How Your Choice of Narrative Voice Affects Your Story

Published February 3, 2026

By Sam Knight

The “narrative voice” is the way the story is presented. There are many ways to present a story. Sometimes a story, or part of a story, is presented as a series of letters, newspaper articles, diaries, clips of audio recordings, or some other similar presentation of data. This is called an epistolary narrative. Examples would be Dracula, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and Carrie.

Usually, though, the narrative voice is presented from a specific point of view. This POV may or may not be that of a character involved in the story. The type of voice an author chooses to use to tell that point of view greatly affects nearly everything else about the story. It sets the tone, the mood, the seriousness and earnestness of the story, as well as things like “can the narrator be trusted to tell me the truth?” The Unreliable Narrator cannot be trusted to tell the truth and (probably) needs to be a character in the story to some extent, while a 3rd person objective POV would nearly always be expected to accurately relate the events of the story. The narrative voice the author chooses sets the stylistic precedent for the rest of the story.

This includes how that narrative voice “speaks.”

Imagine the movie A Christmas Story. Can you hear Jean Shepherd’s voice (the narrator’s voice) in your head as he says, “You’ll shoot your eye out!” It fits that story very well, doesn’t it?

Now imagine everything else about the movie is the same, but Jean Shepherd’s voice has been replaced by comedian Gilbert Gottfried’s. (He did the voice of Iago in Disney’s Aladdin, and the voice of the Aflac duck for a while.)

Does that change the tone of the story for you?

Remember that Robin Hood movie, where Kevin Costner kind of, sort of started out with an English accent but gave up ten minutes in and switched to American? How well does that work in a story where the narrative voice is 90% of the voice the reader “hears?”

If you start your narrative out as though it is being told by an 18th-century Londoner, and later it fades into a 20th-century surfer dude, it ruins the effect of the narrative voice. (Unless, of course, that was exactly what you were going for!)

Those examples tend toward the idea of the narrator being a character. But that is not always the case. Going back to the idea of 3rd person POV stories, what kind of narrative voice do you expect, as a reader?

(I’ll take a guess and answer for you!) You expect words on the page that describe the characters, their thoughts and dialogue, settings, actions, and anything else that needs to be told. You might think, as there is no one actually telling the story, that the narrative voice is kind of a blank, bland thing. But it is not. It is the glue that holds everything together and makes it look the way the author wants it to.

Let’s imagine we are watching a play. Now imagine a background set, built up for the actors to perform in and around. How could those backgrounds have been created?

They could be actual buildings, being used on a street corner, outside, in a city block, like a movie set. This could make the play very realistic.

Or they could be artistic, stylized drawings of the buildings. Or poorly done (but with lots of heart!) finger paintings created by children. How would those settings affect your opinion of the play you are watching? Not quite so realistic anymore, but nice, maybe? Sweet?

What if the sets were cardboard boxes, torn off in approximate shapes of buildings, and then held together with duct tape? Or what if they were expensive sheets of brass and copper made to look like they were cardboard boxes, torn off in approximate shapes of buildings, and then held together with duct tape?

Did those images change the play you were imagining happening around the set? Of course they did. And we never said anything about what the play was at all.

The background set has almost nothing to do with a play, and yet, it has everything to do with how we interpret it.

The narrative voice is much the same way.

The wind blew her hair. She pushed the horse forward, and she was gone.

The gentle breeze teased her tresses. She nudged her steed forward, and the woman faded away.

The air swirled, twisting and knotting her hair. She kicked the animal to make it move, and she vanished.

Those all say the same thing, but they all say it in different ways. As an author, choosing which of those ways (or any of a million other ways) to express the narrative voice sets a tone for the story. Just by choosing the correct words or descriptions, an author can make a fantasy story sound different than a science fiction story, or a western, or a murder mystery.

And it’s all done with an invisible character called the narrative voice.

Once the narrative voice is established, writers have to be careful not to break away from it. Typically, a reader wouldn’t expect, halfway through the story, for the previously invisible narration to suddenly act like one of the characters by using a description like:

It was a particularly beautiful sunset. One I quite enjoyed.

If that sentence ends up in the story, the narrator has somehow become an actual character. If that character hasn’t been explained to the reader, its sudden appearance doesn’t make any sense and ruins the flow and continuity of the story.

The sunset over the village was a sight to behold.

vs.

One would find the sunset over the village a sight to behold.

Note the narrative voice in the second example. The voice has a characteristic of dialogue. When One talks about what One does or does not like, then One is usually talking about Oneself. Which means that the narrator is a person telling the story.

If that is the way you want to narrate your story, that’s fine. But don’t use that sentence halfway through the story that wasn’t started that way. Just as with the previous example, suddenly using this style of narration in the middle of a story seems to turn the narrator into a character that the reader was not previously aware of. And it is confusing.

Unless you are doing something tricky and really think you can pull it off, messing with the narrative voice after it has been established is bad juju.

Point of view and vocabulary usage aren’t the only things that comprise the narrative voice. The tense used can affect the story just as much, not only in whether the whole story took place in the past, but also in the way the story feels when you read it.

There are many choices to make in the narrative voice when you are establishing it in a story, and each of them will affect the story as a whole. Be deliberate in your choices and use them in a consistent manner that benefits your story rather than detracts from it.

This is an abridged excerpt from Blood from Your Own Pen: Revised and Updated 2nd Edition, by Sam Knight. Find the book on his website: https://samknight.com/?p=3591

Sam is on the faculty for the Pikes Peak Writers Conference in April 2026. He’s scheduled to teach on developing antagonists and writing short stories. Find him on Sched.com here: https://ppwc2026.sched.com/speaker/sam_knight.1u7sh873

Sam Knight is the owner/publisher of Knight Writing Press and author of six children’s books, four novels, and over 80 short stories, including three co-authored with Kevin J. Anderson. Though he has written in many cool worlds, such as Planet of the Apes, Wayward Pines, and Jack L. Chalker’s Well World, among his family, Sam will always be known for Chunky Monkey Pupu. He can be found at SamKnight.com and contacted at sam@samknight.com