First Person Worksheet

The role the narrator plays in a story determines the type of first-person point of view. The elements of a story - like genre - can help determine who is best suited to serve as narrator and which first-person voice to use.

Here are some tips in writing first person. 

Be descriptive: In the first person, avoid phrases that keep the reader in the narrator’s brain—for example, “I thought,” or “I felt.” While one of the advantages of the first-person is to know what the narrator is thinking, don’t get stuck in their head. We also want to see through their eyes so use visual language to show the reader around their world. 

Stay in character: When using the pronoun “I,” it’s easy to slip out of your character’s voice and into your own as the author. When you’re writing, stay true to your narrator’s perspective. 

Mix it up: Starting every line with “I” can become repetitive; vary your sentences by illustrating thoughts or feelings. Instead of writing “I felt tired walking through the deep snow”, try “the mountain was buried in snow, making every step feel like a mile.”

Create a strong narrator: Make your first-person narrator an interesting character to make the story really work. Give them a solid backstory that influences their perspective.

Tricks for Writing in First Person

Show Some Attitude. Attitude is what we call “voice-driven.” Make your character’s voice, personality and behaviour distinctive. Your characters need to stand out from the crowd.

Nothing is duller than a first-person narrator who speaks like a computer on the page. The more personality you can infuse into your narrator, the more fun the reader will have.

Which first-person narrator is better?

 “I went into the bar and decided to ask the bartender for a drink. Even though the bar was closed, the bartender was able to pour me a beer. I tried to read the newspaper but it was all the same stuff I read every day.”

 Or

 “What about a teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up with me? I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad’s voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of “Yellow Submarine,” which is a song by the Beatles, who I love.”

The first one isn’t terrible, but it’s not great either. It’s straightforward, like Hemingway. This is the voice of a private eye or a recent divorcee or some other strange character. But it doesn’t tell you very much about the character through the voice alone.

The second one is the opening to “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” by Jonathan Safran Foer, and as Joyce Carol Oates noted, it has the most elusive and best quality of writing: energy. If you can put your energy on the page, readers will keep reading to soak up that energy.

Your characters need personality, and that personality should be embedded in every sentence of your manuscript. It should especially come through in the dialogue, where you have a wonderful opportunity to fly your character’s freak flag (do they speak in dialect? What’s their catchphrase or filler words?). 

Advice: Hear your character’s voices talking inside your head. I mean actually hear, like a gravelly timbre of a truck driver or the screech of an elderly woman or the plaintive innocent bleat of a child. The voice will be the voice of your character, and it will be telling you a story verbatim.

Highlight Your Character’s Self-Deception. One of the most beautiful things about writing in the first person is that your narrator has a blind spot. Maybe even a few blind spots.

For instance, they could believe that they’re Casanova or Helena of Troy, but we’ll see, as person after person in bars turns them down, that their self-perception is incorrect. They could believe they’re amazing at their job as a detective, but after they bumble one case after another, we the readers understand that they’re terrible.

Three Examples:

In J.M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace,” In this amazing book, we can see that the narrating professor David Laurie is sexually exploiting his young college student, even though he defends his action and believes he has done nothing wrong. Later on in the story, we see the underlying tension is that the professor is racist, even though he doesn’t believe himself to be racist.

In “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro, a butler uses high language and formal manners to hide from everyone, including himself, that he’s in love, even though the reader recognizes it at once.

Ignatius J. Reilly in “A Confederacy of Dunces” believes himself to be of high moral standing, intelligent, and brave. The reader knows he is none of these.

If you can help the reader understand that the character lacks self-knowledge, it’ll create tension between what the reader knows and what the character knows, and the reader will keep reading to see if the character ever arrives at self-discovery. Every writing teacher talks about creating tension through the drama of plot and conflict between characters, but this creating of conflict between the reader and the character– the technical literary term is called Dramatic Irony —  is one of the most underrated ways of creating tension in a manuscript.

In third-person narrating the dramatic irony comes from a character not knowing that someone behind the door is about to jump out with a knife (but the reader knows), while in first person the dramatic irony comes from the audience realizing something about the character that the character doesn’t realize herself.

The more blind spots you can give your narrator, the more the audience will be invested in the complexity of the character.

 Caveat: If you give your narrator too many blind spots, they’ll come off as naive or half-witted, which will sabotage the reader’s respect for them. You can’t win, can you? Seriously though, a fine balance is easily recognised once you are writing your book. You will know what feel instinctively right.

Work Out Your Character’s Level of Unreliability

It’s not a choice between writing a first-person reliable narrator or an unreliable narrator. That’s far too easy. The truth is that every first person narrator is unreliable to some extent. Your decision as an author is where to place them on that spectrum.

Does your character only lie in small, understandable ways, like believing they didn’t mean to be mean to someone they hated? This is routine self-deception, and virtually every character will have this to some extent.

Or does your character fundamentally misrepresent the world, the truth, and other characters? This is pathological, and your character will be revealed as mentally unstable.

Every first person narrator is unreliable to some extent. But some are more unreliable than others. If you don’t decide as an author how much the reader will be able to trust your character, and in what part of the narrative they are lying (even if it’s a small lie, or a lie to themselves), then you’re missing one of the best parts about first person narration.

Good luck!

Thanks to Jericho writers, Curtis Brown Creative and Masterclass for a culmination of their writing tips.