Narrative voice is the personality of the narration: the sense, line by line, that a particular someone is telling the story. It comes from the narrator's word choice, the rhythm of their sentences, their attitude toward the characters and the reader, and what they notice. First-person narrators such as Huckleberry Finn have the most obvious voices, but every narrator has one, including the third-person narrators who never say “I.”
The quickest way to hear voice is to hold the facts of a scene still and change only the teller. For whose eyes a story is seen through, see the point of view guide; this page is about how the teller sounds, what a voice is made of and how to develop one.
One scene, four voices
At a wedding, the cake slides off its stand during the best man's toast. Here is that moment four times.
An intrusive storyteller. The cake at the Dobrowski wedding lasted exactly as long as the best man's speech, which is to say a minute and a half longer than anyone wished. Cakes, like best men, should know when to sit down.
A child, in first person. The cake fell down in the talking part. I saw it lean first, but nobody listens to me at weddings, so I just watched it go.
The caterer, in first person. Five tiers on a folding table. I told them in March. I told them again on Friday. Nobody listens to the caterer until the caterer is on her knees in buttercream.
An effaced narrator. During the toast the top tier slid. A woman in green stood up. The best man kept reading from his phone.
Mark what moves from one version to the next:
| Teller | Word choice (diction) | Sentence shape (syntax) | Judgment |
|---|---|---|---|
| TellerIntrusive storyteller | Word choice (diction)Mock precision: “exactly as long as,” “which is to say” | Sentence shape (syntax)One long, qualified sentence, then a maxim | JudgmentMocks everyone, then generalizes |
| TellerChild | Word choice (diction)Plain words: “the talking part,” “fell down” | Sentence shape (syntax)Short clauses joined by “but” and “so” | JudgmentAggrieved: “nobody listens to me” |
| TellerCaterer | Word choice (diction)Trade words: tiers, folding table, buttercream | Sentence shape (syntax)Fragments and repetition: “I told them…” | JudgmentVindicated, and calls herself “the caterer” |
| TellerEffaced narrator | Word choice (diction)Neutral: “slid,” “stood up” | Sentence shape (syntax)Three short statements | JudgmentNone stated; the comedy is left to the reader |
These four change the viewpoint as well as the voice: an all-knowing teller, two people in the room, a camera. To hear voice on its own, hold the viewpoint still. Both versions below give the child's view of the same second, the lean nobody else saw:
The child, at seven. The cake fell down in the talking part. I saw it lean first, but nobody listens to me at weddings, so I just watched it go.
The same child, thirty years later. I was seven, and I was the only one who saw the cake begin to lean. I remember deciding to say nothing, the way children decide things: completely, and for reasons they could not have explained.
The viewpoint is identical: one child, one lean, one silence. The voice is not. The adult's words are more exact (“begin to lean,” “deciding”), the sentences reach a colon and a balanced pair, and the judgment has turned from grievance to irony about the younger self. The wedding is the same. The book you would write from each version is not.
Voice, viewpoint, tone and style
The four terms describe different layers of the same pages. One novel shows the difference:
| Term | The question it answers | In The Great Gatsby (1925) |
|---|---|---|
| TermPoint of view | The question it answersWhose perceptions does the reader share? | In The Great Gatsby (1925)First person, through a witness, Nick Carraway |
| TermNarrative voice | The question it answersWho is telling it, and how do they sound? | In The Great Gatsby (1925)Nick's: well-bred, wry, judging while claiming not to |
| TermTone | The question it answersWhat attitude does this passage take? | In The Great Gatsby (1925)Amused at the parties, mournful at the end |
| TermStyle | The question it answersWhat habits does the author's prose have? | In The Great Gatsby (1925)Fitzgerald's long, lyrical sentences and daring comparisons |
Point of view and voice usually travel together, but they can belong to different people. In close third person, the narrator speaks but borrows the viewpoint character's words, the technique called free indirect discourse, covered in the guide to third person limited. In a retrospective first-person novel, the point of view is the young self's and the voice is the older self's, as in the wedding pair above: young Pip sees Satis House, and the grown man telling Great Expectations chooses the words. Our guide to first-person narrative looks at that split in detail. Tone, meanwhile, is the attitude of a passage, and one voice can carry many tones, as the guide to tone in literature shows.
Author, narrator and character voice
Three voices are in play in any novel. The author's voice is the set of habits that make a writer recognizable across books. The narrator's voice belongs to this book's teller. Character voice is how each person talks in dialogue. The same author can build very different narrators. Mark Twain told The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) through a grown-up narrator who teases the reader, and Huckleberry Finn (1884) through Huck himself.
If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do…
An adult narrator, amused at the boy and at himself (“like the writer of this book”). Huck could never have written this sentence, and in his own book he doesn't try.
What makes a narrative voice
Readers hear a voice as one thing. Writers can treat it as five parts, and changing any one of them can change the narrator. The first three match the columns of the wedding table.
Word choice: what the narrator calls things
…and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log-cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of the river, being a woodyard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh and sweet to smell on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they've left dead fish laying around, gars and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you've got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!
A sunrise any poet would envy, in a boy's grammar (“t'other,” “them cheats,” “anywheres”). The voice is also in what Huck notices. He sees that the woodpile is stacked to cheat buyers, and he can't leave out the dead fish, even at the most beautiful moment.
Rhythm: how the sentences move
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
One sentence, about 119 words, built from pairs of opposites. The rhythm is a public speaker's, and the turn at “in short” lets the narrator step back and mock the habit of describing an age only in superlatives, which is exactly what the sentence has been doing.
Attitude: how the narrator feels about the story
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard—and he had never been handsome.
The narrator is fond of Catherine and laughing at the novels she loves, whose heroines come from neglected, poor or tragic homes. “Though his name was Richard” is the joke: a narrator who treats ordinariness as a scandal.
Address: who the narrator is talking to
In the High and Far-Off Times the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk. He had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that he could wriggle about from side to side; but he couldn't pick up things with it.
“O Best Beloved” puts a listener in the room, a child being told a story, and everything about the voice follows from that: the capital letters of fable, the homely comparison (“as big as a boot”), the rhythm of a story read aloud.
Presence: how visible the narrator is
Reader, I think proper, before we proceed any farther together, to acquaint thee that I intend to digress, through this whole history, as often as I see occasion, of which I am myself a better judge than any pitiful critic whatever…
Fielding's narrator behaves like one more person in the book, with opinions, grudges and a running conversation with “thee.” At the other end of the scale is the effaced narrator, who reports only what can be seen and heard, as in Ernest Hemingway's “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927), one of the dialogue examples on this site. Even an effaced narrator has a voice. It is just a quiet one.
Kinds of narrator and their voices
Narrators are usually sorted by person (first, second, third), by how much they know, and by how much they show of themselves. Each kind pulls the voice in a direction.
| Narrator | The voice it tends to have | Example |
|---|---|---|
| NarratorFirst-person protagonist | The voice it tends to haveThe character's own, on every line | ExampleAdventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) |
| NarratorFirst-person witness | The voice it tends to haveAdmiring, judging, partial | ExampleDr. Watson; Nick Carraway |
| NarratorSecond person | The voice it tends to haveIntimate, accusing or instructive | ExampleBright Lights, Big City (1984) |
| NarratorClose third person | The voice it tends to haveThe narrator's grammar, the character's words | ExampleKatherine Mansfield, “Miss Brill” (1920) |
| NarratorIntrusive omniscient | The voice it tends to haveA storyteller with opinions and asides | ExampleTom Jones (1749) |
| NarratorObjective or effaced | The voice it tends to havePlain report, no comment, no inner life | Example“Hills Like White Elephants” (1927) |
| NarratorUnreliable | The voice it tends to haveA voice the reader learns to doubt | Example“The Cask of Amontillado” (1846) |
| NarratorFirst-person plural | The voice it tends to haveThe voice of a town, family or office | Example“A Rose for Emily” (1930) |
The table describes tendencies, not rules. A first-person narrator can be as flat as a police report, and an omniscient narrator can sound like a gossip at a wedding. What matters is that the choice is deliberate and that it holds. The point of view guide covers the mechanics of each viewpoint.
How to develop your narrative voice
- Decide who is speaking
Even a third-person narrator is somebody. Write a short paragraph about the teller: age or era, education, temperament, and what they think of the people in the story. For an omniscient narrator, this paragraph matters most of all.
- Collect the narrator's words
List twenty words the narrator would use and twenty they would never use. Huck says “rank,” Austen's narrator says “disposition.” Check new chapters against the second list: drift often shows up as a word the narrator would never say.
- Find the rhythm
Read a page aloud and decide the narrator's default sentence: long and looping, short and flat, balanced like Dickens's. Then decide when they break it, because a voice is partly its exceptions.
- Choose what they notice
Put the narrator in one room and write down three details only they would pick out. A carpenter sees the joints, a debt collector sees the new television, a child sees what is at knee height.
- Give them an attitude
Decide how the narrator feels about the characters, the events and the reader: fond, wry, furious, guarded. The tone words list has 170 more to choose from. The attitude can change over the book, but it should change for a reason.
- Write it down and keep it steady
Put the answers on one page and keep it with the draft, the way an editor keeps a style sheet. Voice can drift over months of drafting, often toward your own everyday voice. Reading the first and latest chapters back to back is the simplest check.
For a second check, attach the voice sheet and an early chapter you're happy with, and ask the Strokes Assistant to point out lines in a new chapter that use a never-use word or a rhythm the narrator doesn't have.
Exercises for narrative voice
- Copy a voice. Type out a page by a narrator you admire, then write a new page about your own subject in the same voice. Copying word for word shows you the habits reading hides.
- Age the narrator. Rewrite a page of your draft as told by the same narrator twenty years later. Keep one sentence from the original and notice how it sounds now.
- Change the listener. Write one paragraph of your story addressed to a child, then to a judge, then to an ex. The facts stay. Everything else moves.
- Intrude, then disappear. Write a scene with a narrator who comments on everything, then again with a narrator who reports only what a camera would catch.
- Talk it first. Record yourself telling a story aloud, transcribe it, and compare it with your written version. The spoken one often has the voice the written one is missing.
- Strip a voice. Rewrite the Huck passage above in plain, neutral prose. Whatever you had to remove is what his voice was made of.
Frequently asked questions
Is narrative voice the same as tone?
No. Tone is the attitude of a passage toward its subject, and it can change from scene to scene. Voice is the narrator's personality, and it stays recognizable across the whole book. One voice can carry many tones: Huck sounds like Huck whether he is admiring a sunrise or describing a killing.
Can a narrator's voice change over the course of a book?
Yes, when the change is part of the story. In Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon (1966), Charlie Gordon's progress reports gain spelling, punctuation and long sentences as his intelligence rises, then lose them again. A retrospective narrator can also sound younger in the early chapters. What readers notice as a flaw is drift without a cause, usually the writer's own voice creeping in.
Can a novel have more than one narrative voice?
Yes. Novels with several narrators give each one a distinct voice, as The Moonstone and Dracula do with their different writers, and Bleak House alternates a third-person narrator with Esther Summerson's first-person chapters. Ideally each voice is recognizable without its chapter heading, which is a good test to run on your draft.
