First person is a highly versatile point of view, and its limited scope is both a blessing
and a curse.
Let’s explore the nitty-gritty details of what writers can accomplish through this perspective.
It’s obvious that first person can be a powerful tool for establishing an immediate
emotional connection with the reader.
The audience is granted access to the protagonist’s innermost thoughts and feelings.
Readers view the world through that character’s unique lens, as if they’re hearing a story
told by a close friend.
In the case of likable characters, their emotions often guide the audience’s reaction.
Their happiness is your happiness; their sorrow is your sorrow.
But first-person can also generate empathy toward villains or antiheros in a way that’s
more difficult to achieve in third person.
As one perceptive reader phrased it, “By placing you in the criminals' shoes, the authors
generate ambivalence and twist our emotions, rather than letting us simply dismiss in disgust.”
First person is also great to use when you have a character with a strong voice and an
interesting perspective on life, such as someone on the autism spectrum.
The writing style reflects the attitudes of the protagonist and provides constant characterization.
Oftentimes, the tone is set within the first line.
Take a look at the opening of Emma Donoghue’s novel Room, which is told from the perspective
of a young boy who is isolated from the outside world:
“Today I'm five.
I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I'm
changed to five, abracadabra.”
Now compare that to the opening of Andy Weir’s debut The Martian:
“I’m pretty much fucked.
That’s my considered opinion.
Fucked.”
Then take a look at Humbert Humbert’s first words in Vladimir Nabokov’s classic Lolita,
told from the perspective of a poetic pedophile:
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
My sin, my soul.”
If you’re itching to experiment with your style, consider writing from a first-person
perspective of someone with vastly different opinions than your own.
Maybe you want to write from a Jewish tattoo artist’s point of view or an old couple
living in the Alaskan wilderness.
If you have little personal experience with that perspective, find online forums or blogs
where people share anecdotes about those lifestyles.
Watch documentaries and read memoirs.
You could even interview people who have had those experiences, or do field research by
taking classes or in-person tours.
Your goal as a writer is to portray those identities as authentically as possible.
Another appealing feature of first person is the potential for unreliable narrators,
wherein the protagonist skews the reader’s interpretation of the actual events or outright
lies about what happened.
All narrators are biased to some extent, but authors who want to intentionally create an
unreliable narrator will drop hints, often by creating contradictions between what the
protagonist says and what they do.
For example, a narrator might claim he’s a genius and his classmates are all idiots.
But when the reader finds out he’s the only student who failed the exam, that makes us
question the validity of the narrator’s claims.
You can convey these contradictions through multiple perspectives as well by having different
characters interpret the same incident in completely disparate ways, which is known
as the Rashomon Effect.
It’s named after Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon, in which four suspects, witnesses,
and surviving victims of a murder give contradictory accounts of the incident.
Right now, a dozen examples of books and movies with unreliable narrators are probably whizzing
through your head.
Unreliable narrators can be both fun and frustrating for readers, as they add another layer of
tension and mystery to the story.
Literary critic David Lodge suggests that “The point of using an unreliable narrator
is indeed to reveal in an interesting way the gap between appearance and reality, and
to show how human beings distort or conceal the latter.
This need not be a conscious, or mischievous, intention on their part.”
In other words, unreliable narrators don’t always lie on purpose; they may actually believe
their own distorted view of reality.
For writers, unreliable narrators are an opportunity to explore the deeper aspects of a character’s
personality as well as the eccentricities of the human mind.
With first person, there are also many different forms with which to present your story.
Characters might speak through a diary, a memoir, a series of letters, or even interviews—or
any combination of media.
This allows you to create the illusion of reality, as Yann Martel does in Life of Pi,
which features a fictional author’s note explaining how Pi’s story came to be.
When I read this book many years ago, this opening cast doubt on whether or not the story
was fact or fiction—I had to double check the book’s Wikipedia page to be sure.
In Life of Pi, the fictional author acts as a peripheral narrator, occasionally adding
his own commentary to Pi’s story, which contributes to the book’s larger themes
about truth and storytelling.
Thus, the narrative structure you use not only makes the story more engaging, but it
can also help you emphasize important themes.
So those are a few of the primary advantages of using first person.
It allows you to:
1. Establish an immediate connection
2. Explore unique perspectives
3. Enjoy unreliable narrators
4. Experiment with different narrative structures
Nevertheless, there are several limitations to first person.
For one thing, it’s difficult to execute successfully.
Your character needs to have a captivating voice, and they shouldn’t sound like an
echo of the author.
It can be hard to limit yourself to only the word choices or descriptions that particular
character would use, so first person often involves writing outside of your comfort zone.
In addition, unlike with third person, you are often limited to one character’s worldview.
You can only see what your main character sees.
Say Mary is our narrator and Bob is a secondary character.
If Bob leaves the room to poison Mary’s tea, the reader only finds out when Mary does.
The author can drop hints—perhaps Bob is a little too insistent that Mary drink the
tea—but this approach can’t create the same sense of dramatic irony as third-person,
wherein the reader knows something that Mary doesn’t suspect.
You could switch between different first-person perspectives in these situations.
However, you generally can’t include more than two or three narrators without the voices
sounding too similar or the reader forgetting who’s who.
Then again, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying features 15 different first-person narrators,
so these kinds of “rules” are always meant to be broken.
Another common problem with first-person writing is that many sentences begin with “I,”
which can be tedious to read.
To avoid this, you can eliminate “filter” words that stand between the narrator and
the reader, especially when it comes to sensory experiences.
This includes words like felt, saw, heard, watched, noticed, and thought.
Look at this example sentence: I heard the door slam shut, and I felt my
heart skip a beat.
Instead, you could write: The door slammed shut, and my heart skipped
a beat.
This makes your writing tighter and the scene more immediate.
Here’s another: I smelled bread baking, and it made me hungry.
A revised version, with added details: The sweet scent of Hawaiian rolls wafted through
the air, and my stomach gurgled.
This revision also involves the basic showing versus telling principle: Rather than simply
telling the reader that the character is hungry, use an action that shows the character is
hungry.
When writing in first person, it can also be hard to incorporate descriptions.
If the narrator is encountering new places or people, or recounting a story to the audience,
then this isn’t much of a problem.
However, if a protagonist is describing their own appearance or familiar places, it can
feel forced and take the reader out of the story.
This is what gives rise to the cliché of a character examining themselves in a mirror,
which is best avoided.
Here’s an atrocious example: “I examined my long, raven hair in the reflection, and
bright blue orbs blinked back at me.”
Don’t do this.
You can make these descriptions sound more natural by having other characters comment
on the protagonist’s appearance (Your eyes are so blue, I could just gobble them up!)
or by having the protagonist note a change in a familiar place (The bar was usually littered
with cigarette butts and Mars Bars wrappers, but there wasn’t a speck of dust when I
went in that day).
Even so, descriptive passages generally sound better in the third person because the author
doesn’t have to worry as much about capturing the protagonist’s voice.
Those are a few disadvantages of first person:
1. Difficult to write in someone else’s voice
2. Perspective is limited to one character
3. Many sentences begin with “I”
4. Descriptions of familiar things may sound unnatural
When writing in first person, you’ll also need to address the question of verb tense:
Should I write in past or present tense?
Let’s address the past tense first, since it’s more common.
With first-person past tense, the story is often presented as a retrospective.
The narrator is telling us their story after the fact, and they may even talk directly
to the audience, as Jane Eyre does, stating, “Gentle reader, may you never feel what
I then felt!”
Many classic novels use the retrospective format, such as To Kill A Mockingbird and
The Catcher in the Rye.
You’ll find it in popular fiction as well, like The Book Thief, which is narrated by
Death, who is looking back on the story of a girl he watched grow up during WWII.
At one point, he even tells the reader, “I’m spoiling the ending, not only of the entire
book, but of this particular piece of it.”
Sometimes the audience is not the real-world reader but other characters within the book
itself, such as in The Canterbury Tales and The Name of the Wind, making the story one
long piece of dialogue.
Kvothe, the hero of Patrick Rothfuss’s novel, tells his listeners, “I have talked to gods,
loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep.
You may have heard of me.”
Some narrators aren’t telling stories about themselves but rather those of others.
This narrator is sometimes called a peripheral narrator if they are part of the action but
not the focus.
For example, The Great Gatsby is Nick Carraway’s account of Jay Gatsby.
Within the first page, he writes, “Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this
book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have
an unaffected scorn.”
Just as Carraway portrays Gatsby, so does John Watson portray Sherlock Holmes in Arthur
Conan Doyle’s short stories.
The incidents are written from Watson’s perspective, and here is one of the many things
he has to say about Holmes: “He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing
machine that the world has ever seen…”
In the modern BBC adaptation, John keeps a blog about Sherlock, but it serves the same
purpose.
To once again quote reader Andrew Lim, “The narrator plays a foil to another main character
who is great in some way, distinctive, or unusual.
It can be more powerful to experience that greatness as an ordinary person in the aura.”
In both The Great Gatsby and Sherlock Holmes, the first-person narrators are creating physical
artifacts—the book you are reading was created by them.
Thus, in a retrospective story, the characters are able to reflect on their past selves and
foreshadow events to come.
First-person PRESENT tense, on the other hand, is often used as the primary tense in novels
where the narrator is constantly addressing some kind of reader, like in a diary, which
might have a mix of present-tense thoughts and past-tense actions.
One example is Jeff Kinney’s children’s series Diary of a Wimpy Kid:
“First of all, let me get something straight: This is a JOURNAL, not a diary.
I know what it says on the cover, but when Mom went out to buy this thing I SPECIFICALLY
told her to get one that didn’t say ‘diary’ on it.”
The use of present tense to show action happening in the moment is a much more modern phenomenon.
You’ll see it in bestselling novels like The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Time Traveler’s
Wife, and Fight Club.
Present tense generates a sense of immediacy, and the reader experiences the events with
the character rather than hearing the story after the fact.
Look at this quote from The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins:
“All the general fear I've been feeling condenses into an immediate fear of this girl,
this predator who might kill me in seconds.
Adrenaline shoots through me and I sling the pack over one shoulder and run full-speed
for the woods.
I can hear the blade whistling toward me and reflexively hike the pack up to protect my
head.
The blade lodges in the pack.”
Present tense can work well for stories that feature more heart-pounding action than introspection.
Screenplays are written in the present tense, so it makes sense for books focused on visuals
to imitate the feeling of a movie by using present tense.
You can feel the influence of screenplay writing in Blake Crouch’s sci-fi novel Dark Matter:
“My wife, Daniela, sits on the kitchen island, swirling her almost-empty wineglass in one
hand and holding her phone in the other.
She feels my stare and grins without looking up from the screen.”
In addition, the combination of first-person and present tense makes internal dialogue
sound like the protagonist is voicing his thoughts aloud:
“It will be good to be home again.
I’m thinking of starting up the gas logs.
We’ve never had a fire before Halloween, but tonight is so unseasonably cold that after
walking a mile in this wind, all I want is to sit by the hearth with Daniela and Charlie
and a glass of wine.”
Unlike with past tense, the thoughts feel less filtered by time and reflection, resulting
in an almost stream-of-consciousness effect.
Present tense can also enhance a story’s themes.
Author Emma Darwin names disorientation as a feature of present tense: “The stream
of one-thing-after-another-after-another-after-another suits any narrative where the point-of-view
character is disoriented, and/or you want the reader to feel the same.”
The form of the narrative matches its function.
However, many readers feel that present tense pulls them out of the story—it calls attention
to itself because it’s unfamiliar.
In addition, present tense requires suspension of disbelief.
The writer is asking the reader to believe that this story is happening in real time,
which may make the reader too aware of the author’s presence in the story.
Ultimately, your choice of verb tense depends on personal taste, and some readers don’t
even notice one way or another.
A side note about first person in terms of young adult fiction.
First person carries a stigma in certain circles and is sometimes considered to be for amateurs,
mainly because it’s a popular choice for YA writers.
In fact, many teen readers prefer first person, perhaps because they enjoy the ability to
easily put themselves in the characters’ shoes.
But as you’ve seen in earlier examples, it’s clear that first person has been widely
used in literary fiction for decades, if not centuries.
Therefore, it is not your choice of perspective that matters, but how you use it.
How a first-person narrative is perceived depends on the character’s level of self-reflection
versus external action.
Is your story more about the character pondering the spiritual significance of finding life
on other planets, or is it more about aliens taking over the world and the heroes trying
to defeat them?
It boils down to the difference between genre and literary fiction, which I’ll cover in
a different video.
Here’s an exercise you can use to test out your first-person writing skills: Choose a
place you’re very familiar with.
It can be a room in your house or a store you visit on a regular basis.
Now write a paragraph from the first-person perspective of one of your characters.
Then switch to a different character and write a paragraph from their perspective.
How do they differ?
As an example, think of a kitchen.
How do the characters’ different interests shape what they see?
What do they notice that others don’t?
If they’re a chef, they might critique the quality of the kitchen knives, or think about
how horribly wrong everything went the last time they made macarons.
If they’re a family-oriented person, the kitchen table might be a place filled with
fond memories of family gatherings, the smell of spices and gumbo, a white cat sprawled
on the table.
Physical descriptions can extend into memories.
Where do their thoughts gravitate?
What questions consume their minds on a daily basis and how does that impact their view
of everyday experiences?
Your narrator’s language should be influenced by his or her gender, class, ethnicity, education,
profession, and interests.
Someone who grew up in a strongly conservative family is going to perceive the world differently
than someone with a more liberal background.
Your choice of narrator not only impacts what they notice and think, but also the structure
of their internal dialogue—their syntax, diction, and dialect.
One character might narrate in straightforward, choppy sentences, whereas another might ramble
in long, verbose prose.
A character might frequently express thoughts through similes and metaphors or never use
figurative language at all.
Writing from one character’s perspective can feel claustrophobic, but it allows you
to immerse yourself in a different mindset and use unconventional narrative formats.
How do you feel about first person?
I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
What are your favorite books told in first person?
If you’re choosing to write a story in first person, why did you make that choice?
Whatever you do, keep writing.