has two. Mara tells most of it: the mystery is hers, and we find most of the clues right alongside her. But a handful of scenes belong to Alex. He’s the one who finds the case empty at 8:14, who hears the whole bar decide it was “the one from Barcelona,” and who takes the signed arrest warrant from Olivia and slips it into his pocket without a word.
That changes a lot. The reader knows about the warrant from chapter 9; Mara doesn’t find out until chapter 10. Every time she smiles at him in between, the reader winces. It’s a classic romance move: let us inside both heads, then make us suffer over what one isn’t telling the other. With Mara alone, it would be a different book: more surprise, less dread. Neither is better. It depends on what you want the reader to feel.
If you want to see it in action, open the sample novel from My novels (“Explore a sample novel”). In the Outline, every scene shows who’s telling it.
If you’re thinking of adding a narrator, ask three questions:
- Do they know something nobody else can tell?
- Do they have something to lose? A narrator who only watches is a camera, not a character.
- Do they sound different? If you cover the name at the top of the chapter, you should still be able to tell who’s talking.
And a friendly warning: every new narrator is one more story to keep track of. Two is already work. Five, and you’ll want a very tidy outline.
For today
Write the same sentence from your novel two ways: in first person and in close third. Read them out loud. One of them will sound like your book.
In Sunday Plot, you decide this under “Who tells the story?”, when you create the novel or later in its Settings. With one narrator, you pick the character once and every scene inherits them; change your mind and the scenes change with you. With several narrators, each scene says who tells it in its “Narrator” field. With an external narrator, there’s no one to pick. And any scene can break the rule, like an omniscient prologue in a first-person novel. If someone narrates just one scene in the whole book, Checks asks whether that’s on purpose. Sometimes it is. Then the answer is “yes,” and you move on.