Here’s a twist on narrative point-of-view that most authors seem to let slip through the cracks. We all talk about who the narrator is. But who is she talking to? Who is that narrator’s audience?

I’m not asking about the writer’s audience, which might be different than the narrator’s audience. The writer is obviously writing to the reader, and we do often talk about who the intended reader is. We also often assume that the writer’s audience and the narrator’s are one in the same, but they may be different. The narrator may be writing to someone else entirely.

Let’s take the case of a first-person narrator, because it’s easier to see the difference there. If the book is a memoir, then we assume that the writer and narrator are one in the same and that the reader is her intended audience. We also assume that the author is writing in order to lay down some part of her history, for posterity or even to relate a lesson from her experiences. And these are all reasonable assumptions, for a memoir.

This is the third part in my series on narrative mode. I wrote about narrative voice briefly some months ago, in the context of narrative mode.

To review, narrative mode has three components:

1. Person - First ("I"), second ("you"), or third ("he").
2. Tense - Past, present, or future.
3. Voice - Objective, Limited, or Omniscient

(I’ll cite some examples of narrative mode in a later post.)

Narrative voice is not grammatical voice (i.e., active voice or passive voice), but a completely different animal. Narrative “voice” indicates what the narrator knows about the action in the story. Does the the narrator know only what he can observe (“objective voice”)? Or can he see into the thoughts of one (“limited voice”) or all (“omniscient voice”) of the characters?

Authors and literary analysts typically link narrative voice with narrative person. (See my previous post on person in narrative mode for more on first-person, third-person, and so forth.) But conceptually, at least from a writer’s perspective, voice is an independent concept, not really linked to person at all.

Picking the right person… No, this is not about dating. This is about narrative person, which I wrote about briefly in the context of narrative mode. I mentioned a few narrative modes and how they were used by their authors.

To review, narrative mode has three components:

1. Person - First ("I"), second ("you"), or third ("he").
2. Tense - Past, present, or future.
3. Voice - Objective, Limited, or Omniscient

(I’ll cite some examples of narrative mode in a later post.)

In an earlier post, I talked about narrative tense, #2 on the above list. As a writer, you can use any person with any tense. But as with tense, person is always set relative to the narrator’s frame of reference.

What to do with tense? I wrote about this briefly a few months ago, in the context of narrative mode, and I mentioned a few narrative modes and how they were used by their authors. But how do you pick a tense to use?

To review, narrative mode has three components:

1. Person - First ("I"), second ("you"), or third ("he").
2. Tense - Past, present, or future.
3. Voice - Objective, Limited, or Omniscient

(I’ll cite some examples of narrative mode in a later post.)

For now, I’m going to look in more detail at the second one, Tense, because of a question Paula B (of The Writing Show) recently asked on FaceBook. (I’ll look in more detail at Person and Voice in future posts.) She asked, “What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of present and past tense for novels and memoirs?”

Before we answer that question, let’s look at what we mean by “tense.”

Our word tense comes to us through Old French from the Latin tempus, which means “time.” And indeed tense tells us in what time the action is happening: past, present, or future. But what does it mean to write a story in “past tense”? It means that the action is being described as having happened in the past. But even in a past-tense narrative mode, individual sentences may occur in present tense, past-perfect tense, or even in future tense. How can that be?

The answer is that tense indicates what time the action occurred relative to the time the words were spoken. So for narrative tense to have any meaning, you must know who is doing the narrating. Or more precisely, when he is narrating it. And your mind—I’m convinced—subconsciously intuits the frame of reference of the narrator and adjusts its understanding appropriately.