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Writing Excuses 20.13: First Person
Apr. 3rd, 2025 05:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mbarkerWriting Excuses 20.13: First Person
Key points: First person. What does it do well? Direct address to the reader, the aside. Subjective unreliable point of view. Intimacy. What is first person not effective at? Clarity, complex scenes. Multi POV ensemble cast! Mirror moments, what does the character look like? Tools for first person? Avoid navelgazing by adding a activity. Multiple senses! Cadence. Why use first person? Proximity, emotion. Genres of the body, humor, romance, erotica, and horror. Tapping into emotional subjective experience. Plot reveals! Character change. Coming of age stories. What is the value of an unreliable narrator? When character's goals shift. What is the lie that the character believes?
[Season 20, Episode 13]
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
[Season 20, Episode 13]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] First person.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
[Dan] We are beginning today a small cycle of episodes in which we're going to talk about the lens of proximity, how close you are to a character and how much you get to know about that character's reactions and motivations and so on and so on. We're going to begin today by talking about first person. First person feels as if it might be the most natural way to tell a story, because that's the way we talk about ourselves. Though obviously, the other persons that we will discuss in future episodes are also and equally useful, just useful in different situations. So I want to start by asking what is first-person good at? What kinds of situations do we love first-person? What does first-person do well?
[Mary Robinette] I think the direct address to the reader, the aside, where it's like, this is what I'm thinking. This is how I'm feeling in the moment. It's not just about the internal thoughts. It's one… It's a… The thing that I've found that first-person can do that kind of nothing else gets to is hang on, let me just explain this one thing to you. So that kind of direct address of here's some exposition. I think one of the things that it has is that it immediately connects it to why it is important to the character and that is it's sometimes harder to surface things.
[DongWon] One of the things I love about first-person is it's a thing that you can do in text, in prose, in a way that's incredibly difficult or artificial to do in other media. You can have first-person asides, like the aside in theater, being… Or a soliloquy, and you can sort of fake it in films through voiceovers and things like that. But in a novel, you can have it in direct access into the interiority of a character in a way that you can't in almost any other medium. So there's something really special about the ability for prose writers to use that first-person perspective to say explicitly here's what the character's thinking, here's what the character is perceiving. And when you want to root someone very much in a subjective unreliable point of view, first-person is the go to in your toolkit.
[Dan] Well, that unreliability is so fun to play with, too. Talking about this direct aside to the reader… You could do that in third person. But in first-person, it feels like there is no artifice there. It feels like you're getting it much more directly. But… Of course there's artifice there. Because you are telling this through some other person that you've invented. It's the first person. It's not actually me, it's John Cleaver or whoever I'm writing about. So there's still a lot of artifice, there's still a lot of kind of artificiality about it, but it feels truer, it feels more direct, and that allows you to be unreliable and shaky and shenaniganry.
[Erin] I also think it creates a feeling of intimacy, or it can create a feeling of intimacy between the character and the reader. Because it's like… Like the direct aside, it's like somebody has sat down and said, okay, I'm going to tell you something. I'm just going to tell you, the reader, this thing. And nobody else in the story will understand how I feel about this at the core, nobody else will know my internal thoughts except for you. One of the reasons I love writing in first person is because you can really lean into the voice in a way that I think third person can do, especially third person where it's very close, but it doesn't have that quite the same feel as, like, a friend sat down. And part of what I'm trying to do as a writer is to capture that friend's voice and how they would tell the story in a way that nobody else could.
[DongWon] There's something really, really interesting about first person, because it is both our oldest form of storytelling, because just the way that we tell a story is I was walking down the street the other day. I was going to the store. The dog jumped out in the street, and I chased after it. Right? Like, that is just how we tell stories, and the way people have told stories as long as they were telling stories. But as a literary convention, as a part of the novel, it's one of the newest forms. At least in a dominant way. Like, there are examples that go back. But in terms of being so dominant in terms of how it exists in the contemporary novel, it is very much a thing that arose in, like, modern days, in like early mid twentieth century. Right? So one thing that I see people struggle with, when people push back against first-person, which I still see kind of a shocking amount. But when I see that pushback, it's… There's like an artificiality to first-person that can be a tough hurdle for some readers to get past. Because you're reading a text, but the text is being told to you as if a person is narrating it. So who is narrating it to you in that moment becomes a question in certain reader's minds. So there's like a… There is both an incredible immediacy, intimacy, and familiarity to first-person, and a layer of artificiality that requires one extra jump for the reader.
[Howard] And… That's weird, because I will accept that there is magic and spaceships and vampires, but I'm really struggling with the fact that there is a book.
[Mary Robinette] I think it's not so much that it's… Like, I can think of a bajillion examples of first-person. Because the novel would often start… When you're looking at the trajectory of the novel as a travelogue. Then you're looking at Poe, who often used first-person.
[DongWon] It's like where does epistolary end…
[Mary Robinette] Right. Exactly.
[DongWon] And first-person begin is a we… The distinction that you and I are drawing here. But [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly. But… But I think the thing is that one of the reasons it fell out of fashion is that people started to get hung up on the… But really did they have time to write this while they were being dragged away by eldritch horrors?
[Laughter]
[Erin] Yes. Always yes.
[Dan] Yeah. At what point in the story is this account being given? Well, I like you mentioned the kind of newness of it. It is… First person is going through a huge Renaissance right now in certain corners of the market. A lot of book tubers, books to grammars, book talkers… There's a big trend going around. I see where they will just flat out refuse to read something unless it's in first-person.
[DongWon] Huh.
[Dan] That's obviously not everybody, and it's not the whole market. But it's kind of having a heyday right now, which I think is really interesting. I want to ask the question what is first-person bad at? As long as we're talking about it, what can you not do very effectively with it?
[DongWon] Clarity.
[Howard] Avoid the capital I.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] I think first-person… It can be harder to truly communicate to the reader what's happening in a complex scene. Because you're anchored to one perspective and one understanding of what's happening in a particular moment. So there's an immediacy to that. But when you think about your subjective experience of a large event, you're not getting the full picture because you're only seeing a little piece of it. Right? So I think we think of first-hand experience as the most true, but in a lot of ways, the way we consume information about what happened is somebody explaining from multiple perspectives. So when you're limiting yourself to one POV in a story, you are removing access to a lot of tools that you have that you would have in cinema, for example. You think cinematically, all the things the camera sees are just what the character's actually seeing, what the character's seeing is very different. Right? So you're much more constrained. So if you want real true like grounded clarity about feelings, emotions, what happened in a complex scene, first-person's pretty tough to make that happen.
[Howard] Your multi POV ensemble cast…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] In a heist thing… Yeah, that's difficult to pull off in first-person.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's also, I think, first-person… You can cheat when we get to third person, you can cheat to show us what a character looks like even when you're in tight third person, but when you're in first-person, unless they step up and have a mirror moment, which… I was walking down the hall and I stopped to regard myself in the mirror.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I had curly red hair, bright green eyes, and was extremely buxom.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] I think that everyone thinks about themselves [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] Exactly.
[Erin] Just in that tone. Well, I agree with it. Like, clarity is part of it, and also just knowledge. Like the characters… A lot of times, you have, like, but the reader knows and what the character knows. In first-person, they get… They are the same. Because… Unless… Now there are ways to cheat out of this, but in general, you only know what the character knows about the world, about the situation, about the experience. So if there's something that you really need, like description, self-description, the reader to know, but there's no reason for the character to know that, you're going to have to figure out a workaround. Even in unreliable… Like, one of the things I really like doing in pieces with unreliable narrators is setting up a reliable outsider that is… That can be established, like, because they hold a position of authority or you see them being reliable in several scenes, and can point out through dialogue or through their own actions what's happening outside of the first-person, that character's first-person experience.
[DongWon] They can also…
[Erin] They can then misinterpret what that reliable person does, but the reader… It's clear enough to the reader, like, what happens. I think about a scene I wrote in my story Wolfy Things where the mom is crying and the sun misinterprets it that he's like…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] She's trying to salt the food with her tears. Like… Because no one's going to do that.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Like, you, as a reader, know that seems unlikely. Probably she's just crying over the soup.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] But he cannot accept that. But because it's something clear enough to the reader, it comes through. But it requires a lot of work to do that. Where is in a third person, you could probably just say, like, she's crying and then you would know.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] You could cheat that also with chapter bumps. You insert in universe material that appears at the top of the chapter, and then the first-person account either accounts for that or doesn't account for that. That can argue with the character just fine.
[Dan] All right. Let's take a moment here to pause, and when we come back, we'll discuss this further.
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[Dan] All right. So we've talked about things that first-person does well and does less well. Let's talk now about how. How can we use first-person effectively? What are some good tools for using first person as a perspective?
[Mary Robinette] So I'm going to talk about one of the traps of first-person is a way of bringing us around to an effective tool. One of the traps of first-person is navelgazing. So it is, I think, one of the things that it does really well is that you can get into the character's interiority, but you can, like, have a character just sit in a room and think about themselves and never move on. So, for me, one of the tools that I often try to use when I'm doing that to combat the navelgazing is that if I have a scene where my character needs to think about something for whatever reason, I try to pair it with an activity that is somehow plot related. So, like, if there's this is a conspiracy, I think a conspiracy thing is happening, I will have them trying to repair a rover. Then, as they're repairing the rover, and having conversations, different things will then trigger for them. It's like hum, I think this is… You just said something very fishy, and what's going on with your face right now? But it is… Having that interaction with the outside world keeps… For me, keeps my navelgazing to a minimum.
[Howard] Yeah. It's the multi sensory approach. Only saying what the character is thinking about is just the navelgazing. But, I'm thinking about this. I'm seeing that. I smell this. I heard that. I'm touching this. My heart is pounding or I have a headache. I have… There's a whole huge spectrum of senses that you can tap into with first-person. If you don't use at least three of them, I feel like you're leaving too much unsaid.
[Erin] A tool that I really like that… To play around with with first-person is cadence. What the rhythm of that person's thoughts are as they're driving things. Because it tells you about the emotions. One thing that's really… You can have a very self-aware first-person character, but a lot of times they're not sure what's going on, exactly. They're afraid, but they may not say, like, I am afraid right now. They may just be experiencing fear. But what you can do is go with a faster Kayden. All of a sudden, like breathing heavy, like the heartbeat racing, when you're afraid. They're noticing things that are fearful, but also, the entire cadence of the piece as that sort of taut feeling to it, and then when they're safety, the cadence slows down. It gives a completely different feeling without you needing to signal it from the outside.
[Mary Robinette] Also, that is something that is extremely apparent when I'm doing audiobooks. When I'm narrating and the author is thinking about that, it shows up on the page and you can really hear it. It is much easier to [garbled]
[Howard] [garbled] makes your job easier.
[Mary Robinette] So much easier. I actually think that that's one of the reasons we're seeing the surgeon audio, in first-person narratives, is because they do better in audiobook. But there are times when I have to narrate something and the writer has not paid attention to the Kayden, and attempting to get the emotion into that scene is significantly harder, even though you have the added layer of I do cool things with my voice. It is undercut by the cadence.
[Howard] One of the reasons, Mary Robinette, that your first half of the episode mirrors scene was so humorous is that it breaks the true cadence of that person. That is not the pattern that you would use, that is not the cadence of… At least not of my inner voice. When I look in the mirror…
[Mary Robinette] No.
[Howard] My inner voice… Well, I'm not saying mirrors scenes are bad. I will look in the mirror and the cadence for my mirror scene is, Howard, you gonna go outside looking like that?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Yep. Then I'm off. Now the reader has an insight into how I feel about how I look and how much I care. That's all we need.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, most of my mirror scenes would actually be…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] How did you sleep on your hair to get [garbled]
[laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Like that.
[Dan] So, if we are using first person as a lens… Let me rephrase. If are using proximity as a lens, this is how we want to look at our work and we… What are some of the reasons we might choose first-person then? What is going to guide us? What… I guess this kind of comes back to the question we asked in the beginning of what does first-person do that the others can't. But what are some situations where we will say you know what this really needs? First-person.
[DongWon] It's so intimate. Right? We're talking about proximity. Right? First-person is… You're right up on that perspective, you're in their head with them. So when you need anything that is raw emotion. Right? That's why it works so well in YA, why we see it there so much. That's why you see it a ton in what I think of as genres of the body. Right? So, humor, romance, erotica, and horror. Right? Like, horror in particular, first-person is just so valuable there because as a person is experiencing disruption, fear, sensations in their body, all of those things, are stuff that you can get to so quickly and so closely as first-person that can take extra work when you're having to do the work of third person limited or omniscient of describing a broader scene. Right?
[Dan] Yeah.
[DongWon] So I think whenever you want to tap into someone's like emotional subjective experience, first person does so well for that. I think that's why it's doing so well on things like book talk right now.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Howard] When you've got a plot reveal that that moment, first-person can do that so well. Because we are right there. The Revelation of whatever it is, the plot twist, the monster, the whatever, the reader is getting that reveal at the same time the character is getting that reveal at the end. Yeah. Immediacy and proximity. And, as a writer, that lens of proximity… You may choose to look at your reveal's pacifically at the reveal you have in mind and say, you know what? This is going to work better in first-person than anything else I can do. So maybe that's the way I need to shape the rest of the story.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Yeah. I think that a lot of times, I think of first-person stories as stories of perspective. Because you've chosen to use this particular… That character is the lens into the story more than anything else. Because you are filtering everything through the way that character experiences things. So, choosing it when you're going to have a reveal that shifts that character's perspective, where they understand something they didn't understand before, that they couldn't understand before, is where something… Where it really appeals to me. Where there is a reason in which that person as a filter is the best filter for the story.
[Mary Robinette] That ties into one of my absolute favorite things that you can do with first-person that you cannot do with any of the others. It's the proximity thing. That you can have the character change by the act of telling the story. Like, some of my favorite stories are ones… It's one of the reasons I love the John Cleaver books so much is that John is not the same person at the beginning is at the end, and the way John is relating to the reader has changed. That is so… I think that's so interesting. It works really… I think, really, really well in coming-of-age stories. I think that's one of the reasons we often see first-person paired with younger protagonists, because you more commonly have a coming-of-age story with them. But it is something that is just so delicious, so intimate.
[Dan] Yeah. I know that we are kind of running up against the end of time here…
[Erin] The end of time!
[Dan] The end of all… Not necessarily all time, but the end of our time for this. I do want to get back to…
[Mary Robinette] As I was sitting on the couch, Dan told me that I was running up against the end of time. I paused to look in the mirror…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Are you really going outside like that?
[Dan] This is part of the lens of where and when.
[Erin] Exactly. At least I'll look good during my final [garbled]
[Dan] I do want to circle back to unreliability. Because not only… That was something we mentioned not only as a strength of first-person, but it's one of the things that is… One of the downsides of first-person. Not necessarily a downside, is that it's really hard to not be unreliable with it. What is the value of an unreliable narrator? This isn't really an unreliable narration episode, but it's so closely linked to first-person. You were talking about the John Cleaver books. That's leaning so heavily on that, the idea that what he is telling you is what he thinks is true, not what is actually true. That dramatic irony of being able to listen to him talk about himself and know, oh, dude, you are wrong about so many things. What is the value of unreliability and why might a reader, an author, I mean, choose to put that into their story?
[DongWon] I mean, going back several episodes to goals and motivations. Right? A character's goals often involve them lying to themselves a little bit because they think they want X, but what they really need is Y. Right? So the movement from understanding what your original goal was to what your new goals are is one of that unreliability coming to the fore so you realize that, like, oh, my understanding of the world is shifting. The reason why first-person is sort of inherently unreliable, because character growth necessarily changes what is quote unquote real for the audience experience. Right? So you're shifting… Which is both what makes first-person fun and so challenging is that it's always already moving around you at all times.
[Mary Robinette] There's the idea that we talk about periodically, what is the lie the character believes? There's a bunch of different forms that that takes, but I think one of the things that you can really play with in first-person is that you can reveal character by what the character is lying to themselves about and how they are lying to themselves and the lengths that they will go to to preserve those lies. That's something that's, I think, much easier to do in first-person because of the navelgazing. But because they can do a soliloquy in ways that a third person really can't. Then, that in itself, can become a form of conflict as they are struggling with the fact that all of their reasons are breaking down.
[DongWon] I call that narrative parallax because the slight shift in perspective lets you reveal more.
[Erin] Something that just occurs to me as you asked this question is that the reason because I love unreliable narration. It's like my favorite thing ever. I think it's because I like characters that don't necessarily change or grow. Which means that the forward momentum in the story has to be the reader realization of the truth of who that character is. So, like, if they're not, like, because if they were doing… They externally sort of do the same things, but you… They understand more about the world, you understand more about them. It grows in context, as opposed to in action. Sometimes I think unreliability works well because it feels like you're moving forward as they continue to misinterpret the world, even though they don't do anything different. It still gives it a sense of a forward lean in the reader's mind.
[Howard] I think two of my favorite examples of unreliable narrators are in first-person our books where you don't realize until the very end that this is a single POV that has been telling you a story in multiple POVs. The Fifth Season and Player of Games by Iain Banks. Fifth Season by N K Jemison. You discover late in the stories, oh, this story has a first-person narrator who is part of the action, and they been lying to me about their involvement the whole time, until the very end. That's not really a first-person narrative, and maybe that's a segue into how we mess with proximity later.
[Dan] Well, now we finally have arrived at the end of times…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] So, it's homework time. What I would like you to do is go pick up a book that you love, something that you enjoy. Find a scene that you think is really great that is not in first-person, and take a crack at rewriting it in first-person from the point of view of one of the characters in it. Pay attention to what types of changes this requires you to make, how information comes across differently.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
