Writing in the First Person?

Some common mistakes—and an overlooked technique.

Hiii from London, where I came for a few work events and stayed to sneak in some writing while the kids have weekend sleepovers. It’s been exciting to see all the new subscribers! I loved hearing from you; thanks to the many who posted or emailed. Clearly, the idea of not writing as a key part of a working practice resonated….

This week, with fall in the air, I thought I’d get a more technical, and offer a Craft Talk—a series that will eventually be for paid subscribers only. This week, I’ll talk a bit about the challenges of writing in the first person.

The following is mostly about writing personal essays and memoir, but much of it applies to fiction and poetry too.

Common Mistakes

One of the biggest mistakes I see in first-person essay submissions is this: The writer has forgotten that the “I” has to become a character on the page. Often, the author of a personal essay forgets that we don’t know very much about them and includes too few details. Alternatively, they tell us too much about themselves, but the details don’t accrue into a coherent portrait of a person. Have you ever been in a workshop where someone says, “I don’t feel I understand the speaker very well?” Or “I don’t know why I’m learning this detail?”

In nonfiction, we need to feel the essayist or memoirist has a point of view, and that they understand that the details they are including suggest things about who they are, or who they aren’t. In nonfiction, unlike in fiction and poetry, you also have to build a first-person that the reader can trust, and any person we trust is someone who reveals their own limitations.

The trick, though, is that the writer has to understand those limitations, rather than accidentally reveal them. In fiction and poetry, it’s less important that we trust the first person—but in all genres, the writer needs to signal their grasp of the limitations of their character. What’s so challenging about nonfiction is that the “character” is ourselves, and it’s hard to see ourselves clearly. (I’ll be doing a few more posts about this technically and emotionally complex problem in the coming months…)

So, how to do this?  

A helpful technique…

One often-overlooked technique in creating a character on the page is to build a dimensional, well-curated portrait of a person by allowing the reader to shadow the “I” in the act of perceiving. And yet we rarely talk in workshop about the way that a speaker perceives, or about the quality of their perceptions.

This is too bad, because one of the fundamental ways that writers create intimacy/interest (whether they are conscious of this or not) is by letting the reader shadow the memoirist/narrator/speaker in the act of perceiving as they move through the world. Intimacy doesn’t arrive from exposition in which you tell the reader something about yourself, but in the places where you enact a mind reflecting and processing on the page and allow reader to live within it.

Example: If I tell you I grew up in Brooklyn in the 1980s (some crucial facts about me) do you feel you understand me better? Probably not.

But if you use reflection to establish trust and dramatize the speaker in the act of perceiving, as Hilton Als does in this wonderful essay about writing in The New Yorker, you will help the reader understand a great deal about the “I”—and engage the reader as you do. Here is his opening; I’ve put a few key moments in bold, but in fact the whole paragraph deftly weaves exposition and perception together:

Some months ago—actually, it’s been over a year now—I moved from one part of Manhattan to another. The distance wasn’t tremendous, less than a mile, but the psychological shift was sizable; I was vacating a way station that had passed as a home, for a room of my own. Even though I’d lived in the apartment I was leaving for over twenty years, I’d shared it with a number of friends and too many ideas about what constituted generosity and receptivity. If you had a roof over your head, then it behooved you to share it with others, no matter the financial and spiritual cost—giving might make someone else, anyone else, better. That was my mother’s ethos; she raised me and my five siblings in Brooklyn.

But, in the last years leading up to leaving my first Manhattan apartment, I’d felt crowded in it, or, more accurately, crowded out of it…
—Hilton Als

Notice the ways that Als establishes trust by allowing for self-correction: “actually, it’s been over a year now” and “…or more accurately.” How many of us would have edited those moments out? How many of us would have replaced  “Some months ago, I moved from one part of Manhattan..” with “A year ago, I moved …” ? I probably would have!

And yet those seemingly throwaway self-corrections are crucial to the establishment of our trust in the “I” on the page here. So, too, is the way that this opening threads factual information with moments of perception: “The distance wasn’t tremendous, less than a mile, but the psychological shift was sizable.” This sentence embodies a threading technique I suspect Als learned from reading Joan Didion: you deliver crucial pieces of information not merely as fact, but as occasion for reflection, or even the source of reflection.

A less skilled writer might have tried out something like the below (my apologies to Als.) This version has all the same facts as Als’ opening, but it doesn’t engage the reader in the shadowing the act of perception of the page, or work to characterize the essayist. Rather, it TELLS us everything:

A year ago I moved from one part of Manhattan to another. The distance wasn’t far, but I had lived in my old apartment for twenty years and it was hard to leave it, even though I had been unhappy there, crowded by my roommates. Now I was moving into a room of my own—something I had never had. I had grown up in Brooklyn with my five siblings…

I think you can see the difference! This is a version of show, don’t tell, but what is often left out of that bromide is that showing isn’t just a matter of building out scenes and dramatic action. In nonfiction, we need to see the writer’s character perceiving on the page.

The truly fun thing is when you get to start differentiating the present-day writer on the page and the back-in-time self on the page—I’ll be returning to this theme in a future post. But for your weekend, here are some techniques to play with. Let me know how it goes.

Things to DO when writing in the first person:

• Formulations. I think of them as “punctures”—places where the ossification of fact, or of the “normal” breaks open. These are moments where the essayist or memoirist’s world view comes through, where perception snaps into place, where risk is taken.

• Self-correction: Be sparing, but remember you can break the fourth wall, and offer clarifications like “actually, it’s been over a year now”.

• Curation: The personal essayist becomes a character on the page through selection of key details/curation, and knowing what to leave out. You don’t need very many facts, but you do need some. Ideally, they come in through the unfolding of a scene or reflection, rather than in a kind of potted personal history. They also should accrue meaningfully. Think of building your character as if you are decorating a room or choosing an outfit to wear; the various items should go together, but not in too matchy-matchy or random a way. Your character should be like a well-lived in room, organized, coherent, idiosyncratic.

• Compression: Take a personal scene that isn’t working and try cutting it in half, or by a third, a quarter. Often, when high emotion scene isn’t working therei s just too much affective language around it. Intensity often comes from tightening.

• Dimension: You can build an “I” on the page by thinking about what the reader “needs to know” but also about the odd details that make a person—you— unique. If the details are too programmatic or tidy, the “I” on the page will feel like the author of a formulaic college essay.

• Specificity: This is the key to connecting. “I grew up in Brooklyn in the 1980s” doesn’t allow you to relate to my experience. But if I write “From my bedroom window, I could see the park where Al Sharpton and the protestors gathered every Saturday…” you start to learn more about the character of the “I” and what she is noticing.

• Risk: Last but not least, after every draft I write, I ask myself, “What have I not risked saying? What am I afraid to say?” Then I try to say it in two sentences or less. (Remember: compression can be the difference between disclosure or confession working and not working at all.)

Things to let go of:

• Details that don’t help tell the larger story/argument

• Details that are confusing / require too much explanation for the payoff

• Verbose language - sometimes a “formulation” needs to be in the piece, but in far compressed form

• Tidiness. People are messy: Let go of anything too cutesy, too tidy, too resolved

• But don’t be too messy: You’re making an aesthetic object

Always reread the piece asking yourself what the reader doesn’t know yet and still needs to learn!

I look forward to hearing your thoughts about first-person writing—as well as further questions! Let me know whether this was helpful, and have a great weekend.