Call me Ishmael.

[truepenny]

I should be working on Chapter 2 of The Mirador, or on one of the two short stories that have complete drafts, or on this article I promised to write.

But I'm not.

I'm sitting here getting my ass kicked all over the map in Civ IV and thinking about first-person point of view. Why you do it and how you do it and what the heck is it for anyway?

This is what we might call first-order cat vacuuming (well, except for the Civ IV part), because the issue of first person is something that has been kicking my ass all over the map in writing The Mirador. Because--and I warn y'all about this right now, so there won't be any nasty surprises--I switch narrators. A secondary character in The Virtu is one of the narrators of The Mirador; Felix gets to take a break, at least from a narrating perspective. (And then in Summerdown, I'll switch again and poor Mildmay can sit down and shut up, while Felix gets back in the spotlight, but we aren't even there yet and that's a half-procastinatory anxiety for another day.)

But switching narrators, especially after all the blood I've sweated over getting Felix & Mildmay right, is hard, and it's throwing into sharp relief what it is a first person narrator does.

Now, it used to be, way back in the day when Daniel Defoe was the hot thing in authors, that first person was an attempt to give a narrative credibility and verisimilitude. It was supposed to be an eye-witness account of the "No shit, there I was" variety. This is no longer true, except in certain specific subgenres that I'm not going to talk about because, frankly, I'm not interested in them. Nowadays, when you pick up a novel or flip to a short story and find that it's in first person, you don't think that might mean that Huck Finn or Bertie Wooster or Adrian Mole is or ever has been a real person. It just means that the author has made certain choices about storytelling.

And sometimes those choices have to do with the flavor of an eye-witness or survivor account. Stephen King's novella The Mist uses it for that reason. So does, in a very different way, The Left Hand of Darkness. The Left Hand of Darkness, though, also uses its first person narrators to talk about subjectivity and truth-telling, and this, I think, is one thing that the first-person narrator does extremely well, if you let it.

A sidebar: not all authors choose first-person for the kind of thematic and philosophical reasons I'm discussing. Some authors choose it because their genre dictates it or because they feel comfortable with it or because they took off their tinfoil hat and this is what the voices told them to do. I don't think, back when I started writing Mélusine, I was thinking about any of these things either. As Edgar Degas once said, Painting is easy when you don't know how but very difficult when you do.

Where was I?

Oh, yes. Subjectivity.

Making the choice of a first-person narrator means that there are certain things you can and cannot do, and most of them have to do, one way or another, with the narrator as character. (Which, yes, can also happen in omni, but rather differently.) The first-person narrator/protagonist is both agent of and witness to the events of their story, and that means that you never get to simply recount, This is what happened. (Even if that is the first line of The Mist. It's a lie. Because we're writers, remember? Lying is what we do.) The divide between author and character has to be constant and sharp, because you always have to remember that you aren't the one telling the story. Third-person ironically allows the author to be much closer to the narrative, because you don't have to filter the story through this other voice. (Voice in third-person has its own pitfalls, but that is not what this post is about.) The first-person narrator is not a mouthpiece for the author; if anything, it's the other way around. Because to get the value of a first-person narrator, you have to think about what that character would say, what they'd feel, how they'd react. What kind of details they notice--and it may not be the same details you would notice in the same situation. And if you want to get a particular piece of information to the reader, you have to think through the reasons that this particular character would mention it. Motiveless exposition is bad in first person, because it's obvious and because it breaks the very delicate balance of the fiction.

Which is not to say you can't have exposition in first person--P. G. Wodehouse does it beautifully. But the exposition has to be in character. First-person is like acting; you don't get to set the character down for a paragraph while you get the backstory sorted out. If they say something, it has to be for their reasons.

But that's also what makes it fun and what makes it an infinitely fascinating storytelling technique. Because you always have that question of the narrator's reliability to play with. Even a first person narrator who's trying to be truthful may not be reliable; their truth-telling abilities are limited to what they know and how they interpret what they see. Huck Finn is a devastatingly truthful narrator, but he's not reliable. Part of Twain's point, in fact, is the ways in which Huck can't be a reliable narrator, because his perspective is limited and warped. And Twain shows us this through Huck.

That, I think, is the best use of first-person: to tell a story that author and reader know is partial--both incomplete and biased. And to use that to show the reader the parts of the story the first-person narrator can't tell.

Comments

[libskrat]

Off on a slight tangent... one of the things that I think has to work for a first-person narration to be effective is that the narrator and his/her POV have to be at least as compelling as any other in the book.

This is why Sorcery and Cecilia works and The Grand Tour doesn't, IMO. In the former book, Cecy and Kate's voices are far and away the most intriguing available. In the latter, I kept finding myself distracted by other characters I wanted to hear more about (and from) -- the maidservants and the husbands especially.

(Plus the framing device in the sequel doesn't really work, but that's another story.)

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

You've just put your finger on two of the reasons I sometimes have trouble reading first-person narratives. I can and do read novels where I really dislike the narrator but I find it noticeably more difficult: I have to persuade myself that the book's other qualities merit spending time with this person. This is why I have found thinking about David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas more fun than the process of actually reading the book (and, in a way, one reason I miss being forced to read for seminars). The other problem I have is the one you describe finding in The Grand Tour: where the choice of narrator constrains the narrative to a point where I'm constantly being irritated by the flashes of detail, seen out of the corner of my eye, and constantly running away from the story. This is not the same as feeling that the world makes sense even in the bits you can't see: it's a matter of shade and intensity, I think, like avoiding blue-on-red in UI design.

Sometimes a hint from the author that you don't have to take the character by their own evaluation can be helpful. I read Wilkie Collins' The Woman In White before I'd really started thinking properly about who narrators were and whether I was supposed to agree with them, and oh, the relief (and enlightenment) when the narrators changed and I realised that I was allowed to think that Walter Hartwright is a wet dishcloth.

[jaylake.livejournal.com]

Wow.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[jaylake.livejournal.com]

Wow.

[mmarques.livejournal.com]

I've run into some of these issues with Mysterious Paris while writing limited 3rd.... Manon's main connection with her dead mother is through mysteries her mother wrote, and I have lengthy quotes from her mother's mysterious throughout my novel. But although I'm writing and inventing those excerpts, they have to sound like what fictional Georgia Roberts would write, and not my voice.

[dancingwriter.livejournal.com]

Now I really want to try writing something in first-person....

First Person Boondoggle

[jodi-davis.livejournal.com]

I fought, fought, fought like hell not to write my novel in 1st. Why? Even though there were all the good reasons you list here to do it. I'm good at it - the character had a hell of a voice - it illuminates the times better than any other method. But... the literati hate it. The buyers are prejudiced against it. I wrote a full three chapters in 3rd - DID NOT WORK.

So, I figured it's really hard to sell a story anyway - at least the story will be right.

I do think sometimes it is hard to get a reader who gets that your narrator can be judgmental, biased, wrong, unreliable... all rolled into one - it's their world view.

I have this bit about the WTC as seen from 2036 and the memorial there - and I can't tell you how many times readers have mentioned to me, wow - why do you feel that way... and I just have to laugh before I hit them with the manuscript. SHE feels that way, based on what she has lived through... do you think that I have killed someone before, based on the character? 1st person seems easy for the reader to confuse the author's voice (and I know I'm tangenting here) with the narrator's voice - I know I get comments like oo-la-la on the sexy bits but no one hides under their chair from me over the ruthless vicious bits...

It's strange.

[scribbling-elf.livejournal.com]

Interesting post....thanks for sharing.

I'm currently in a first person/third person quandary on my own slippery, troublesome novel. I've been told the adage "first time writers shouldn't use first person" because you need to "earn" it, etc., though I take it with a grain of salt. However, I've been flip-flopping back and forth on the novel for months, and it's become something of a mental block stalling my writer.

Every time I want to write from the main character's perspective, it just flows best in first person, not third. However, for purposes of the story, I really want to write about other characters' motives and scenes that she wouldn't be privy too. These want to be written in third--veering from limited to something more omniscient. No matter how I try, I can't seem to be able to make myself stick to one or the other.

Ah, the headaches of a writer....

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

Why should you have to stick to one? If you read Diana Gabaldon's stuff, a couple characters are first person POV, and most of them are 3rd. It can work to have multiple POVs. Too many authors get smacked down for wanting to use first person. This makes me sad, since it's a great tool. Having multiple POV characters can be very confusing, and switching POV depending on character makes it *less* confusing for me as a reader.

Whatever you do, you don't want to be Tom Clancy, where I pick a POV character, read all the scenes from that character's POV, then go back to the beginning and pick a new character.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I'm always glad when people point this out, since I'm currently trying to do a stunt rather like that. Only two characters, though -- one first person, one third. It's uncommon, but I hold fast to the belief that it can work. Also that I can't seem to make the novel work any other way.

[aitchellsee.livejournal.com]

Now and again I like to use first-person to tell an author that I've just scored a copy of a new book like "The Queen in Winter" and that I reallyreallyreally liked the story "A Gift of Wings" that I read therein. :-p

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

And a lovely use of first person it is! Thank you!

[almeda.livejournal.com]

SP Somtow/Somtow Sucharitkul's The Aquiliad strikes me as an amusing and useful example of a completely unreliable narrator (alternate-world Roman empire with tech, farce; the narrator is a pompous, moderately dim centurion who thinks other cultures are dirty and useless; the story is really ABOUT one such native, Aquila, and we gather throughout the story that his people are really rather nicer than the Romans on the whole, by modern standards).

Of course, it will also probably put anyone who's taken Latin seriously through the floor with laughter, but that may be my own particular kink at work. :->

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Of course, it will also probably put anyone who's taken Latin seriously through the floor with laughter, but that may be my own particular kink at work.

Now I really want to read it.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

No, but that's why writing in first is cool.

Do you find that filter-thing slows you down and makes you have to stop to think? Because I find the opposite, it speeds me up, because I don't have to think about how to write the line, I just have to think about how the character would say it. There isn't any objective reality problem. Everything is subjective. Everything is POV. I love that. Brust says everyone lies, and this includes first POVs -- and not only do they lie, they don't say things. (Though this is more true with some kinds of narrated first than with what I call first-headlong, and first-present. First headlong is the diary composed as it goes along, like I Capture the Castle or Sorcery and Cecelia, and any lying there is directed, and first-present is first person present tense, where you're getting stream of consciousness. No lying in first-present, and transitions are hard as hell.)

When doing the copy-edit of Farthing I came up with the phrase "First person is a special case of dialogue", when pleading for retention of a mixed metaphor. I think this is actually quite a useful way of looking at it.

Also, have you ever noticed how some people seem to be naturally most comfortable in first -- Mary Renault for instance?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The filtering process slows me down immesurably when I'm learning the voice. Once I've got it, yes, it works like you say. But with characters I'm still trying to learn to hear, it's like building the Great Wall of China all by myself.