My battered copy
One of my favourite
books and certainly one of the most influential on me as a writer
is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. I loved that book
as a teenager and I still do. The narrator of the book is Jane
herself and she speaks directly to me and the millions of Bronte’s
fans. There is something wonderful about the way the character
engages us in her story: it is as if Jane is in the room with us. She
is as honest a narrator as she is a character and you are immediately
on her side. That immediacy is one of the strengths of first-person
narration. But there are downsides, as I discovered when I wrote my
trilogy The Healer’s Shadow.
I soon discovered that
not all readers are fans of first-person narration. One reviewer told
me categorically that she didn’t like first-person narration
because there was no suspense – she knew that the hero/heroine
would survive to the end of the book. Actually that isn’t always
true, but I can understand where she was coming from.
I also discovered that
not everyone understands some of the devices and rules of
first-person narration. One criticism my book Girl in the
Glass has occasionally received is that the tense sometimes
changes to the present, even though the majority of the book is
written in the past tense. This happens when the central character is
talking about an incident which is particularly vivid to her. This is
acceptable in a first-person narrative, because the narration is
reflecting what happens in real speech. When we start to relive the
past, we will often start talking in the present tense. I could play
safe and not shift tenses, but I feel that loses something.
I was reminded of the
problems of first-person narration recently because I was reading a
lovely book also written in the first person – When Rosa
Came Home by Karen Wyld. The problem first-person narration
gives a writer is that you can’t jump out of the head of the
narrator and into someone else’s, which means that the story is
filtered by what the narrator can see and know. At the macro level
this means either the narrator has to see what happens or be told it
by someone else who has seen it. Some readers (and reviewers) believe
that a good book explains everything at the end – they want to
understand the motivation of all the main characters, they want to
know what happened to so-and-so who leaves the narrator’s world at
the end of part one. If you are using a first-person narrator you
will either disappoint them or create a narrator whose omniscience is
not credible. Be honest – do you understand your own motivation,
let alone anyone else’s?
Of course there is an
upside to this problem and that is the games you can play with your
narrator misinterpreting other characters and circumstances: an
unreliable narrator as they say in the trade. It does seem to me that
all narrators should be unreliable (to varying degrees) if they are
human beings. My central character regularly gets things wrong and
part of her character arc over the trilogy is how she comes to
realize how wrong she has been.
On the micro level
there are certain things that I have learned to look out for when I
am going over my books. The most obvious of these are descriptions of
things that are not visible to the narrator. These can be quite
minor, but I find they can jolt me out of the first-person narrator’s
consciousness. Another issue I try to tackle is the overuse of
phrases such as “I saw”, “I heard” “I tasted” etc. In a
way they are redundant in the first person – of course I saw it, I
wouldn’t be describing it otherwise. There is a very real danger
that you will overuse the word “I” in first-person narration,
which is just as off-putting in a novel as when you are listening to
someone. First-person narration’s very strength – its immediacy –
can be negated by the overuse of the word.
First-person narration
is a minefield for the writer. As I have outlined above, you will
alienate some of readers just by using it, and others you will upset
because of the limitations of the first-person narrative. There are
even some agents who refuse to accept manuscripts written in the
first person, but then some of the most successful books ever written
recently and in the past have had a first-person narrator.
