First Person Point of View

Trying to decide whether to use first person point of view or third person point of view is often one of the biggest problems newcomers to novel writing face.

They set off on their writing journey, full of confidence and excitement, but they are barely a mile down the road when they come across a fork: first person to the left, third person to the right...

• Which way should they go?
• Is there a wrong choice and a right choice?
• Could either road lead them to success?
• What information should they consider before making a decision?

The fact is that neither point of view is inherently "better" than the other. It all depends on the particular novel you have in mind - and since only you know that, only you will be able to decide which viewpoint to use.

The aim of this article - and the next one on Third Person Point of View - is to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each. More specifically, I will look at each viewpoint under the following headings:

• Straightforwardness
• Intimacy
• Immediacy
• Claustrophobia
• Objectivity
• Freedom

If you still can't make up your mind, there is a third article - 1st vs. 3rd Person Point of View - which will hopefully steer you in the right direction once and for all.

Here, then, are the advantages and disadvantages of First Person...

First Person Point of View is More Straightforward

At least, a lot of creative writing guides will have you believe that it is.

First person point of view is certainly the most natural voice to use, probably because you use it all the time in your everyday life. Whenever you tell somebody about something that happened to you (and you do that every day) you use the "I" of the 1st person.

To do the same thing in a novel, you simply need to slip into your viewpoint character's skin, as it were, and away you go.

But telling somebody about something that happened to somebody else in the 3rd person isn't so natural, particularly when it comes to communicating that third person's thoughts and feelings.

I believe that it is the naturalness of writing in the first person point of view that accounts for the fact that most first-time novelists choose it. It strikes them as being altogether more straightforward. But is it? It all comes down to the question of who is telling the story.

In a third person narrative, you have the narrator (who you can imagine as either an invisible, godlike witness to the events, or as a kind of movie camera), and then you have the viewpoint character.

The narrator can tell the story from on high, as it were, using their neutral and non-opinionated voice, and they can home-in on a scene and on the viewpoint character in particular, showing us the events through the character's eyes, letting us hear their thoughts, and allowing their neutral voice to become "coloured" by the viewpoint character's voice.

In a first person narrative, however, the narrator and the viewpoint character are both the same person, meaning you don't have to make any tricky shifts from one voice to another, which is why first person point of view is often referred to as being the easier viewpoint to handle.

But there are two counter-arguments to this.

The first argument against first person point of view being easier than third person is that, in a third person narrative, you don't need to use a neutral narrator at all. (More on that in the article on the pros and cons of Third Person Point of View.)

The second argument, and one that it is critical to understand, is that a first person narrator is not precisely the same person as a first person viewpoint character...