first person
Getting some feedback from the current work-in-progress, I’m noticing that my main character is far more reactive than she is active. Our lady of Althorp needs to do more. This is the consensus.
This is my first effort writing first-person. Like all good and fair-minded people I take criticism from those I respect very seriously, and am looking over my first chapters and finding ways of pushing things forward. It’s good to catch these things early. But it had me reflecting, last night, on what the purpose of first-person really is.
I started the novel in first-person with the intention of creating an intimacy between my reader and my main character that isn’t quite possible in third or close third. I wanted my reader to see Hampton Court Palace and the rutted roads to Staffordshire through the eyes of Elizabeth Spencer. At the same time, though, I find that if you’re going to go the rather ambitious route of writing well in first-person, the main character with whose voice you speak must, by nature, be an observant person. She must be interested in the world - and the people - around her. Otherwise - unless you’re writing something brilliant and ambitious like, say, Iain Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpost, whose foundations are on a series of highly unreliable narrators - your reader will experience a very narrow view of the world you build.
Because I have recently read, reread and read again Brideshead Revisited, I think of Charles Ryder, its narrator and main character. Ryder does things, and things happen to him, but he is more in the nature of an observer than an actor, and it isn’t unfair to ask whether or not the story would have changed without his intervention. I think of Wodehouse’s Mr Mulliner too, who gives his picaresque tales his own voice, but takes little part in them.
I have no intention of writing such a novel. I have great plains for my own main character to be both active and reactive. But the world she sees, that particular time and place and series of events, is what I want to create. Elizabeth Spencer is neither incidental nor irrelevant, but she is not the only person in the story, and she, at least, is aware of it.
Speaking of which, I promised myself I would finish my fifth chapter today. Pip pip.
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August 8th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
That’s an interesting point about Brideshead and Ryder. I remember the original television adaptation (it was gorgeous) and was annoyed when Jeremy Irons won a BAFTA for playing Ryder, because all he did was stand around looking languid, with his hands in his pockets. I find it very hard to write in first person, present tense and am very envious of those writers who do it so effortlessly.
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August 8th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
Great post. I’ve been struggling with first person myself, for the first time since my teens, and I’m noticing the same thing.
Also, while intimacy is far easier to achieve with first person, I notice that it’s far more difficult to cultivate a slight sense of unreliability, and I like my MCs to be unreliable in a way that the reader understands just a little bit more than they do about themselves. I was very comfortable doing that in third limited; it’s a hell of a lot harder in first.
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