Cenonn's How to Holofic and Writing in General

You're stuck with your narrator, choose properly.

I said we are done with planning our Holofic, right? I lied. We have to tackle one more important thing and that is your narrator.

In writing a story, a narrator is the most important thing. They will be the ones who will tell the story to your readers. Whatever events that are going on, the narrator is the one who will report it to your readers.

Having good characters, good setting, good plots, and good conflicts aren't enough. No matter how unique those things are, it would be pointless if they aren't properly conveyed to the reader. I kept talking about "anything can be interesting if they are executed properly", right? Your narrator is a huge part of your "execution." It's not too far off if I say that your narrator will be the one who'll entertain your readers the most.

Now then... I talked about the importance of a narrator. I'll be going over the three types of narration which are the first person, second person, and third person.

First person is the type of narrator where the main character is the one telling the story. You'll notice a lot of "I" and "me" or even "we" in first person narrators.

Second person is the type of narrator where they will be directly speaking to you, the reader. There will be a lot of "you", "your", and "yours" in this kind of narrator.

Third person is the type of narrator where they are an external narrator. They are someone who is not part of the story but is still telling it. "He', "she", "it", and "they" are found a lot in this type of narrator.

I'll talk about how each type of narrator works in the next three chapters. I'll just give general tips on how a narrator should work.

I've said it before but narrators are pretty important. They don't simply say what happened. They create a brand new reality, a world that the readers will believe, keep on believing, and want to keep believing. It doesn't matter what kind of narrator it is. Narrators make fictional worlds real and that takes a lot of skill.

First and foremost, a narrator should create memories. Memory is a persuasive force on the consciousness that keeps convincing us of this reality. Narrators take advantage of it. They create new memories for us and then call back on that memory as needed.

A narrator should imprint a memory on the reader's mind and then make them remember about it. For example, a narrator told you about a certain detail like a character has a scar. A good narrator would be able to imprint that detail into your mind so that when the scene would talk about the previously revealed detail, you would be able to remember it.

Next is that a narrator should create a horizon. A reader should know what is "here" and how different it is from "anywhere else." You could write about a scene in a room. The narrator should paint the scene properly and the limits of what your characters know. After all, you can't have Kiara know that Calli is currently sleeping in another room while she is busy acting out a scene and has no way to contact Calli.

A scene should always have a sense of "what is close" and "what is far." In other words, a narrator should create the "space" of the story. After all, "space" is needed for "reality." A narrator has to occasionally remind of the distance between two concepts and build around it.

The last thing a narrator should have is the ability to disclose everything. A narrator should always say everything they know. Note: what the narrator knows is not necessarily the truth. There's a thing called "Unreliable Narrator."

Whatever type of narrator you will have, make sure they tell everything they know but not always the truth. What do I mean by that? There's a thing known as misinformation and your narrator is not excused from that.