Is Your First-Person Narrator Hurting Your Story?
Is your first-person narrator hurting your story? Ten traps to watch out for, and resources that can help.
Annie Mydla, Managing Editor
The author wants the reader to feel close to the story, characters, and narrative voice. They believe that first-person narration will make readers experience the story as they do. Why not? The reader will "see" and "feel" everything in the same order, and in the same detail, as the author does in their head. This approach may seem common-sensical, but reader experience doesn't exactly work that way.
Recreating the environment we see and feel in our heads through a first-person narrator rarely achieves the author's intent. It's not artful enough. Good fiction is successful not because it draws from the "common sense" we know from everyday life, but because its author has become an expert at creating an artificially immersive experience for the reader. That takes a whole different set of rules and tools.
From this point of view, first-person narration is like the "hard mode" of fiction writing due to the temptation of using "common sense". It can lead writers to collapse tension, reduce reader investment, and diminish the authority of the storytelling. Read on to ensure your first-person narrator isn't falling into these ten traps.
The narrator is a glove puppet for the plot
An author has come up with an amazing plot, and they want it to stand out. They leave their first-person narrator undefined, or vaguely defined, to allow the maximum number of readers to project themselves into the narrative.
It might feel logical to help one narrative element stand out by toning down another, but watch out. A disembodied "I" immerses readers less than a narrator who feels specific and concrete. That's because a book feels most like "a real book" when all of the ingredients are used in the right balance: Plot, character, setting, theme, mood, tone, atmosphere, motif, and more. Dial any of these down too much, and readers instinctively lose investment.
For more information on what makes a strong first-person narrator, check out these articles from Now Novel and Writing Mastery. The exercises on my blog post about one-dimensional protagonists might also help.
The narrator is all interiority and no material context
You're reading a book with a first-person narrator. After five pages, you realize you still don't know the setting, the time period, the genre, who the narrator is, who the other characters are, what their relationship is, or what kind of plot you can look forward to. The narrative is so far inside the first-person narrator's head that there's little concrete information for the reader to hold on to.
Winning Writers editor and North Street Book Prize judge Jendi Reiter describes the problem this way: "[Some] authors start too soon within the subjective experience, and don't bother with the setting or the material details of who this person is."
While it might seem like good sense to create a feeling of mystery by withholding information from the reader, it can backfire, especially when writing in first person. Readers need a certain amount of information to feel interested. The time for perspective shifts, plot twists, and withholding information is in the rising action, when the reader has already become oriented in the narrative.
Exercise: Read these articles from Writers Helping Readers, Georgina Green, and Reedsy, then look at your exposition. Does it contain answers to the following questions: What, when, where, why, who, how? Is your exposition setting up reader expectations for later? If not, how can your exposition be changed to fulfill those functions while staying immersive?
The narrator is an excuse to "tell" and not "show"
"Writers are at their best not when they tell people what to think, but when they provide a context within which others can think." (from How to Know a Person, by David Brooks)
Writing in first person is like the hard mode of "showing, not telling" due to the dominance of the character's point of view. Yes, it is the privilege of the first-person perspective that more telling feels okay compared to third person, but sometimes authors can take it too far. With unlimited access to the character's thoughts, authors are sometimes tempted to really make sure readers understand what's going on.
This can lead to a flattening of the narrative through redundancy or just plain over-simplicity. Here's an example: ("telling" parts in bold):
I sat miserably in my chair, biting my fingernails. I felt so upset. Rachel had tripped me on my way into the classroom that morning, and her friends had laughed. They were bullying me. I raised my hand in order to get the teacher's attention. The teacher noticed, but didn't call on me. She was ignoring me!
Here, the bolded sentences prioritize plain information over providing an immersive experience. They unnecessarily repeat what the un-bolded sentences have already demonstrated. The paragraph gets stronger when the "telling" language is removed:
I sat miserably in my chair, biting my fingernails. Rachel had tripped me on my way into the classroom that morning, and her friends had laughed. I raised my hand. The teacher noticed, but didn't call on me.
If you'd like to learn more about showing and telling in the first person, these articles from The Habit and Inkthinker can provide some good context.
The narrator is overly observant
Have you ever met someone who had to comment on everything they saw? While this can make a person fun to talk to in real life, it can also make it hard to have a straightforward conversation. And when it's a first-person narrator who's over-commenting, the excess detail can obscure the main plotline.
I mainly find the overly observant narrator in novels with worldbuilding: sci-fi, fantasy, and historical fiction. The author wants to make sure the reader is "seeing" every interesting aspect of the built world. When those details aren't supporting the plot, though, it can lag the pace and make the reader feel less invested.
Exercise: Read this novel excerpt from Roz Morris, then do a line edit for excess detail. For everything the narrator "sees", ask: Does this support the main plot or themes? Does it foreshadow? Is essential characterization provided by the way the narrator thinks about it? Is it contributing to atmosphere or tone? Does it feature in the story later? If the answer is no, that detail might be better left out, or replaced with one that supports other elements in the story.
The narrator is static
Even when the first-person narrator has an interesting character profile, the narrative will likely feel flattened if there's no character growth. "But my book is plot-driven, not character-driven," some authors respond. Fair enough. But even plot-driven novels have character growth—especially high-interiority books, like those with first-person narrators.
The difference between plot-driven and character-driven books comes down to emphasis. In a character-driven book, each plot point supports the character's inner journey of change. In a plot-driven book, the main character still grows, but each stage of character growth supports the forward movement of the plot. Both types of books have plot development and character development—they just perform different functions.
Exercise: Read this article about balancing plot and character development by Jami Gold, then journal on your first-person narrator's growth arc. What about your narrator is different in the falling action than it was in the exposition? When the climax happens, what change in the narrator is it catalyzing? What in the rising action is foreshadowing this change? How is the change reflected in the narrator's attitudes, speech, and behavior toward other characters?
The narrator sounds too old or too young
It's important to get the "age" of a first-person voice right, or risk losing believability. Jendi observes that we often receive books with young narrators whose "observations, references, or syntax sound too adult," as well as teen or new adult narrators who sound "developmentally younger (simplistic reactions, no awareness of issues outside their immediate personal life, immature dependence on peers' opinions)." Narrators with the wrong-aged voice can jolt a reader out of the story.
Fortunately, there are resources to help authors achieve a believable voice for their character's age: here's Writers and Artists on writing like a child, DIY MFA on middle-grade narrators, and Sophia Whittemore on first-person teenagers. Lit Hub has a thought-provoking article on how fiction treats the elderly, and this forum discussion on writing older characters is full of good insights.
If your first-person narrator is a different age from you—or even if they're the same age—it might be worthwhile to spend a week or two developing their voice to make it sound realistic to readers. Harking back to the "glove-puppet narrator", above, it's not safe to assume that the common-sense knowledge about age you have from real life will translate into a realistic voice on the page.
The narrator's views become the book's views
One of the most distressing experiences for me as a contest judge and book critiquer is when a first-person narrator has prejudiced views, and it's impossible to figure out if it's just that character who is flawed, or if the book/author endorses those views. Nine times out of ten, this problem arises from a problem of tone: the distance between the narratorial voice and the authorial voice has collapsed.
Jendi describes the problem this way: "The first-person narrator has prejudices or uses problematic language, and because we're limited to their point of view, it is not clear whether the book endorses those attitudes. Too many authors think that a first-person character voice automatically creates critical distance, but no. The story still has to show some pushback, either from other characters, from the point-of-view character changing, or from the facts around them."
The authors I talk to about this rarely intended to have the entire book come across as prejudiced. But while they as authors knew how they stood on the issues, those perspectives never made it to the page.
How can an author create space for contrasting and contextualizing information in a first-person story? There are multiple ways. Making choices in the wider narrative that disprove the narrator's opinions can help, as Mythcreants points out. This article from Gotham Writers shows how to incorporate other characters' thoughts into first-person narration. Electric Lit demonstrates how making a narrator obviously unreliable can challenge their prejudices, and also gives good examples of when it didn't work so well.
If your book takes on prejudices, it might be worthwhile to reconsider whether first-person narration is the best choice for what you want to communicate. Researching the basic functions of first-, second-, and third-person and experimenting with alternate POVs in your manuscript could boost your book's credibility and effectiveness in the long run. Jericho Writers and The Novelry both have straightforward and comprehensive overviews of the POVs and where they work best.
The narrator takes over the book
The author has a character in mind and wants the reader to experience that person the same way they do. They choose a first-person narrator to make the reader really close to that character. Anything else that happens in the book—plot, other characters, setting, theme—comes a distant second to the narrator, their thoughts, and their reactions to things.
The takeover narrator often appears when the first-person figure is a proxy for the author. I see it often in memoirs and fictionalized memoirs, and also in genre fiction, literary fiction, and poetry. My interest plummets if I notice that the first-person narrator has taken over. To me, it's a sign that the author is writing the book as a personal processing tool rather than as an immersive experience for readers.
The first-person narrator who takes over also often has other problems, like being too self-congratulatory, too often correct, remaining static, and solving every problem too quickly. Believability suffers in these cases. Most good fiction leaves room for ambivalence—contrasting emotions and attitudes that exist at the same moment. Too much certainty, success, and correctness in the narrator can lead readers to suspect that parts of the narrative are being left out, parts that would have shown its events (and the narrator's part in them) in a fuller light.
If your project is in first person and you haven't yet considered whether the narrative voice is balanced with the plot, it could be a good idea to look into it. Ideas on how can be found in these articles from ThoughtCo (the section entitled "The Demands of the First-Person Singular") and Alyssa Matesic (item #3, "Alienating Readers").
Reading up on how first person is used in memoirs can help, with many of the same insights applying to fiction. Brooke Warner's article on self-referentiality and Jane Friedman's observations on POV in memoir are great resources.
The narrator's first-person combines with present tense to flatten the narrative
An author wants readers to feel the immediacy of a character's experience, so they couple the use of first-person narration with the present tense (example: "I walk to campus with Julie. We're talking about John when I see him crossing over the green towards us.") Again, though, this common-sensical approach can backfire if used without careful consideration.
Jendi describes the problem: "In general, I read too many books nowadays with first-person, present-tense narration (traditionally published, as well as in the North Street competition). The present tense deprives the POV character of the temporal complexity that a novel, as opposed to a movie, can provide—the ability to look backward, forward, introspect, and go beyond blow-by-blow external action."
If you find your first-person present narrative feels flat, it might be time to think about moving to past tense and/or third-person to open up the range of literary tools at your disposal. The articles mentioned above by Jericho Writers and The Novelry could be helpful for analyzing POV choices, and Writer's Digest has an excellent write-up about choosing tense and POV together.
The narrator starts too many sentences with "I"
The last trap first-person narration can lay is stylistic: it tempts authors to start sentences with "I". It's not a sin to start sentences with "I", but it can be a flow-killer beyond a certain point. Take, for example, this paragraph:
I sat upright in bed. Where was that noise coming from? I fumbled to turn on the light, and at the same time I used my feet to search the floor for slippers. I could hear a scratching under the floorboards. I almost didn't get out of bed, I was so scared.
When there's this much repetition in sentence structure, the writing can look inorganic on the page and cause the reader to lose immersivity. Rewriting to remove the majority of "I"s helps pacing and focus:
I sat upright in bed. Where was that noise coming from? My fingers fumbled for the light switch while my feet searched the floor for my slippers. That scratching—it couldn't be from under the floorboards? My feet shrank back up to the mattress.
Having to leave the "I"s behind didn't just reduce repetition, it gave me the opportunity to introduce new literary devices that added interest: personification ("my fingers fumbled", "my feet searched", "my feet shrank") and free internal discourse ("That scratching—it couldn't be from under the floorboards?")
Line editing for "I" sentences is usually a good idea when writing in first-person. These articles from Writing Classes, Louise Harnby, and Liminal Pages discuss the problem and suggest different sentence openers.
Choosing the right point of view for your narrative, be it first-, second-, or third-person, is only one part of what makes writing a novel different from everyday communication. A great novelist can tap a wide range of literary skills. For a detailed description of the key differences between writing "a real book" and simply "telling a story", see this article from The Editor's Blog. Or, for a more personal analysis of your work-in-progress (novel or memoir), submit it to our Critique Service.
Categories: Advice for Writers