Morning Writing Club ends with a discussion every Friday, and one recent Friday, while was guest hosting, a conversation began about first person vs. third person. Basically, a bunch of us have written our debut projects in first person and now are struggling to write our next project in the third, even though we deliberately set this challenge for ourselves. It led me to think more about the different types of first and third person, as well as past and present tense, and how they can best be used. In general, I love talking about various writing craft topics and point-of-view is one of my favorites to geek out about. First up, I’ll be talking about the first person. I’ll send the third person piece next week.
Works Discussed: Darryl Jackie Ess | The Baby-Sitters Club Super Specials Anne M. Martin | As I Lay Dying William Faulkner | The Border of Paradise Esmé Weijun Wang | The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish Katya Apekina | I'll Give You the Sun Jandy Nelson | Sadie Courtney Summers | “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” Denis Johnson | The Virgin Suicides Jeffrey Eugenides First Person Past / Present / Near Past
Without question, the point-of-view and tense that I’m most comfortable writing in is first person past, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s true for many writers. It’s a natural storytelling tense and how we speak when we tell people a story that happened to us. Most of the books I read are in first person too, though I think that’s skewed by the types of novels I predominantly read (literary, indie, autofiction, YA, as opposed to sci-fi or fantasy). When I looked at the last ten novels I read, eight were written in first, and only two in third.
But those eight were not all written in first person past, some were written in first person present. Without any research to back this up, I’m going to say that first person present is way more popular than it was fifteen years ago. First person present is pretty much the default for contemporary YA right now, it’s very off-trend to write a YA novel in first person past. I’m not sure how that came to be. Maybe because first person present feels more immediate and that’s how you experience the world when you’re young. It also can feel like a younger, fresher, tense, one that signals that the teenage narrator is narrating right now, while they are currently a teen, and not looking back as a wiser, older adult.
There’s still a good mix of first person past and present in adult novels, but I definitely see first person present being used more and more, and probably for the same reason it’s used in YA. It creates the illusion that the action of the novel is happening in the moment, you’re right in the mind of the narrator, getting information when they do. First person present is also the tense people use when they’re under hypnosis, or undergoing EDMR therapy, and I’ve seen it employed for similar effect in first person past novels—a particularly tense or traumatic scene will switch to first person present, even if the scene itself happened, like the rest of the novel, in the past.
Something I see discussed less when talking about first person past is: how past? It’s one thing to be narrating something that happened many years ago and another to be narrating something that happened recently. Sometimes the time between narration and story narrated is very clear, like the narrator will mention they are X age now and the events of the novel happened X years ago, but sometimes that time gap is less clear.
I wrote my novel Log Off in what I’ve been calling first person “it just happened” past, but when I looked it up it’s more formally called first person near past. The novel is told entirely via LiveJournal entries, so Ellora, the main character and narrator, almost always narrates something that happened to her that same day, or sometimes only minutes before. It’s an epistolary novel, and epistolary novels (novels told via journal entries, letters, blog posts, podcast transcripts, etc.) are where I see first person near past the most, since the fictional documents that make up the novel are written shortly after the novel’s events. Its strength as a tense is that the narrator has no time to process. This can be used to comic effect, where you as the reader are privy to the narrator’s real-time realizations (Jackie Ess’ Darryl is a great example of this), or tragic, if something tragic happens, you’ll have as little time to process as the narrator does.
(I’m mostly speaking of novels for all these examples, but I think the first person near present concept can also be applied to memoir and non-fiction. There’s some rule that a memoir writer should have distance from the subject matter of their book to gain perspective and I actually don’t think that’s the right choice for everything. There can be real heat in writing about something when you’re still in the chaos or mess of it, still angry or hurt or raw. Nor do I believe that more time is any guarantee of wisdom or growth.)
First Person Multi / Dual / Plural and Direct Address
As a reader, without question, the first time I encountered first person multi POV was The Baby-Sitters Club Super Specials, loll. Unlike the regular BSC books with a single narrator, in super specials, the whole gang went on some fancy vacation, or had a more grandiose adventure than normal, so every babysitter got her turn to narrate events. If you’re looking for a more serious example of first person multiple POV, might I suggest As I Lay Dying. And two contemporary examples that do this well are The Border of Paradise by Esmé Weijun Wang and The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish by Katya Apekina.
While I think first person multiple POV can be used to do a lot of things, make a novel epic, sprawling, Southern gothic, or just do fun weird shit (like having a small side character narrate a chapter and then never appear again), in my opinion, from a craft perspective, there’s only one major reason to use dual POV—to build tension and momentum. That doesn’t have to be, like, crime thriller-level tension; dual POV is used a lot in romance novels to build tension around the two parties’ courtship and inevitable conflicts. YA also does a lot of dual POV, two of the best examples of it I can think of are YA— Jandy Nelson’s I'll Give You the Sun and Courtney Summers’ Sadie. Two completely different novels, but both use dual narration to withhold information and then reveal it later at just the right time and in a way that delivers maximum impact. Dual narration should be a puzzle, where each narrator alternates filling in the pieces, and the reader feels increasing satisfaction as they start to see the complete picture. And because the reader is also the only one seeing the full puzzle coming together, i.e., the reader knows more information than the two narrators since they’re reading both narrations, there are opportunities to build even greater tension.
In general, I’m always impressed by writers who can pull off dual or multiple first person narrators. It seems challenging to me to make two characters (or possibly even dozens of characters) have different enough voices to believably be distinct characters but not so different that it feels like two different books. How can you hold different voices within one unified voice?
Oral history-style novels (George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones & The Six) could also be considered a style of first person multi POV, but I sometimes struggle with those types of novels precisely for the reason mentioned in the paragraph above—they seem like all dialogue, no unified voice. But one thing I will say about oral history novels, like epistolary novels, they are usually written with an audience in mind and often employ direct address. Direct address can be used in third person as well, but it’s most intimate in first, where the I narrator is speaking to you the reader.
Most epistolary novels have an actual audience in mind, but even in more traditional first person novels, where an individual’s mind is just being narrated for whatever reason, direct address can be a really effective tool. People love to be invited in. Or even pushed away, that direct address of the reader can be antagonistic. It can show disdain or pity for the reader. Why do you think people love the last line of Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” so much? And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.
Finally, there’s first person plural POV. That’s when the first person isn’t one particular individual per se, it’s a greek chorus “we.” The prime example, the real first person plural GOAT is The Virgin Suicides. But to be honest, I don’t really view this POV as first person. In Eugenides novel, the collective “we” of the neighborhood boys speak about their obsession of the Lisbon sisters, but the boys themselves are rarely in the action of the story, usually they’re just narrating things that happen to the girls or editorializing about them. In that way, I think first person plural actually has more in common with certain types of third-person omniscient, which is a good place to stop. I’ll send my thoughts on third person next week. Teaser: I think third person is hard.
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My editor
appeared on Another Fucking Writing Podcast and Publishing Genius’ Lunch with an Editor series. She talked about the many publishing endeavors has explored during its decade+ in existence, her own most recent book Woman With Hat, and of course, the two books Shabby Doll House is publishing this year, my own Log Off and Oscar d’Artois’ The Island.
That Friday discussion was one of my very favorites, and I'm so happy that it inspired you to write about POV.
I love this! Got advice from a poetry teacher to try expressing stuff in the present and it changes the character of the piece entirely!