Three Ways with First-Person

Also introducing a new mode I like to call: 'first-person reflective'

It’s been a long time since I wrote any fiction in first-person. I have, however, recently been writing a personal essay in first-person, after having struggled for practically my whole writing life to write my ‘self’. Writing characters has always been easy for me, but writing myself has always been more difficult. I’ve always struggled to find a kind of ‘angle’ through which to view myself.

First-person is a narratorial style that the reader inevitably associates with the writer, because of its history and association with letter and diary writing. However, as every fiction writer knows, despite the associations a reader might make between the narrator and the writer, fiction is a confection, even when first-person is used. This post is about the different ways in which the first-person can be put to use.

This post is partly inspired by fiction writers, such as Elizabeth Strout, Katie Kitamura and Charlotte Wood who have recently used first-person in really interesting and non-conventional ways. And in my reading around writing craft, I’ve been interested to discover that there is recognised to be two different ‘modes’ when using first-person. In this post, I explore those two different modes, and also suggest the possible existence of a new, third way of thinking about first-person.

First-person: hero

In the ‘hero’ mode of first-person, the narrator is at the centre of events: causing them and responding to them, reflecting on them. This is probably the most frequently used mode of first-person narration — the narrator is at the centre of the drama and everything that happens around the narrator is about their story. It is the style of first-person for example most often used in the Bildungsroman, where the narrator is experiencing a sequence of events that allows them to grow in some crucial way. Because the narrator is both causing events and experiencing the effect of these events on themselves, the story is about them in some crucial way.