Writing in the First Person
Whenever you choose the narrator for your story, it is a good idea to know why you have chosen to tell the story from that particular POV.
Since most beginning writers tend to write in first person, I thought it would be a good idea to present some of the most useful advice I
have been able to give to my students as well as a couple of exercises to help you understand just who that first person narrator really
is. (I'm not going to protract this discussion with all the various first person options; we're just focusing here on a basic persona
narrator.)
A good rule of thumb:
When you think about why you have chosen first person as the point of view in a short story or a novel, it is not because it is you, but a
character you have created to tell the story. Obviously there is a significant difference between choosing first person in fiction and having
no choice but to use first person in a memoir. However, in both instances time, most likely a significant amount of it, has passed
between when the protagonist experiences the story and when the narrator is telling it. On the other hand, the narrator's voice in a
memoir, is a representation of you, and you are the protagonist. (More about that in another essay.)
In first person, the narrator and the protagonist are the same person. Pretty self-evident, right? Except, the narrator could be the
protagonist twenty years after the events of the story have occurred. And sometimes it's really good to think of it that way, that there is a
time separation between when the events in the story happened and when the story is being told.
The narrator, then, is not in the same place or time as the protagonist. The protagonist, then, is a character, separate from the narrator,
who is acting and reacting in the story, not commenting on it, not describing where the action is occurring, not mentioning what the
weather is. The protagonist is being manipulated by the narrator just like all the other characters are.
This separation is key to a successful and exciting first person voice. The exercises below will make this clearer, and I suggest that you
also take a look at Jim Thompson's novel, The Killer Inside Me, in order to read a wonderful example of how to conceptualize that split
between narrator and protagonist.
First, the exercises:
1. Imagine the narrator of your story and the time in which he/she lives. How distant is it from the events in the story? Do you know why
this time difference is important to the story? Has the narrator's reason for telling the story something to do with this time span? Answer
the questions, as best you can, and don't take too much time. You might want to set a timer for 15 minutes.
2. Write a character sketch of the protagonist, including all pertinent details regarding his/her life as it may or may not impinge on the
story. The more you know about this character, the more authority you will have to tell his/her story. Do not set the timer for this exercise.
Take as much time as you need to become as familiar with the protagonist as possible. You may find yourself spending more than one
day at it.
3. Now write a character sketch of the narrator. How has the time difference changed the basic elements of his/her personality due to the
events in the story? Again, take as much time as you need for this.
Let's Look at The Killer Inside Me
Some writers have a canny ability to scare us not by making the environment of the story frightening but by making the character's inner
world frightening. In this novel, a real classic of the noir genre, a seemingly boring, stupid sheriff, tells the story. He is someone whose
every conversation is riddled with clichés and from whom most people shrink because of how boring he is. But that's his outward
persona. It's when we are able to listen to what goes on inside him that we begin to understand what the action of the novel is going to
be about. Thompson doesn't take long to set this up, in fact it's within the very opening that we begin to notice there is a frightening split
in this man. The mild, seemingly dimwitted deputy has out of nowhere revealed his vicious, mean side that he knows he must hide. It is
from this early encounter with his two sides that Thompson prepares us for what we eventually learn about him -- that he is a psychotic
killer, capable of horrifying brutality towards women.
The reason to look closely at this novel for our purposes has to do with the way in which Thompson has made the tension in the story
dependent on keeping the two sides of this man's personality separate. As the character struggles to maintain the split, we as readers
know that it will only be when he begins to lose control of himself that the working out of the conflict can occur. When the boring sheriff
and the psychotic killer begin to merge we can see, as writers, what the consequences of merging the narrator and the protagonist are.
At the end of this novel, the protagonist no longer knows who he is, where he is, or why. In much the same way, you should remind
yourself while writing that if you merge your narrator and protagonist, you will have dampened the impact of what you have been working
so hard to achieve. There is a reason why there needs to be two separate personalities, the most important being that in first person, it
is the narrator who has achieved the transformation and it is the protagonist who has caused it to happen. The protagonist's role as
catalyst is essential to what the narrator has learned.
In Thompson's novel, what he so graphically shows his readers is how the diseased mind of the protagonist kills the narrator so that at
the end he can't distinguish which is which. And what this narrator/protagonist merger shows us as writers is the problem we will have if
we allow this merger to occur. When the two are one, there is no voice to guide the story and no one separate from that to experience the
story. It is a great object lesson for all of us and is one of the best reasons to read this novel, which I recommend you do in one sitting so
that the full impact of the progression hits you fully.