An Introduction to Narrative Point-of-View
I’m a teacher, and I try to come up with ways that will help my students understand concepts better. So when I was teaching point-of-view a couple years ago, I came across the ideas of the Balcony, the Stage, and the Script as ways of understanding from what distance the audience experiences a story.
Point-of-view impacts how close the reader feels to what’s happening in the story. The narrator, the person telling the story, acts as a proxy for the reader and how close the narrator is to the story is how close the reader will be to the story.
We’re going to use the metaphor of a stage play to look at the different points-of-view you have to choose from when you’re telling a story.
Specifically, we’ll be looking at the view from the Balcony, the Stage, and the Script.
The Balcony
Third-Person Point-of-View
If a story were unfolding on a stage, the person up in the balcony would be able to observe all that was going on and tell the story from a third-person point of view. This would be an outside observer, someone outside of the story…
