: Help! How do I transition from a character voice to a narrator? How do you successfully transition from a first-person narrator, who is present only for the first few chapters of a book, to
How do you successfully transition from a first-person narrator, who is present only for the first few chapters of a book, to a different narrative voice that will continue for the rest of the book?
I start off my novel with a boy setting the stage and a few chapters in I have to leave him behind and narrate chapters that he is not a part of. How do I transition from him speaking to me (as the author) doing it?
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@Smith147
If you're writing in 1st-person, then you can switch to 3rd-person for the duration of those few episodes. This is how Brandon Sanderson did it in his Skyward book series. Spensa, the protagonist, narrates her own chapters in 1st-person and when interludes happen, they are narrated in 3rd-person.
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@Ravi5107385
Another way is to transition the narrator from the boy to someone else (the teller of the tale) is by having the boy turn to the storyteller as a different character at the end of his narration. That way we see how the storyteller found out about what the boy narrated.
Hope this helps.
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@Samaraweera193
Plenty of books just switch narrators, no real transition, but I'm not a fan of that approach. A more elegant solution, if it fits your plot, is to have the boy narrate his section to your primary narrator. In other words you start with a brief intro featuring your narrator, explain how he meets the boy, offer a pretext for the boy telling the narrator his story, and then continue with the main narrator after the interruption.
If your primary narration is 3rd Person Omniscient, and not tied to a character in the story, you can still present the first few chapters as being recounted by the boy to an actual character. In this case, I would still recommend starting the book with at least a brief intro in the actual narrative voice. That will prepare the readers for the impending loss of the boy-as-narrator, and keep them from being thrown off by it when it happens.
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