What's your opinion on narration styles?

[A Small Bird]

I'm currently attempting a few different WIPs for writing and I keep struggling to decide on narrative mode.

I find myself wanting to write stories that emphasize experiences and sensations by focusing on what the primary characters feel, in a very stream-of-consciousness style, but every time I do so I feel like a hypothetical reader will give up and yell at me for not getting to the plot.

On one hand, I want the emotional punch of being in a character's head, taking advantage of the limited perspective to make everything feel strange and visceral. On the other hand, I feel like readers might have less tolerance for being "so melodramatic". I feel like some of my writer friends would be irked by all the focus on a character's experiences rather than the step-by-step of the story, even if those experiences are more interesting to me than the story.

What's your experience with different narrative modes and narration styles? Do you feel at odds with stream-of-consciousness narration? Is there any particular style that you find bothersome or tedious?

 

[Kadmus]

It sounds like your story is the experiences/feelings/inner life of the character rather than, to use a slightly more accurate word, the 'plot' - i.e. the events that happen? That's an entirely valid style of writing, and though it's likely to turn off some readers it's just as likely to draw in others.

(Of course, you can go too far, and you have to bear in mind things like 'time' - if your character is in the middle of a conversation you don't have the ability to slot in paragraphs of emotions between sentences without the character coming across as extremely slow and self-absorbed, for example - but that's true of everything. A 'plot' work that goes too far is simply a list of events.)