1st person pov question

Maryn said:

Jane, I don't think there's a hard right or wrong, but what I see in the change from third person limited to first is a lack of conversational tone that's typical of first person.
Only you know your character and how she'd phrase things, but most of us speak more informally. A one-pass rewrite aiming for that might read I drove toward the top of the cliffs, where the house stood guard over the village. My hands gripped the wheel with white-knuckle fierceness, which stilled their trembling. [Or some other sentence which tells us how her fear feels.] I wanted to look away, tried to, but that damned house reeled me up the winding driveway, its undefinable power drawing me closer and closer. The house wanted me. Creepy.[/
Is that sort of approach more the tone you hope for when you write in first person? I'll understand if that's totally not it.

Maryn, who writes mostly in first

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Redzilla said:

It's not really a question of "right." It's more--what works for the story you want to tell? For example, if you really want to tell the story with the kind of language and detail in your first sample, using things like "sentinel" and "fear pulsing," well, you need a narrator who talks that way. If Amelia doesn't, and you write in first person from her POV, you have to write the way she talks.

That's what choosing your narrator is about--what kind language and what perspective does each narrator bring to the story?

Here's my own example from my writing:

After seven years of bullshit, the State of Oklahoma finally decided to kill me. The whole deal pissed me off, but once I got the official letter with my execution date, I felt relieved. At least come August, I wasn't gonna have to worry about keeping myself busy.

That's first person and I chose first person, because my main character has a very distinctive voice and an unusual perspective on the world around him. So I let him speak, although his vocabulary is a little limited and his grammar is dodgy. It means I have to be careful about not letting my own knowledge leak into his narrative.

If I were writing this in third omniscient, it might look something like this:

After seven years of appeals, hearings, and court filings, the State of Oklahoma finally approved an execution date for him. The sentence itself still made him angry, but the finality of the Board of Corrections letter in his hand relieved him. In August, he would no longer have to occupy his mind in a six-foot by ten-foot cell.

See how radically different the voice is?

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maestrowork said:

The two versions don't sound too much different. Seems like you have a 3rd person narrator (and voice) in mind, but when you switch to 1st person, you're not really dealing with the character's voice -- so both sounds the same to me. Switching from 3rd to 1st (or vice versa) is one of the hardest things because it's not a 1 to 1 translation. The narrative voices are inherently different.

In your example, the 3rd person narrator voice seems right to you, but the 1st person voice seems wrong, because you're not inside your character's head. The 3rd person narrator sounds right because of the word choices and rhythm and sentence structures: they seem a bit more distant and narrator-like. But that wouldn't work for a first person narrator.

How about this (I'm just making an example, since I don't know your character):

(first person):
I drove toward the house. It looked small from a distance, high on the top of the cliff like a tiny candle on a cupcake. Or maybe like a sentinel, guarding the village or something. My body started to pulsate with fear. I couldn't help it. I tightened the grip on the wheel but my foot continued to press on the gas pedal. The house pulled me to it. I couldn't look away. I couldn't refuse it's call. It had bewitched me, and I thought, "Oh my God, what is happening?" I pressed on the gas pedal even harder.

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maestrowork said:

No. If you go with 1st person then the whole thing needs to be "rewritten" (and not change the pronoun/subject) in your character's voice. Yes, it's work, but it's not that daunting. I mean, it took me just a few seconds to change your example, and I don't even know your character. If you know your character, then you should be able to change the narration from her point of view and told in her voice instead of the 3rd person.

In first person, your character IS the narrator. There's no 3rd person narrator anymore.

When you tell the story in your character's voice, the word choices, the way she puts together the sentences, her thought processes change. She probably wouldn't say "the house located at the top of the cliff..." because that sounds kind of formal, for example.

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Ruv Draba said:

Yes, it's more than substituting 'I' for 'She'. A third person narrator isn't a character but a persona. It has a style and a mood but it doesn't have a history, knowledge or opinions, and it doesn't react to events. A first-person narrator has all those things and you need to let some of that through. E.g.

Driving through the village I could see the house on top of the cliffs, guarding the village like a sentinel. I spent so much time staring at it that I almost swerved off the road twice. The village ended with a gas station and as that dwindled in my rear-view mirror I began to sweat. My eyes literally wouldn't stay on the road. They were glued to the house, and I was steering as well as I could by the rear-view mirror when I could see it -- watching where I'd been. I heard the wheels hit gravel and I swung hard by reflex and took a bend. My head turned like a plaster clown's at a carnival side-show, my mouth open wide. And all the time I crawled up that lonely road to the cliff-top house like a convict mounting a scaffold.
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So what's different?

Does the passage feel more immediate? More tense? Do we get a sense of who's driving the car? Can we tell how the character felt at the time, and how the character feels now, narrating the story? Is the character normally a good driver or a bad driver? How does the narrator feel about the driving? Do we feel like we're driving the car too?

Here's the same passage rendered back in third person with a simple pronoun swap:

Driving through the village she could see the house on top of the cliffs, guarding the village like a sentinel. She spent so much time staring at it that she almost swerved off the road twice. The village ended with a gas station and as that dwindled in her rear-view mirror she began to sweat. Her eyes literally wouldn't stay on the road. They were glued to the house, and she was steering as well as she could by the rear-view mirror -- watching where she'd been. She heard the wheels hit gravel and she swung hard by reflex and took a bend. Her head turned like a plaster clown's at a carnival side-show, her mouth open wide. And all the time she crawled up that lonely road to the cliff-top house like a convict mounting a scaffold.
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That's probably not how I'd write it in third-person -- there are phrases that sound cruelly unsympathetic when they don't come from the character's mouth. But does it still retain its urgency?

An eyewitness account is always more immediate and personal than a third-hand account. First person narrative requires us to make the reader be there, while a third-person account will let us just say what happened. Many authors find first-person narrative challenging because it exposes hidden weaknesses in their narration.


I used several tricks to try and make the experience immediate:

1. I never told the audience that the house wanted the narrator there; I let them come to that conclusion just as the character was;
2. I gave this fact consequences (the narrator might crash);
3. I showed those consequences physically using what the character can see and feel rather than what it knows or believes;
4. I showed (but didn't tell) the character's reactions every time the situation changed;
5. I let the outcome be in doubt (would she crash, or would she get to the house -- and which was worse?); and
6. I added a bit of anger as the narrator related this story -- the narrator is understandably angry over her powerlessness.

Of these tricks, all are useful for third person narrative too, except the last one -- 3P narrators generally shouldn't react to events, but just relate them. There's one other trick that you need for first person narrative, which is to choose the narrator's voice carefully -- pick the kinds of sentences and words to suit the narrator's personality and background. You need it for third person narration too, but in first person it's essential. Phrases like 'wheels hit gravel' and 'plaster clown's at a carnival side-show' create a sense of personality, age and background. An seventeen year-old high-school student would be unlikely to use those phrases, and neither would a seventy year-old retired academic. We need to use the language that suits the character.

Hope that helps.

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