When I was growing up and reading books, I encountered a lot of first person point of view. As a result, I started writing in first person when I was in middle school, thinking clearly that was the best perspective. It took several creative writing classes and a truck load of short stories (and, surprisingly or not, poetry) to really show me the variance and beauty of different points of view — that, and how to write first person correctly. Or, well, compellingly and using showing as opposed to just straight-up telling. (It is a natural inclination for a first person narrator to lecture the reader. Making narration active, interesting, and compelling without thickly infodumping or going off on tangential riffs or lectures can be difficult.)

My opinion now on point of view is that it should, first and foremost, fit the story it is telling. Sometimes I’ve encountered first person (fantasy, usually) novels that do not do just that; in those stories, the  point of view is clunky or arbitrary rather than seeming native to the stories. The genre of fantasy is not any lesser or different, at its fundamentals, than any other genre.

First person isn’t about simply using “I” and running with it. Some people think that a viewpoint is just an afterthought when telling a story or that certain stories “must” be written from some viewpoint, regardless of the actual story’s needs. I believe firmly that it is one of the most important elements in the story and it influences everything about the way that story is told, organized, and how the plot is revealed. In first person narration, your narrator is your guide, your entry, into the world of the story. This is as important with fantasy as with any other genre. With first person, your narrator is present, by default, in every single scene. (Unless you pull a Robert Louis Stevenson in Treasure Island and switch narrators to tell something your narrator can’t know, but I hate that. Consistency is key, especially in fantasy where you are usually world-building as well as narrating.) Normally this determined focus on your narrator places the story’s emphasis on and around your narrator but this may also lead to certain difficulties.

A narrator-focused story, by default

Your narrator is telling the story, and characters can only tell us what they know, either from first-hand experience or second- or third-hand (etc) knowledge. (Unless they’re omniscient, which happens, but in that case that’s characterized and thus explained.) This limits how the story can actually be staged. This can happen in more or less three ways:

One, the narrator is the protagonist or main character. Everything that they tell us is actually happening to, around, because of, or through him/her.

Two, the narrator is close to or near the main character or protagonist and the difference in perspective yields an important narrative focus that lends a new gravity to the story (such as in The Great Gatsby).

Three, the narrator is omniscient or god-like and knows everything, and as such is either a very strange main character or tells a story about other characters that ends up being more technically classified in the third person narration category somewhere.

The one I’ve seen in nearly all first person fantasy I’ve read is the first, the narrator being the protagonist. Considering a lot of fantasy stories are heroic stories in nature, this may lead down interesting paths. (In fantasy there is also the possibility of the narrator in the third instance being “the storyteller” like in, say, a fairy tale, thus framing a more traditional third person point of view within a first person’s narration, similar to Wuthering Heights‘ narrative frame, but that’s more or less third person with a frame, not really first person in the same way.) The second style, as in The Great Gatsby, is as rare in fantasy as it usually is in mainstream fiction more or less because it’s not easy to pull off. But it happens.

The narrator-protagonist’s perspective limitation

In this most common form, the main action of the novel is happening to, around, because of, or through the narrator. Your narrator-protagonist is telling the story, thus is working from a base of what they observe, know, infer, and learn. They can’t relate things they don’t know, things that could be related through exposition in certain third person formats. Revelation of information cannot happen in any way that is not consistent with the narrator’s character. If the narrator is simple or stupid, they cannot believably give speeches or long passages of expository history or background information in the manner of a scholar — that sort of thing.

Additionally, they can’t be everywhere at once, nor can they see everything at once. What happens when your narrator is unconscious, asleep, or otherwise temporarily incapacitated? What happens when two minor or secondary characters have a conversation that is of the utmost importance to the plot? (Eavesdropping, dear readers, can only take you so far, so often.) In terms of relating past conversations or events the narrator is “remembering,” can he or she realistically remember everything all of the time? And accurately? Do real people remember every small detail at every perfectly opportune moment? (Do you?) The easiest way of thinking about the limits of first person narration is to think about yourself as the main character of your own life and see what you know and can know and how you know those things. It seems intuitive, initially, but it is easy for a writer to be tempted to just inject things in convenient or artificial ways. Deus ex machina, much, people?

Hopefully your narrator is a real person (or, in fantasy, at least firmly rooted in a familiar reality or playing by consistent rules of your own reality). Real people have limitations. Some authors forget that and make protagonists or characters with none, effectively depriving them of their humanity, while still claiming their character is human (or at the least, ordinary). (The omniscient god protagonist is different, but we’re not talking about him right now.) What happens if your narrator is busy fighting a duel with Character #1 but Character #2 over there behind him is doing something really important and the audience should see it, but your narrator is busy and can’t glance over and see it? Or, what if Character #2 is sneaking up dramatically on the narrator, about to deliver a blow to the head and your narrator is turned away? The narration has to find ways to dodge around such issues. (While avoiding overuse of “suddenly” or “all of a sudden”. Tricky, yes; impossible, no.)

Aside from the physical issue and the knowledge-base issue, there’s the issue of personality and reflecting that personality accurately in the narration. If your character is selfish, would they really notice everything about everyone, or have dramatically insightful observations about someone else’s behavior? Unless it relates to them in some way, or unless they can take that observation and swing it around back to themselves, probably not. Naturally it depends on the character, but this can also depend on the way you sell their personality. Some of the best first person writing I’ve read involves really exciting and enjoyable irony that comes out through the difference between the way the narrator views the world, characters, and situations, and the way things might actually be. A narrator may develop opinions, biases, and ideas that are completely factually wrong or misleading, the revelation of which can be exciting to read.

When handled well, these “issues” hardly seem problems at all. With a flowing command of the scene through the narrator’s eyes, first person can be seamless, engaging, and above all, immediate.

The device of voice

Voice is a device, make no mistake. It’s that which can illuminate a side of your character’s personality in a showing way that telling could never really do justice. It can (and in the best, does) instantly reveal your character’s views, opinions, background, social class, culture/heritage, and overall personality. A distinctive or unusual character voice can be that which takes the story from bland to fascinating or can take a traditional-seeming storyline and turn it on its head. The right narrative voice can completely change the story’s tone and flavor. It can sprinkle comedy in a hero story, give a dark novel practicality, give a whimsical story depth or mystery, or an action novel some tension-breaking humor. It is an essential but sometimes overlooked element in any first person story.

Sometimes authors forget this, that writing in first person means you’re automatically writing in a voice. Going along with limited perspective, when a narrator speaks out of voice, it can be jarring and pull the reader out of the story’s world. Not every character will speak as the author does or as any number of third person narrative styles/voices speak. Just because you the author are writing this character does not mean the character should or does sound like you; that was an important difference writing classes really showed me.

When reading a novel (or series) that consistently switches first person character viewpoints, this difference can be crucial but is sometimes overlooked. Just like in normal dialogue, when all of the characters sound the same and see the world the same, it’s hardly worth demonstrating that these are different characters. If you don’t show them as being different, telling us they are does meaningfully little. If I don’t feel it, why should I care? Reading a lot of first person middle grade fiction growing up, I did not even know such a thing as a “voice” existed— so many of those novels sound exactly the same. It’s most often the unusual voices, however, that stand out and make the best novels worth rereading. (Avi, Jack Gantos, Louis Sachar — they do first person voices well.)

The first person epic versus the first person romance (i.e. non-epic fantasy)

Fantasy stories can be generally divided into two broad categories: the character-driven story and the epic story. (There are a rare few stories that are character-driven epics but by definition that’s a hard thing to accomplish without sacrificing either individual character for epic themes or trope stand-ins or sacrificing epic realism for emphasis on individual character. I’ll discuss this at length in a future post.) Basically, this difference is the difference between J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. (Though one could make an argument for the entire Earthsea Cycle being an epic, but in this sense I’m speaking of the single novel.) An epic is rooted in themes of society, class, country, war, the world, good vs. evil on a grand scale, etc. Romantic or non-epic fantasy is character-driven and localized, focusing more often on themes of the self, self-discovery, personal growth and change, coming-of-age, character relationships, localized themes of pride, etc. The scale is the difference. (Get it? Vaguely?)

I generally dislike seeing first person narration being used to tell epic or tension-filled fantasy (suspense, horror) stories. A first person story, to me, is by default and focus about the character of your narrator and their view of the world. A single person’s view of the world is automatically rather small. A single person is rarely at the center of everything which is what is necessary and essentially by definition an epic. Epics therefore usually involve a cast of characters with third person views that swing between this cast to effectively capture the range of opinions, emotion, and depth of a world to vividly draw and illuminate the epic scale. Rarely is a single character poised to be the center of the world in a realistic and believable way that effects us with the level of emotion, character depth, and individual voice to really be a good first person story. Rarely. A first person story, then, with its natural emphasis on its narrator and their view of the world, immediately focuses the story thematically in a different slant than Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which is epic in scale and less about character than about broader themes and issues.

First person series fantasy on a localized, “romantic” scale

Telling a series from a first person point of view, then, is tricky, because unless it’s very serialized (i.e. every book has the same format/plot style) or the series is very carefully or trickily plotted, a series can quickly rise to the epic level (focusing more on the world and its events than mere character) or can become redundant (a too-serialized series can lose its freshness), making our interest in the narrator wane. Some of the more successful first-person series, to me, are those which cover a large, overhanging arc of character, plot, and growth divided across several books, enabling each book to give us more character growth and insight as it follows along the life arc of the narrator. Additionally, the fact that important things keep happening to the narrator has to make sense. Either he/she is looking for trouble or is in a position where trouble can always find them. “Normal” narrators fit strangely here, in a fantasy series; if they are “normal,” if their lives are “normal,” if they want desperately to only be left alone, what is worth reading about them? What is so fantastic? Thus the most successful first person fantasy series are those that have compelling, curious, or danger-seeking protagonists (regardless of actual occupation). (The Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher, The Night Huntress series by Jeaniene Frost, the Greywalker series by Kat Richardson.)

This is part of my issue with the later books of Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire series about Sookie Stackhouse. It’s first person from Sookie’s perspective and only so much can keep happening to Sookie without the series continuously trending toward an overly melodramatic or soap-opera-like style. She is only a waitress and isn’t really looking for trouble, yet trouble keeps finding her and she keeps running from it. Sookie’s evocative, real, and hilarious voice, however, saves the series and keeps me wanting more. The narrative voice is sharp and witty and pulls me in regardless of the other melodramatic elements that I’m not a fan of. The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher is an example where the narrator constantly running from trouble works, because it’s in his personality to never run too far, because he’s just too noble to give up on anyone. Harry Dresden’s job makes him a target for trouble and his character (the often under-prepared white knight who feels obligated to save everyone all of the time) makes serialized danger really a necessity. He can’t ignore the damsel (or child, friend, or fairy) in distress — who knows that’s a shortcoming that keeps him from living a quiet life — and that’s always a good set-up for trouble. But not every series is so conveniently situated.

Epic first person fantasy

There is at least one perfect example of the successful employment of an epic story told through first person that I know of. (I’m still working my way down the science fiction & fantasy shelf at the book store, give me time.) This example is Robin Hobb’s Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies, surrounding the narrator of Fitz. Fitz’s voice brings this story to life first in hindsight as something of a memoir and then as immediate action. He’s poised in the center of events of the Six Duchies in a believable way — he is a royal bastard with none of the power but all of the physical proximity to everything that’s happening in the heart of the kingdom. He’s related or consistently near everyone important, either by blood or occupation. As a result, he has a hand or an eye in everything. This is, obviously, rather convenient for the vehicle of first person in this series. Plot always, rather conveniently, happens to and around Fitz. Hobb addresses this “coincidence” and convenience of Fitz always being at the center of everything important by telling us he is a “catalyst,” a person around whom great, pivotal events tend to naturally swirl, thus explaining these coincidences with a (in this case somewhat minor) pinch of fantastic explanation. (She gives us just enough prophecy, too, to make this even more epic than usual. Note: epic stories almost always have prophecies, foretelling, or important signs or signals.) Hobb earns this, however, through the compelling gravity of interest she develops around Fitz. We are willing to suspend our disbelief that Fitz is the one, so to speak, because he is interesting. He might be heroic by his actions but because of his narration we know he only wants simplicity in his life, earning our sympathy at every turn that takes his life down a path that keeps him further away from peace. It’s a dream of his he desperately fights for at every turn but life keeps throwing obstacles of heroic proportions at him he must find his way through, over, or past before he can reach his desired peace.

His introspective narration and extremely perceptive personality make him an interesting and terrific narrator as well. Fitz receives training in how to observe, assess, and conclude in order to function as a spy and assassin; this training, then, serves as the explanation as to why Fitz’s “memory” of events is so detailed, sharp, and accurate: he was trained to remember everything in that manner.

But aside from this, I’m usually of the opinion that first person stories are better focused not on the nation or the world but on the characters and their relationships and how they effect one another — with, potential world-changing consequences. It’s hard to see the world changing from the eyes and by the actions of a single individual. When a first person story centers a whole world’s events around a single character without that substantiation, however, problems result. When there is no rationally believable reason why everything is happening around the narrator, then why are we interested in the story at all? If the narrator hates adventure, why do adventures keep happening to him? Sometimes this issue can be solved by the device of voice. If the voice is funny, compelling, and interesting, we’ll probably want to keep reading it. If it’s a plain story but well told we’ll come back to it. But when a bland story is told in a bland voice, nothing can really keep it from being bland.

A few [hopefully] illuminating examples

Stephenie Meyer’s Bella in the Twilight series comes to mind. She’s not nearly interesting enough to settle a series around and Meyer gives us no good reason why it’s told from her point of view. Meyer even switches first person points of view three separate times (à la Treasure Island), leading me to think that Meyer should have told it from third person if she couldn’t get a handle over her narrator’s inability to tell the story herself. (I could go on, but I’ll stop there.)

Sherwood Smith’s Crown Duel is a perfect example of first person (YA) fantasy done right. She even discusses point of view (and its attendant difficulties and benefits) on her website, making terrific points about each of the different points of view. In Crown Duel, Meliara’s narration is unreliable, compelling, hilarious, and ironic. We completely get the sense of Meliara being a stubborn, prejudiced, and angry narrator whose prejudices influence every character interaction and description she gives us. When she meets the Marquis of Shevraeth initially, for instance, she simply describes him as she sees him — he’s just some “evil” unnamed interrogator, and she gives him a straightforward description. But once she finds out he’s a dreaded rich aristocrat from the class and society she hates, oh does that change the way she views both him and everything he does. Every action she sees him take is colored by her biased description of it. Despite her view of him, though, we still see and get the sense of his individual personality (which is not what she mistakenly thinks it is) by his own actions, even if without careful reading it might take most of the first part (or first book, depending on your version of it). It’s absolutely terrific and terribly underrated, a perfect example of the strength of a voice adding to the strengths of a story.

On the point of first person narration done right, I just finished re-reading Halfway to the Grave and One Foot in the Grave (the Night Huntress books) and read the new At Grave’s End by Jeaniene Frost. For a (new) author writing paranormal romance/urban fantasy, I think she’s talented and I really enjoy her books. One reason I do is because of her definite mastery of the first person point of view’s range, vulnerabilities, and strengths. Compare it to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga and the differences are even more startling — and all go in Jeaniene Frost’s favor. In both series, the main female character is the narrator, and she falls for a deadly and powerful (and handsome) vampire. But Cat is so much more interesting, engaging, exciting, and kick-ass; every scene is important, immediate, and necessary. And Cat can easily hold a scene herself without Bones being present. As such, I think Cat is a terrifically drawn character and it’s hard to imagine the story being told from third person with the same level of vicious immediacy to every scene. Compared to drab, hollow Bella, Cat is real and exciting.

The best part about Jeaniene Frost’s style, though, is her revelation of information. There are no long passages of first person explanation of the world (like in Karen Chance’s first two Cassandra Palmer books) and the information comes out both organically and with enough dramatic heft to make every line matter. She doesn’t infodump. A lot of first person narrators infodump at the start of novels. (Carrie Vaughn does this to some degree.) This is annoying. Jeaniene Frost (along with Kat Richardson, Jim Butcher, Robin McKinley, and others) really has a knack for revealing the information, world, and character details slowly enough to be enticing without infodumping but quickly enough to give us a handle on the world. Sometimes authors plunge us immediately into the other world with everything fully formed and working around us (the opening of Sunshine by Robin McKinley does this perfectly) and sometimes the author brings us in a toe at a time, like a nervous swimmer entering a cold pool.

Sometimes the author or narrator directly addresses the reader (depending on the format of the first person novel this can be dismissible, natural, awkward, or intriguing), which leads to an entirely different format of character and world revelation. The first Dresden Files book, Storm Front, does exactly this. Jim Butcher stylizes the opening in a sort of classic P.I. noir voice, letting Harry Dresden, Wizard, tell us about his world and his life in a matter-of-fact, conversational infodump that feels natural because it’s following a specific stylistic pattern. Journal- or memoir-style first person (fantasy) can be even trickier. Robin Hobb gets around this with Fitz, as I mentioned, because Fitz has a trained memory for detail and you get to a point where you simply believe everything Fitz says. (Thus, Hobb wins.)

The Claidi books by Tanith Lee are trickier (crazy plot aside) but she wins me over (at least a little) because she’s absolutely, strictly practical about it. Her slave-turned-heroine narrator Claidi writes the events of her life in a journal that takes up several different-looking and -sized notebooks and pieces of paper across her journey as she goes from place to place. It becomes a device, almost its own character, one that is carried in a backpack or pocket, hidden from prying eyes, stolen, fought over, and which becomes a prized account to be read by enemies and friends alike. It is the story we are reading but it is also (meta alert) being read by other characters, too, who get to see Claidi’s voice and handwriting, her insecurities laid bare, just as we do. It also makes certain to take appropriate logical liberties. When Claidi is taken prisoner or stolen away or flees or hides, something inevitably happens to her journal, too, and there are gaps in time of “I haven’t been able to write in days because…” that make the account realistic and interesting. (The books’ only real downside, however, is its crazy plot, devices aside; the stuff that happens to her in this world…eesh!)

In conclusion

First person is varied and can be terrific, but it should also fit the story and the characters. As with any type of writing, it can be stylistically challenging yet yield interesting and compelling results when written well, and bland reactions when it falls sort of the ideal mark. Like any genre, fantasy has its perks and drawbacks, but it certainly doesn’t limit itself to third person.