Alan Plessinger – Finding Your Voice

Finding Your Voice: Writing in First Person

by Alan Plessinger

Introducing another character when writing in first person:

“Michael Johnson stood nearby. Michael was twenty-three years old and currently working for Starcrossed Industries as a marketing consultant.”

No one thinks like this, in real life, when they see Michael Johnson. So why should a first person narrator write like this? Well, because telling a story in first person is more than a matter of one character in the story recording his thoughts and impressions in real time, as the story goes on around him.

The job of a first person narrator is to act as host to the reader, bringing him in slowly, introducing him around, making sure he’s not feeling confused or left out. If there’s something the reader needs to know about Michael Johnson to appreciate the story, the narrator had better tell him up front.

But the narrator will test the reader’s patience if he insists on relating the life story of Michael Johnson before poor Michael has had a chance to say a word. Sketch in the details to begin with, let Michael Johnson say a few things to prove he’s worth caring about, then later on, if it’s worth hearing, you can tell the reader some more about Michael Johnson.

The reader need not always be perfectly informed about everything. Once Michael starts talking, it’s fine if he says a few things that don’t made perfect sense to the reader, things that make the reader curious and entice him to read further. These things need not be explained immediately. But if there are too many of them, with no explanation forthcoming, this will result in a confused and exasperated reader. If the narrator really expects the reader to wait until the end of the book for an explanation of some mysterious matter, then the matter must be brought up many more times, to keep the reader in the game.

All this assumes that Michael Johnson is a character already known to the narrator. Suppose the first person narrator is meeting Michael Johnson for the first time? Then he really is limited to his thoughts and impressions about Michael Johnson in real time. Both reader and narrator must get to know Michael Johnson at the same time, from his appearance, his words, his body language, the look in his eye, the expression on his face. But not his thoughts, because the first person narrator doesn’t get to peek into those, unlike the third person narrator.

It’s probably a bad idea to bring in a fact that the first person narrator knows in retrospect but not in present time about Michael Johnson, though this has been done by some great writers to great effect.

So why write in first person, when it is so severely limiting, and prevents the reader from getting to know any character other than the narrator intimately? Probably because some stories just can’t be told any other way, and some authors just can’t write any other way. And there is a challenge to presenting other characters this way, from the outside only. After all, it is the only way we get to know other people in real life.

And you could always cheat. Better authors than you have cheated outrageously. Marcel Proust was famous, or infamous, for having his first person narrator know all sorts of things about other characters he couldn’t possibly have known. Raymond Chandler’s narrator recounted a conversation between a murderess and the cop who arrested her that he did not witness and could not have known a word of, since they both died.

Regarding the idea of enticing the reader with a fact that the first person narrator knows in retrospect but not in present time, you might turn your attention to “David Copperfield,” written by Charles Dickens in first person. Young David, still a boy, meets a girl his age named Emily, and as the two children stroll by the seaside together, young David favors us with this rather chilling pronouncement:

There has been a time since—I do not say it lasted long, but it has been—when I have asked myself the question, would it have been better for little Em’ly to have had the waters close above her head that morning in my sight? And when I have answered, Yes. This may be premature. I have set it down too soon, perhaps. But let it stand.

Talk about hardcore! And this just after meeting the girl! What did she do? Did she kill someone?

Find out along with David.