Choosing Viewpoint: The First Person

This is the first in a three-part series of posts on choosing viewpoint.  Like many modern aspiring genre authors, I used to default to the third person limited past tense for my storytelling, but I don’t want that to be my default; many of my favorite books and stories are written in other viewpoints and tenses, and making a deliberate choice will almost always result in a stronger story than reverting to a default or an assumption.  The myriad short stories I’ve been writing have given me the opportunity to experiment more, but when I queried my writing group about how they go about choosing a viewpoint for their stories, the answers were, for me, unsatisfying.  I’m certain that the viewpoint “coming with the story idea” works for them, but it doesn’t for me – I want something more rigorous, which is what this series of posts is intended to provide, a detailed walkthrough of my considerations in choosing a viewpoint for a story.

Now, when I say “viewpoint,” I am including the choice of both point-of-view in the traditional, literary sense, and the choice of tense.  While separate decisions, I make them together, as I find them to involve similar considerations.  If we include all of the major points of view, and all of the major tenses, we end up with sixteen possible combinations, but I will immediately eliminate from consideration the second person POV, the past perfect tense, and the future tense.  While there may be circumstances in which employing these would be desirable, I cannot imagine an engaging, readable, full-length story being written with those formalisms.  Thus, this first post will cover the first person past perspective and the first person present perspective, the next post will be on the third person limited past and present perspectives, and the third in the series will address the third person omniscient in past and present tense.

Choosing the optimal viewpoint for a given story can drastically affect the story’s final strength, and choosing the wrong one can even cause a story to become completely dysfunctional, which is why I’ve undertaken to think more deliberately about the process of choosing one and the factors which I should consider in the choice.  However, I don’t agree with the writers who claim that the best viewpoint is the one that provides the greatest immediacy and immersivity to a story…perhaps because I don’t like the first person present tense.  A recent movement holds that the first person present tense is the best way to tell a genre fiction story because it immerses the reader in the viewpoint character and keeps the tension high.

Part of why it doesn’t work for me is because I’m not fond of the present tense in fiction writing.  I find it clunky and awkward to read compared to past tense, and rather than making a story more immediate or tenser than it would be in past, I end up thrown out of the story in many instances.  Yes, it’s supposed to be as if the action is “happening now,” but you can accomplish much the same effect with simple past tense.  I blame the rise of present tense in genre fiction writing on movies, because people try to write like the movies they see.

Ironically, I recently got a story published which I wrote in the first person present tense.  A Rejection, though, utilizes a particular conceit of being an “in-world” exchange of letters, and is formatted accordingly.  I call this sort of style epistolary, although I’m not certain it meets the exact, textbook definition of that technique.  These types of stories are my major exception to my general dislike for first person and/or present tense writing, and it can work especially well in short stories.  In longer pieces, the first person viewpoint, past or present, is not my preference for reading or for writing.

The first person can be done exceptionally well, even in longer pieces: Kingkiller Chronicle is a fantastic example of this, in which, after a third person framing story, the main narrative is written in first person past tense.  Rothfuss provides a distinctive voice for his narrator, but it is not too distinct – there has been a rash of first person viewpoints that are snarky, angsty, and/or sarcastic, and of first person viewpoints that spend far too much time speaking to the reader – and he does a fantastic job of implementing a narrator who is just the right amount of unreliable.

It becomes clear from these examples that, for me, first person works best when it is harnessed to a deliberate purpose and structured within an “in-world” framework of some kind.  If I am going to tell a story in first person, it will involve some kind of framing device or conceit.  If it will be longer form, then it will somehow be the narrator having a reason to tell or write down their story for an in-world audience, not simply a story told through the first person directly to the reader.  That being said, your results may vary; plenty of people seem to enjoy a straight first person perspective in both past and present tense.

Outside of specific instances where the style of the story I want to tell demands first person as a tool, however, I do not enjoy it.  A Rejection wouldn’t work as a story if it was written from any kind of third person perspective, but Charmers, while it could be written in the first person, would not work as well as it does in its current third person form.  First person is a tool that enables some tasks no other viewpoint can, but I don’t enjoy it when another tool could do the job.  We’ll talk about one of those other tools next week.