August 19, 2005
I'm not even going to copy my example of first person here. Everybody knows what it is.

For the record, I love first person. I love reading it and I love writing it. It's worth being noted, just as a curious aside, that the Derek Stillwater novels are not first-person and I feel they're my best books to date.

Pros of first person. Intimacy, first and foremost. Not only does it feel like the character is talking directly to you, there's a certain amount of transference--through the alchemy of reading, the reader often feels like they ARE the main character. Pretty much by definition, in the first person the reader is privy to the thoughts and emotions of the main character, unless the writer is using the narrator as a "Watson," as Doyle did in his Sherlock Holmes stories. In other words, Sherlock is the main character, but Watson is the first person narrator. It worked well for him because it made Sherlock bigger than life and mysterious, but you don't see that too much these days. And even though Watson is the narrator, it's Holmes we remember.

More pros. First person works well for mysteries because in theory the reader doesn't know anything more than the main character does. We get to find the clues at the same time and be presented with clues in the same way, so even if we miss them, hopefully they're there and the character did catch them.

So intimacy, immediacy, etc. What's wrong with first person? Some are obvious. It's limiting. Sometimes you want to show things the main character doesn't see. This can be handled in different ways. For instance, in my second Meg Malloy novel that my agent is shopping around, after some adventures together, Meg and Jack Bear go off in separate ways, her to deal with a client being cyber-stalked, him to Chicago to retrieve Meg's car that was stolen by a 14-year-old runaway. When they get back together, Meg asks Jack about his trip and he tells her about retrieving the girl, his encounter with her "pimp" that ended up with Jack breaking the guy's arm. There are probably 3 ways to handle this.

1. Jack could just tell her. It lacks immediacy and "talking heads" can get boring if you're not careful.

2. Cut the scene and have a third-person break. More about that later, but I didn't choose to do it that way.

3. Have Meg tell Jack's story as a story. That's more or less what I did and here's what I wrote:

He had left Lake Orion around six at night and hit Chicago around ten. Figuring Sally and her pimp, Tom, were territorial, he headed over to Wrigley Field, Racine and the Coldwater Bar & Grill. After that, he merely drove in ever-widening blocks until he spotted the car, two streets over from the bar.

"I found a parking spot--something of a miracle in that part of town, believe me--close enough to keep an eye on the car, and settled in to wait. I didn't have to wait long. Sally came out of one of the brownstones with Tom and headed for the car. It was around midnight or so."

[ital] Jack angled out of his rented Mustang and plotted an intercept course. He met them just as they hit the Z4. Sally's eyes grew big and she grabbed Tom's arm. "It's that guy! Jack Bear! It's him."

Tom sneered. "You're a persistent bastard, aren't you?"

"Persistent," Jack agreed.

"She's staying with me and I'm keeping the car," Tom said.

Jack shook his head. "No."

Tom pulled a butterfly knife from his pocket, spinning it so the blades clicked into place. He lunged at Jack.

[regular font] Our waitress brought the sizzling platter of meat and tortillas just as Jack got to this point in his story. I had finished my margarita. Jack was only halfway through his beer. The waitress, Kathy, wearing denim shorts and a black Sagebrush Cantina T-shirt, brushed her shoulder-length brown hair away from her face and said, "Everything okay?"

"Yes," I hissed.

***
Then Meg nags Jack into telling her the rest of the story.

The point here is that first person offers certain technical challenges. Some authors handle them imaginatively and creatively, working hard to blend in ways of providing a variety of information that doesn't seem like an "information dump."

Some authors don't. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth--when I was in high school in the late '70s, early '80s--I was a good high school saxophonist. I took some private lessons from my band director, who in turn had studied sax with the godfather of saxophone education (whose name I forget) at the University of Michigan. I was given that instructor's book on saxophone and in the intro it said something along the lines of, "The saxophone is one of the easiest musical instruments to play--poorly."

I think that's exactly the problem with first person. It's easy. It's natural. But there's a tendency for even the best writers to slip into too much "tell" and not nearly enough "show." It's entirely too easy to slip into a pov that isn't actually the character's, but is the authors. An awful lot of authors--especially mystery authors, I'm afraid--choose first person not because they're good at it (although they probably think they are) or because it meets the demands of the particular story they're writing, but because they feel that mystery stories should be written in the first person.

Another problem is suspense. For the thriller, third person works better, especially if you can create suspense from an alternate pov by having things going on that are going to be dangerous that your main character doesn't know is happening. That way the reader can go, "Oh God, Frank and Joe are trying to defuse the bomb, but they don't know that the Bombadier's partner, Go-Boom, is just on the other side of the door with a radio transmitter..."

On the other hand, there are a number of exceedingly talented and successful writers who have used the first person for so-called suspense novels--Barry Eisler for his John Rain books; Lee Child for his Reacher books; Jonathan Kellerman for his Alex Delaware novels. I would argue that Kellerman's books rarely seem that suspenseful, but are fascinating, and I've often wondered why Barry chose the first person for a half-American/half-Japanese assassin. First-person pov for an assassin as a main character wouldn't have been my first pov choice for all of the reasons above, but Barry pulls it off.

Let me wrap this up with a comment on shifting povs. I blame this on Robert Crais, the amazing author of the amazing Elvis Cole P.I. series. (As well as Demolition Angel and Hostage, both terrific stand-alones). Crais went along his first 5 or 6 books or so and wrote the books in traditional first-person. Then he wrote "L.A. Requiem." Not only does Cole narrate in first person, but there are plenty of alternating chapters and scenes written in the third person. It works great. It's a terrific, suspense book. It was a bestseller.

Unfortunately, it encouraged an awful lot of bestselling authors to use that technique. It must have seemed like a license to steal. "Well, the assumption has always been that this doesn't work, but Crais did a great job and it was successful, so I'll do it..." Harlan Coben does it in his thrillers. And honestly, despite his successes, I'm not sure it always works in his books. I'll be reading along, caught up in the story, there'll be a change from first person to third person and I'll be totally freaking confused about who's narrating, where we are, who we're writing about. Harlan could have done better. And this failure, I think, has more to do with not be as concerned about those transitions rather than concerned about first versus third person pov. A little more care should have been taken at the beginning of those scene changes to establish who was the pov character. Kellerman has also done this, and although I rather like seeing scenes from Milo's pov, I'm not really sure they worked from a technical pov.

David Morrell in his book on writing lectured at length on NEVER USING THE FIRST PERSON. Then goes on to use it in his book "Long Lost." (Not very well, I thought. Perhaps he should have followed his own advice). Although I don't agree with Morrell entirely on this issue, I think part of the takeaway message today is to not automatically just leap into first person because it's easy for you. It may not serve the story well that you're writing.

Now I could go on to write about first or third person present (try to avoid either one, but there have been notable exceptions) or 2nd person (gag me), but I won't. Let me just bring up one more point about first person and we'll wrap up this little mini-series lecture.

I think a lot of writers, especially of mysteries, choose first person because the person they're writing about--the film editor who finds a dead body, the caterer who solves crimes, the housewife who is an amateur sleuth, etc--is an awful lot like them. In fact, their character is essentially a thinly disguised version of themselves, so, hey, why not write it in the first person?

Okay. Sure. My character, Theo MacGreggor, who appeared in the two novellas in "Catfish Guru" and in a short story "Just As Dead" published by Orchard Press Mysteries, [and in "Blood Secrets," which was picked up by two publishers who went out of business before publication (otherwise known as Small Press Hell)], is essentially me. Me with a PhD, a divorce, a young child, etc. But we drove the same car, lived in the same house, had the same point of view.

So when an editor or agent or reader says, "I really don't like the character..." be prepared to have your feelings hurt. Not to mention your ego slammed a bit. We can kind of understand Sally Fields saying, "You like me! You really like me!" Because the rest of the time we're thinking, "They hate me! They really hate me!"

Well, have a good weekend.

Best,
Mark Terry