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.

Capturing the Essence of Childhood

Richard Thompson speaks the truth.

And his kids -- the kids in his Cul de Sac comic strip -- speak the truth as well. (There's a permanent link to his comic strip website to the left. Please visit. His comic strip is wonderful. Demand that your local paper run it. Ours does.

They are children who speak and act and perform and worry and fret and prattle like children. Behold today's installment:

I have to admit that I, too, when I got to visit a furniture store -- we rarely did that as kids; we were always at home when Dad came back with the truck loaded with new furniture -- I also thought it would be pretty neat if the whole outdoors was like that, with furniture stretching as far as the eye can see. I was also convinced that when angels had to go to the bathroom, they did so over the forests where we went to get firewood because if they did it over the city, that would be gross.

I'm a big fan of comic book kids, and those who can be true to the life of kids in general are my favorites. Cul de Sac, this week I realized, has tipped Peanuts out of that lofty position. It's because in Cul de Sac, the angst and worry and tension and pathos and fear and joy and happiness and excitement and disappointment is all borne from children, not from an adult pushing adult worries onto his kiddie creations, like Charles Schulz did, or pushing manufactured childhood fantasy through the eye of an adult onto a pseudokid, as in Calvin and Hobbes.

I still like Charlie Brown and the gang, mind you. When Charlie Brown's lying on that hillside looking at the clouds with Linus and Lucy and is getting more and more freaked out as Linus describes the elaborate fantasies he sees in the clouds when all he sees is a ducky, I'm there with Chuck, feeling inadequate. I'm also a pretty big fan of Charlie's unrequitted love with the Little Red-Haired Girl, as the few friends I had in elementary school at his age were the girls that liked me for some reason, I don't know why.

Then there's this: I know this angst is pretty real for a kid. I experienced it myself.

BAMSPHD?

I find out this week, of course, if I've passed my online class on building an online class, representing the last three credits I need to earn a masters degree. I have high hopes. I know my final paper and website for the class aren't perfect, but I think I worked hard enough on them to accomplish something a little better than average. I have been wrong before, of course.

So now begs the next question: Since I may soon have the right to add the MS to the BA already behind my name, do I go on for the PhD? I'm listing pros and cons here, with cons first, as is my pessimistic wont:

• Sounds like just about any subject I pick has a teaching element involved.
• Not that teaching is terrible, but that means I can't complete the program and remain employed where I am, unless I want to drive myself crazy by driving all over the place. Nearest doctorate-issuing university to me is Idaho State, 75 miles. And do they have a program I want?
• Obviously I could continue at Utah State, get a PhD in professional communication. But that means moving to Logan.
• I can't provide for my family on what pittance I'd get from the university during the program. No way entirely. I'd have to work and go to school at the same time.
• I know people have done this, but do I want to do it? It sounds insane.

Yes, narrative style is helping me think these through. Now the pros:

• Earn big money, after spending big money.
• Honors and benefits, and at the age of nine.
• Working to accomplish something this difficult would be an amazing thing.
• More, better job opportunities, as masters degrees are going the way of the bachelors, in becoming a dime a dozen.
• Teaching experience on top of anything else. Could lead to better things, get me out of RWMC (not that it's bad, mind you) and into BYU-Idaho (not that BYU-I is necessarily nirvana).

One more con: I'd have to buy a suit.

So in a word, I don't know. I think a little more research is needed. That's a good place to start, right? But I'll have to act quickly because, like Cuzco, I ain't gettin' any deader.

Best Damn Dead Squirrel Reporting on the Internet

I tread lightly here, because it wasn't just a few years ago that I was the idiot reporter bringing in news stories like this one (from Local News 8) Link his here; I can't guarantee it's permanent, however:

A squirrel got the shock of its life Monday morning, and so did people in his neighborhood. It happened in the area near Freeman and Cleveland Streets in Idaho Falls.

The little squirrel made his way to a transformer box on top of a power pole and was electrocuted. It landed on the ground.

The mishap caused an extremely loud explosion, and it startled several people living nearby.
"All of the sudden there was a huge ‘kaboom!' And I mean, it was loud! And then a lot of smoke came up from the ground," explained Diana Forbes, who witnessed the explosion.

The smoke near the ground was most likely from the body of the little squirrel. It apparently fell from power pole after the explosion.

Comments on the local news' website about this story have been comical to say the least. A few chimed in to say that the station had no right to parade this dead squirrel's remains on television, where innocent children are confronted with the grisly images. If her innocent kids are anything like mine, this is not the first unfortunate, dead animal they have seen in their lifetime. We had a dead bird in our front yard earlier this summer, which the kids found. We explained death to them -- a topic they're already familiar with, given the passing of their Opa (who died before the younger two were born, and at a time when the oldest wasn't even a year old). So the concept of death is not new to them. They asked a lot of questions. We answered them, honestly. We've talked to them about the fact that our dachshund, now 14 years old, is likely to die in the next few years. It'll be sad, we tell them, but that's how life goes.

Then there's the misdirected soul commenting on the story who decries the sentiment expressed by these two ladies, angrily snarling "It's people like you who have helped the government turn Americans into sheep," as if there's a vast conspiracy to conceal rodent death from the general population, or if the moment we cry for dead rodent censorship on local television is the exact same moment the feds will descend upon us with their helicopters with the owl-feather-coated rotors.

Then there's the ghoul who is upset that the TV station, instead of reporting on dead squirrels, isn't reporting on the traffic accidents he/she has seen in the last few days. These kinds of rubberneckers aren't content with driving by the site of destruction, they want the local TV station to aid and abet their rubbernecking. My Dad, rest his soul, was a serious rubbernecker. One of the most embarassing moments from my childhood came after a cop shouted at dad over me through the passenger window because Dad was moving too slow past the scene of an accident. Additionally, having been a reporter, I'd like to say this: These are the worst kinds of stories to do. Do you like ambulance-chasing lawyers? Why encourage ambulance-chasing among reporters? And, having been in a few accidents myself, I'd like to say that the last thing I need is some idiot reporter shoving a microphone in my face. Although if one did, I'd insist the only way I'd talk to them is if the printed "Brian Davidson, Local Boob" underneath my picture when they do the reporting. (Best Homer Simpson line ever, if I'm allowed a segue: "Our lives are in the hands of men no smarter than you or I. Many of them incompetent boobs.")

Urgh. All of this confirms the fact I'm glad I'm no longer in the news business.