What is a narrative technique?
A method of telling, how a story is constructed and delivered, as opposed to what happens in it.
How to spot it: Describe the telling, not the events: an unreliable narrator, a frame story, present tense, epistolary form.
Often confused with structure: Technique is a local choice of delivery; structure is the shape of the whole.
12 narrative techniques in the vocabulary
Unreliable narrator
A narration whose account cannot be fully trusted because of the narrator's bias, delusion, deception, or limited knowledge.
8 works
Frame story
A narrative technique in which one story is told inside another, the outer tale framing and introducing the inner one.
3 works
In medias res
Beginning a story in the middle of the action, before the background is explained, and filling in context later.
Stream of consciousness
A technique rendering the continuous, associative flow of a character's thoughts and impressions as they occur.
Epistolary narration
Telling a story through documents such as letters, diary entries, reports, or transcripts.
5 works
Multiple points of view
Alternating the narrative among several characters' perspectives to build a fuller or contested picture of events.
3 works
Foreshadowing
Planting early hints or signs of what is to come, preparing the reader for later developments.
Flashback
Interrupting the present-time narrative to depict an earlier event, filling in backstory or motive.
Dramatic irony
A situation in which the audience knows something crucial that one or more characters do not.
Immersive worldbuilding
Conveying an invented world's rules, history, and texture through detail and immersion rather than direct explanation.
1 work
Subjective or unstable reality
A technique in which the depicted reality shifts, dissolves, or proves unstable, mirroring a character's disordered perception.
9 works
Second-person narration
Narrating with 'you' as the protagonist, placing the reader directly into the position of the character.
1 work