English Question: Writing in First Person

Factual Questions
1

Ok, in college, I recently took a Creative Writing class. My teacher was like this Goddess of the English language. She opened my eyes to many things, like poetry, writing, etc etc. (She also bequeathed the frustration of these modern day ‘poets’ who write poetry with no meter! Arrrrrgggghhh! But I digress)

Ok, in the class, she only let us write in second person. (There were a ton of rules with that as well) I asked her what were the rules for writing in first person but she refused to tell me. She dismissed my question as:

“Master Second Person and we’ll get to first person”

The problem is that we never got to first person, the class ended by then. I’ve looked on the Internet and can’t find any indepth guides to writing in first person. (Like in flashback, dialogue, setting up the paragraphs, etc etc) Does anyone have any information they could share on this?

Thanks in advance.

2

Honesty, my partner in treasure trail loving!

All I ever do is write in first person. I’ve written an entire novel in first person present tense. I think it’s great, but also a challenge to keep it from becoming (a) too “journally” or (b) too “stream of consciousness”, unless of course you WANT those two things.

I don’t know of any first person guides, but I’d be happy to talk to you about it if you have a specific question.

jarbaby

3

Well, you just wrote your whole post in first person, and it looks fine! You probably know what you’re talking about, but are you sure you meant that you wrote everything in second person? Simply put, writing in first person means writing through the “I” perspective, while writing in 2nd means “you”, and writing in 3rd means “she/he”. I’ve only written a few things in 2nd person, and it’s a whole lot more difficult that first or third. I’ll see if I can dig up some good resources, though.

4

<boggle>

Second person? I hope you mean third. Second person stories are extremely difficult to bring off and certainly not something a beginner needs to master. It’s hardly ever used. A teacher who insists on using it borders on incompetence.

So, I’ll assume here that you really mean third person. From your description, I don’t have much faith in your teacher’s ability. There aren’t a lot of “rules” to follow for third person. Basically, you need to be aware of the point of view and keep it straight, mostly by making sure that the point of view character in the scene doesn’t know anything he wouldn’t normally know (like what someone else is thinking). But there are exceptions to that – no POV (“camera eye”), all POVs (“omniscient”), switching POV from scene to scene, etc. If you keep the POV straight, 3rd person isn’t all that difficult.

First person is slightly harder, not from a technical sense – you won’t make the mistake of switching to another character’s thoughts – but because of the need to create the narrator as a character. It’s difficult for beginners to avoid the trap of having the narrator be them and it is a bit more difficult to deal with certain aspects. You can’t deal with things the character doesn’t know, for instance. OTOH, if the character does know something, first person is a great way to tell the readers the information they want to know without it seeming like an info dump.*

One trap is that the writer assumes that the reader will take the narrator’s words at face value, but the reader doesn’t always do this.

For instance, suspense is very difficult in the first person, since suspense requires that the reader knows something the narrator does not. However, mystery works well in the first person, since both the reader and the character don’t know what’s going on (very many mysteries seem to be written in the first person).

So it is a bit harder to write in the first person (and this is exacerbated by the fact that people think it’s easier), and a good writing teacher will mention this fact. But to forbid it is poor teaching. How else can a writer learn how to use it? Not from memorizing a bunch of rules, that’s sure.

But ultimately, it’s not a matter of looking up rules. It’s a matter of writing the story. The technical issues will resolve themselves, or they won’t, and the best way to discover what works is to try it out and see. (Especially since any rule can be broken in writing.)

From your description, it might be best to ignore most of what your teacher told you.

*See the Turkey City Lexicon for the definition of this and other important writing terms.

5

Yep! I meant third person :slight_smile:

I enjoy writing fantasy, so its really hard to let the reader know the things I want them to. One problem I have is giving a description of the main character.

Jarbaby, that would be nice. Is part of your novel on the web where I could take a look see?

6

RealityChuck makes some excellent points. I might quibble with him a bit on what I think the most likely pitfalls of the first person perspective are, but he introduced the bases quite well.

One additional trap that I might mention: beginning writers often use the first person thinking that it will provide a greater reader empathy for their main character. In fact, unless the POV is handled quite skillfully it creates more distance between reader and charater. It is not easy to find the balance between showing to little of the characters inner world (relying on the illusion of reader identification) or too much (risking reader alienation as the “I” of the story becomes too “alien”).

Like everything else ever written about writing, the above is a generalization, an over-simplification, and just plain wrong.

7

No rap on any teachers, and it was GBS who said it first: “those who can do and those who can’t teach.” Unfortunately, some teach misinformation. (“Those who can’t teach, ***” - fill in whatever you like.)

If you’re writing non-fiction, say a legal treatise or a scientific treatise, the 3d person is the tense to use. I guess, not having any knowledge of that stuff, that the 1st person is fine for fiction. But in presenting a study, teatise, etc. 3d person is better.

8

Awww, heck, writing in 1st person is no challenge. Even 2nd person is only moderately difficult. If you want to test your narrative skills, do a story in 2nd person PLURAL, past-participular tense!

:smiley:

9

One writer who uses second person a lot is Tom Robbins. Whether you think he’s wonderful or whether you think he’s a hippy-dippy tripe slinger, “Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas” provides a good example. Rather than addressing himself to the reader as “you”, Robbins usually uses second person to address his protaganist from his perspective as narrator, with the reader listening in. Most of his works have sections of it. In HAiFP he does it pretty much for the entire book.

BTW, I fall on the “wonderful” side when it comes to Tom Robbins, though I can understand why people cannot stand him. If you haven’t read him, I would reccomend starting with “Jitterbug Perfume”.

10

They constantly talk directly to the child, almost as though he were in the room.

“Follow me into the Story Corner. Come on, let’s not dawdle.”

I suppose the same could be said for exercise classes and most commercials where someone talks directly to you.

To sustain that for a book however, is a bit precious, or just a stilted exercise.

11

I can’t offer much direct advice on writing first person, but you might try reading some good fantasy novels written in that mode and use those as examples in developing your style. I would recommend Barry Hughart’s Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox (especially Bridge of Birds) and Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos novels. The Hughart novels are from the perspective of a peasant boy partnered with the smartest man in China (and the greatest con-man), while the Taltos books are from the perspective of an assassin.

12

Those examples are talking directly to the watcher or the reader again. A non-literary analogy for what Robbins does might be the old cartoons where the narrator talks to one of the characters:

“Elmer didn’t want to kill you with that axe after all, did he? Must feel pretty good, huh?” addressed to the rooster strutting around and about to get clobbered by the tree that Elmer is chopping down …

Except in Robbins’ case, it allows him to pontificate about the nature of the universe directly to his characters. It would be dreadful except for the fact that Robbins can stretch metaphorical language to such stunning and comicly absurd lengths, and get away with it.

13

I don’t think that counts as a 2nd person… It’s more like 1st person telling the story to others.

If you read those “Choose your own story” books, then that’s a good example of 2nd person.

à la…

“You enter a room with two doors. You go through the one on the left (go to page 102), the one on the right (go to page 63)”

14

And, as an aside to this, is should be noted that this can be, at least partially, overcome by making the protagonist and the narrator two different people: cf. Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby or Dr. Watson in Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.

I just wanted to say that the only story I’ve actually published (in Jackhammer E-zine) was written in the second person. Not something I normally do, but, hey, it worked that time. (In fact, the editor emailed me yesterday–and she wants to put it in her Best Of anthology. Woo!!!)

LL