English Tuition/Tutoring Bolton, Manchester: How do you choose your narrator?

• Different stories may demand different voices or narrators. And  here’s an easy or useful way to get you thinking about the problem of narrators.
• Think of something you OWN and decide that you are going to tell its story.  Find it and think about why and how you own it. There has to be an emotional connection!
• So look in your bag, or at your ‘phone, your  shoes, ring whatever catches your attention. Even a bar of chocolate or ticket stub?  
• Take it out and think about HOW you own it and WHY you own it…notice that you are using the FIRST person Narrator as you speak about your ownership..
• Are you a RELIABLE ‘I’ or ‘EYE’ or do you notice that you are making up details, ‘flavouring’ your story as your I becomes UNRELIABLE? 
• Maybe your ‘I’ is CONFESSIONAL too? 
• Are you like the ‘I’ (Governess) in Henry James’ chilling  novella The Turn of the Screw misleading your readers and  improvising for effect? 

• Now change your narrator. Instead of your ‘I’ or ‘Eye’ move to a THIRD person narrator. 
• So you are now  using he/she or perhaps an OMNISCIENT narrator? 
• How close are your readers to the voice and feelings of your third person? Almost as if the THIRD person is like a FIRST person confidant? 
• Or are we distant as we are passively FED our tale as the narrator seems God like in their knowledge?

1) ‘ I loved this pen from the beginning of its life! Did you know that  when  I bought my Crimson Mistress (as I baptized her in that hill church somewhere in Devon) my heart was broken, yet as soon as I bought her and we became friends, everything changed! ‘

2) How warm his hands felt on his face and how much ink! Yes, he loved this pen more  than anything, except maybe Henry and just maybe his whole family nattering away as usual inside and outside his head about his funny  writing. 

3) Three weeks ago the pen was sold on a busy street  in Singapore. No one knew how such a pen came into the hands of a master criminal, like Jaques,  but Police all over the world  offered their services to try to decipher the secretly  inked codes  of this astounding crimson pen