All-knowing narrator...

Consider that your character in POV only knows what she actually experiences for herself. Imagine that she has a camera on her shoulder. What the camera sees is what she can use in her POV.
If it does not happen where she is, she either needs to have someone else relating those things to her - another character telling her - making it dialogue, or letters, journal or some other form of knowledge.
You could also take those things out of her first person POV account and make them third. nothing wrong with mixing from first person with the things your POV character witnesses with a third person account of the things that she doesn't.

If it's first person, you do need to let the readers know how she got to know the details -- it can be subtle, like that's what she heard. As for the details, I think once your readers realize how she happened to know things, they would suspend their disbelief and accept it. One tricky thing, however: thoughts and feelings. Unless everyone involved told the narrator how they thought and felt exactly at the moment, there is NO WAY the narrator could be privy to them. So the same rules apply to first person narrative even if you're talking about "retold events" -- no thoughts and feelings.

It would definitely throw me off if you didn't explain how she knew these things. That's really the big limitation of first person POV - you're stuck with the narrator!

I think Stew21's idea of having these things relayed to her in letters, etc. would be great. She could have just pasted a friend's letter into her journal.

"As I found out later, Joe was lying. He hadn't really delivered the message to Matilda."

"Rumor had it that Matilda was having an affair with her boss."

"According to Joe, Matilda's boss was secretly the Kwisatz Haderach."

AndreaGS said:

It would definitely throw me off if you didn't explain how she knew these things. That's really the big limitation of first person POV - you're stuck with the narrator!

I think Stew21's idea of having these things relayed to her in letters, etc. would be great. She could have just pasted a friend's letter into her journal.

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And as I found out in one of my own novels, you can't relay the information on how the narrator knows these things too late into the story. One of my betas caught it when I had done this (explained how the first person character knew things he hadn't witnessed) and said, "I see now how your character knew these things but we need to know this much sooner or you need to change it to third person."

Death Bean said:

Not that different to General Scorch's post below, I'm afraid, but I'm writing this book where the narrator is one of the characters and she's very involved in the plot and tells it all sort of like a loose diary format. The problem is I've found I have her writing about events that happen miles away that, even if she heard about, she couldn't really relate in such detail... should I just ignore this and carry on, or make her say at the end 'this is what I heard, it may not be accurate', or has anyone else got any suggestions? Thanks!

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Have you ever read Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island? Mr. Stevenson wrote it much like you're talking about.

In chapters where Jim Hawkins was not present, Mr. Stevenson had other characters in the story relate their own experiences in the same basic, diary-style format. When he did this, he would put a header at the beginning of the portions that were narrated by different characters, that said, "Narrative continued by (insert character name here)".

Perhaps you could use something to that effect. That way you would maintain the diary-style narration you started with, and still make the story believable.

I hope this helps you out. All the best with your work.




--Sean

You might want to check out Anne Enright's The Gathering.

Much of the book is her first-person (and completely unreliable) narrator relaying events that she was not present at. Things that happened to her grandparents long before she was born and the like. It is all couched in terms of the narrator being a writer and imagining what happened. Of course, even events that she was at are mistold and reimagined, which fits in with the overall themes of the book.

Death Bean said:

The problem is I've found I have her writing about events that happen miles away that, even if she heard about, she couldn't really relate in such detail... should I just ignore this and carry on, or make her say at the end 'this is what I heard, it may not be accurate', or has anyone else got any suggestions? Thanks!

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For one, you might have her say, "This is what I heard, etc.," before she launches into the narrative. You could even have her admit that "I sometimes fill in details of the conversations with speculation," or something like that.

Having a narrator say things they couldn't know definitely awakens my disbelief. Extreme example: I once read a first-person story in which the narrator is killed at the end. Kinda left me wondering who the hell wrote the story?

If it's really necessary to fill in every detail of events the narrator can't know about, it's not a crime (despite what some people here seem to think) to have a chapter or two told in third omniscient, then return to "the narrative of Karla X," or whoever your primary narrator is. It's a little tricky, but it's been done successfully.

But if I were you, I'd try to give the narrator only that info she could've gotten after the fact, and not let her insert details she couldn't have known.