Narratives in story telling - Single Strand and Multi-Strand

Narrative strands come along with basic narrative structure, the idea of beginning, middle and end is what writers base their stories upon. Within this, the writer/story teller has an infinite way of telling the story and is seen especially in longer written stories where different narrative strands are weaved together.

There are two different kinds of Narrative Strands within the world of story telling, the two strands are called ‘Single Strand’ and ‘Multi-Strand’ but what exactly does each one entail?

Single Strand –

Single Strand narrative refers to the one central character of a film you’re watching or book you’re reading. The plot revolves around this character and everyone else featured are labelled as minor characters. But Single Strand stories have an antagonist that tries to disrupt and get in the way of the central character, you say.

Well, yes. That is completely true but you’ll notice that throughout the entirety of the book or film you’re watching, the focus is always on the central character, their story and adventure is top priority and shown above everything else going on in the story.

An example of this? Take Superman for instance. The story and development of the Superman story is dominated by a single strand narrative where as Superman is the protagonist and central character and everyone around him is a minor character.

Multi-Strand –

Now that you have an understanding of what a single strand narrative is, the concept and definition can be applied to what a multi-strand narrative is. So using the definition of a single strand narrative, we know that a multi-strand narrative is just the same but with multiple single strand narratives being used in conjunction with one another.

Multi-strand stories contain more than one central character and is possible to have that one group of supporting characters will later on become the central group of characters later on. It also means that the central character is more than one person and becomes a group of characters like seen in the X-Men comic book series.

In X-Men, you can see that the story doesn’t have one single central character but a group of characters that all support each other and take the limelight together or one at a time in a spin off story. This works because the viewer will become interested and wonder how each strand is connected and relates to each other, on top of this the viewer is still able to be concerned and wonder about the outcome of each individual strand as well.