Writing in the First Person

Writing in the first person voice is one of those areas of novel writing that seems simple at first glance, but is a little more complicated if you want to write like a professional.

The Logic of Writing in the First Person

So what's complicated about writing first person prose? Well, it all comes down to the difference between the narrator and the viewpoint character.

If I write a story about something that happened to me last year, the narrator will be the part of me writing the words, and the viewpoint character the part of me actually experiencing the events of the story at the time they happened.

Now for the complicated bit: as explained in the article on understanding first person narrative, the narrator and the viewpoint character in a first person point of view novel might essentially be one and the same person, but there are two important differences between them:

1. The narrator will be older (and probably wiser) than the viewpoint character. The time difference might be slight - perhaps as little as a day or a week - in which case the age-gap won't make any discernible difference. But if the narrator is 80, say, looking back on an incident that happened to them when they were 18, they will hardly be the same person at all.

2. The narrator will have been changed by the events of the novel, whereas the viewpoint character has yet to experience this change. And so if this change is profound - which it frequently is in a novel - they might share the same body, but they will be completely different people inside.

Confused? Then don't be, because it is actually simple to master once you get your head around the logic of it all. You see, the key to writing in the first person like a master is simply this: you must reflect the difference between the narrator and the viewpoint character in the language.

If every single word in a first person point of view novel sounds the same, like they were all written by an 80 year old or all by an 18 year old, the prose will be monotonous and unconvincing (meaning publishers will reject it).

How, precisely, do you achieve this variety and realism in the writing. Again, it is simple, once you know how. The best way to explain it (and to make everything clear) is with a comprehensive worked example of writing in the first person, and you will find precisely that in my Ultimate Guide to Novel Writing.