Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird Twilight, Rebecca and Twilight. Four books written in First Person and all seem to have done rather well for themselves, even though I gave up on one of them way before the end. Not necessarily through any fault on the author’s part and certainly not because of the First Person narrative.
Oh come on, you already knew the odd one out was Twilight, didn’t you?
This narrative style device virtually guarantees immediacy, taking the reader inside the mind of the lead character, but such intimacy has its pitfalls. The writer has to work hard to avoid the over-use of sentences beginning with ‘I, while internal monologues and introspection are similiarly prone to over-use.
My exposure to fellow writers revealed so many faults in my own writing. One of these was a tendency to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’ and this is even more difficult to eradicate from one’s writing when your leading character can reveal everything they see and feel.
In addition, there’s the problem of the narrator having to be in every scene – an obvious limitation on plot development.
All this introspection came about when I wrote a series of short pieces in my blog, very loosely based on my own experiences and therefore written in the first person. This worked well, in my somewhat biased opinion, but when considering extending a short vignette into a full novel, I’m far from convinced that First Person is the way to go.
When I started thinking aloud at the beginning of this piece, I pulled some examples of books written in this fashion from my imperfect memory. I’ve now remembered ‘ Engleby’, a wonderful book that I’d suggest as the definitive example of a novel where a First Person narrative approaches perfection. On the other hand, I’m not Sebastian Faulks!
Hello Jake,
I enjoy your ramblings and felt compelled to respond to this one. I enjoy the first person narrative in the books you mentioned plus a few more. However, I feel, too many real horrors of first person narratives (you may have mentioned one) have escaped into print. I’d be interested to hear your ‘ramblings’ of how to avoid pitfalls. I think the success of the book has a lot to do with the voice of the narrator, i.e. Scout in TKMB, and the structure of the book, how it’s set up. I’m reluctant to try.
Caroline
I like the intimacy of First person Narrative, in fact for short pieces i prefer it. However I found it difficult to maintain in the novel. I doubt that I would have attempted FPN on a fiction piece of any length. A biography …well yes of course it was for me essential. I haven’t attempted anything over 5,000 words in FPN in fiction, but I may give it a shot in the next book.
I like the way you handle it JB. The intimacy and immediacy are a heady lure to a reader.
Better late than never… (Only just found your blog, sorry!)
Just thought James Patterson deserved a mention as an incredibly successful purveyor of first person crime fiction in his Alex Cross series.
I just HATE the way he breaks all the rules and suddenly swaps to third-person-omni when it suits him. But when you’ve sold as many books as he has who gives a f*** about rules?
For some reason readers flock back to him time after time, and I’m one of them.
Guess if you’re not a writer you wouldn’t know “the rules” so wouldn’t know if they’d been broken.
Ignorance is bliss!