Writing Fiction in First Person is Weird

A story in first person? Like, who are you talking to?

I should write, “To whom are you talking?” But I was writing in first person, and I was trying to write conversationally. That’s part of the fun of first person: writing in a style that’s close to speech.

I recently wrote entries on “Your Unique Storyteller’s DNA” and “What Is Voice?” And so I thought I’d sneak in a note on writing in the first person. It’s easy to mix all of these issues up. You may think that writing as “I” is what it means to write with a voice, and you may think that voice is the same thing as writing the stories you’re compelled to write. These are not at all the same things. 

Writing in the first person is simply one choice among many. You have first (I), second (you), and third (he, she, they) perspectives, and you have past, present, and future tenses (plus the progressive, conditional, and perfect tenses). Check out Ursula K. Le Guin’s book Steering the Craft (1998) for efficient guidance on perspective.

The most common perspectives in fiction (I’m judging by experience) are first person and third person, and the most common tenses are past and present. 

First-person past and present: I wrote a novel. I write a novel.

Third-person past and present: They wrote a novel. She writes a novel.

Today, at my age, I love writing novels in third person. I think my affinity for the third-person perspective comes from decades of practiced empathy. I want to be more than one person! I want to write one chapter from the hero’s point of view, one from a minor character’s point of view, one from a villain’s point of view, and so on. I want to be an actor playing all the parts. I don’t want to be stuck in one character’s first-person perspective. 

I want to fly above my world at night and dip like a bat into my characters’ lives. I want to dart between perspectives.

When I was young, though, I wrote a lot of my fiction in first person. There’s something liberating about having a platform to just speak your mind and believe you’ll be heard—and valued—and, in fiction, to do so as if you were protected behind the mask of someone else. 

You wear the mask of the narrator, which might also be the mask of the hero, and you can write safely from within one character’s world. It feels easier. You only have to wear one mask and play one part. You only have to experience the world from within the skin of one character. You can say what you want, and you know it’s also not really you. It’s the narrator.

You can also write like you talk, or it feels like you can write like you talk. It feels like no one’s telling you what to do, and you can just start typing. Yes! This isn’t so hard! Fiction is fun!

But then you realize you’re not supposed to be writing a diary or an essay. You started out wanting to write fiction. You want to dramatize life. How is talking with your fingers page after page dramatizing life? How are you going to write scenes? 

If you’re writing in first person as a character in the story, how do you write about what other characters are doing? In life, we don’t pay close attention to each other. I can’t tell you who was behind me in line at the grocery store. I can’t remember arguments I had yesterday, surely not word for word, and I have no idea what the other person was thinking. I was thinking about my side of the argument. We both were thinking about our own perspectives. That’s why we were arguing. 

This is part of the attraction of writing in first person because it feels close to how we, as individual humans, narrowly experience our own lives . . . except, of course, we as individual humans don’t narrate our own lives to ourselves in perfectly spell-checked 250-page monologues.

So how does one character narrate from their point of view and from the points of view of other characters while also remembering people’s clothes, expressions, movements, and speech? Oh, and while also remembering to sneak in stuff about the weather and the setting and people’s relevant personal histories?

The answer is that the character doesn’t. It’s impossible. That’s why we’re pretending it is possible in a story or novel. It’s artifice. 

The first flush of fun you have when writing in first person, which makes you feel spontaneous and alive and honest, vanishes quickly beneath the demanding waves of dramatic writing. 

First person feels real, but it’s even more fake than, say, third person.

Okay, maybe it’s not more fake, but it’s at least equally as fake.

It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write in first person, obviously. I just wrote the novel Locke Writes a Story to Save His Life in first person, and it was even in the present tense as well, which is another fun yet maddening impossibility. I’m also doing it now, like, right now, writing in first person and in present tense, but this is my lecture mode. I’m thinking while writing. I’m not dramatizing a conflict between fictional characters.

Anyway, I’m just saying writing in the first person is super weird.

I can edit my first-person present-tense prose because I’m typing into a document on a laptop. I’m not narrating my own life spontaneously in my mind as life rushes forward. If I were living the fiction of first-person narration, I wouldn’t be able to see the words of my own narration. I certainly wouldn’t be able to scan the previous paragraph and reread my own narration and edit my sentences. That’s because . . . I’d be talking out loud, I guess, to myself . . . in my mind . . . but in perfect sentences and paragraphs . . . I guess? 

Yeah, so that’s what’s so weird. What is supposed to be happening during first-person narration? To whom am I talking . . . or thinking . . . or writing . . . or whatever? And who is this person who is transcribing everything I’m thinking . . . or saying . . . or whatever . . . and then printing it out in a book?

Once, I stared at the word the like I’d never seen it before and could not reconcile its spelling with its pronunciation. 

The. The. The. 

There’s a T and an H and an E. Tee. Aitch. Eee. Ta-hee? Tee-aitch-ee? T-eh?

That’s how first-person narration hits me sometimes: a familiar thing resolved too much into focus until it’s so weird that I can’t make sense of it.

“True—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” [The Tell-tale Heart (1843)]

Me? I didn’t say anything. Are you mad?

“Call me Ishmael.” [Moby-Dick (1851)]

Okay. Ishmael. Little rude.

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.” [The Great Gatsby (1925)]

 You talking to me?

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” [The Catcher in the Rye (1951)]

That’s fine, bro. Chill. You don’t have to go into it. 

So . . .

Is a first-person novel the transcript of an interview or interrogation or therapy session? 

Do first-person narrators think they’re thinking this in their own heads? If so, isn’t that what crazy people think . . . that the words inside their heads are being projected outside of their heads . . . and disseminated publicly . . . and recorded by the government?

And how did this inside-mind voice get recorded? How could an inside-mind voice speak so intelligibly while adhering to the rules of dramatic writing? And how can first-person narrators remember all that dialogue, remember what other people said, like, word for word?

Do they know they’re speaking “a novel” for 250 pages straight? Who does that? I mean, voice actors read novels for audiobooks, but even that’s a helluva project. So is this a crazy person walking down the street and telling a 60,000-word story, with perfect dialogue, to whomever wants to walk beside them and listen hour after hour? 

Don’t crazy people think the world hears their thoughts?

If it’s not a transcript or a brain recording or a performance or a crazy person’s mumblecore monologue, did the first-person narrator write all this down? Is it one long diary entry? Is it an email, a blog, a string of social-media posts . . . all of which adhere (again and somehow) to the conventions of dramatic writing? 

And does this real-time narrator of their first-person life realize that someone has made copies of their self-narration—thousands of copies called books—and given them to people around the world? Are we readers like gods eavesdropping on these poor peoples’ private dream chatter without their knowledge? 

Maybe it’s not about why the first-person convention exists but why readers like it so much.

We’re pervs.

Writers play with answering all these questions, of course. Trying to answer some of these riddles about first-person narration can inspire you to write your story in a different way, a way that engages you and fires you up.

Sometimes writers compose fiction as transcripts, email exchanges, recordings, news articles, scripts, and dialogue. There are wonderful epistolary novels like Flowers for Algernon (1966), A Woman of Independent Means (1978), The Color Purple (1982), and Dear Committee Members (2014). I recently read Several People Are Typing (2021), a very funny novel consisting entirely of online messages between employees. It reminded me of something Douglas Coupland would write.

You can play a lot with various written forms of speech and communication and incorporate them into your fiction. See the recent novel Interior Chinatown (2020) by Charles Yu as an example of messing with a screenplay format to tell a story. See also Mark Leyner’s novel The Tetherballs of Bougainville (1998) for how it incorporates a script. Heck, I guess you can even go back to Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce.

And then, yeah, you’re into modernism and postmodernism. There’s a lot there.

It still startles me, though, when a writer ignores all the questions (or hasn’t considered them) and starts—pow!—with first-person narration and expects the reader to go with it . . . expects the reader to take it for granted that people narrate the stories of their lives in real-time to no one in particular. 

By now, I mean, in fairness, we are readers. We’re holding the novel. We know it’s a novel. It’s not likely our first encounter with “Book.” Novels are filled with lies and tricks and gimmicks and gears. We’re used to it. It’s nothing new. Get on with the story! 

Maybe it’s like anything: after a while, first-person narration is like yoga pants, Crossfit, and poke bowls. You just yank on the tights, do your deadlifts, eat your fish cube, and stop thinking about it. 

And get on with the story! 

_____

PHOTO: Teaching during the school year, I observed Covid-19 protocols in one way by eating lunch in my car, which became my office.