I Dislike First Person, or All the Good Writing Advice Comes from Futurama

I’ve finally read enough books written in the first person to decide this: I do not generally like books written in the first person.

Funnily enough, I don’t mind if one of the characters narrates the story – I’d have to pound on the McGurk Organization’s Joey Rockaway if I did mind – but perhaps that’s because good ol’ Joey isn’t telling me about things happening as they happen; he’s telling us things after events have transpired.
And I may have stumbled across the principal reason why I don’t like first-person writing: throbbing temples.

In almost every first-person book I read, a character’s temples are throbbing. All sorts of crazy is going on around them, but they focus on the throbbing temples. I guess it’s a way to show a dazed character, to show us as readers they’re in mortal danger yet have throbbing temples, THROBBING TEMPLES. We just don’t see the danger because THROBBING TEMPLES.

Too much time inside the character’s head.

And this is ironic, considering I’ve got a book in the works that is being told partially from the first person.

Maybe there are good examples of first-person writing out there and I haven’t yet stumbled across them, or have simply forgotten about it in the wave of all the good third-person writing that I’ve consumed.

There are ways to get inside a character’s head without stabbing the reader with the first-person “I”. Terry Pratchett does this well, particularly with his Sam Vimes and Tiffany Aching books.

And maybe I’m a snob, poisoned by so many good books told from a more omniscient perspective that reading a few from the first-person that aren’t all that great turns me off the style, which like hanging an onion on our belts, is the style at the time.

This could very well be a difference between writers who are able to show well versus writers who have to tell. And it inspires me to read these good authors again and again to pound this facet of writing into my head.

Cue the angsty Futurama Devil Robot again:



If the folks at nownovel.com are to be believed, I think the rule most often broken by first-person narratives – and the one that grates the most on me when it is broken – goes stregit to the show don’t tell phenomenon. To quote:

Because the narrator uses the first person ‘I’ (and sometimes the plural ‘we’) to tell the bulk of the story in first person narration, you may be tempted to begin sentences with ‘I’ a lot. Take this sentence for example:

‘I saw that the door was closed and I heard a faint scratching noise coming from within the house. I thought it sounded like someone trying to dig a tunnel out.’

The words ‘I saw’, ‘I heard’ and ‘I thought’ all place the reader at one remove to the unfolding events. The reader isn’t seeing, hearing or thinking these things through the narrator. The reader is being told about the narrator’s experiences.

Telling rather than showing can be defined as “overusing words that place distance between the narrator and [the] reader,” if I can borrow a phrase from nownovel.

Another rule that gets broken often is nownovel’s No. 5: “Vary the way your narrator expresses feelings, thoughts, and experiences.” Many of the first-person novels I’ve read have narrators that use one method – and one method only – to get these thoughts across. Points for consistency, but it grates after a while.

I also appreciate nownovel’s points on starting a story in first person.