First Person Foibles

More and more middle-grade and YA novels are being written in first person. Many people like first person because it brings them closer to the main character. If this is your POV of choice, here are a few tips to help make the task easier.


Show. Don’t tell.

Most of us know this already, but in a first person POV, it’s a bit harder because the nature of first person is to tell. The main character is ‘telling’ a story, so we have to work doubly hard to make sure the story happens, rather than telling it.

Telling - I stood at the bus stop wishing the driver would hurry up and arrive. It was freezing out and I didn’t know if I could stand the cold much longer.

Showing - I stood at the bus stop, shivering. The bitter wind blew hard and cold, and my lungs burned with each breath. I hunched my shoulders to my ears and slid my numb hands into my coat sleeves. Where was the bus driver?


Talking to the Reader

This is another common problem when writing in first person - talking to and explaining things to the reader. It’s an easy trap to fall into because, once again, that’s the nature of first person. But the main character shouldn’t be telling things he already knows. He should be telling us what is happening.

Example - My name is Aaron Cutler and I’m 13 years old. I’m sitting on this bus and heading to Georgia because my parents died, and now I have to live with an aunt I’ve never met.

What happened in this example? A boy talked. So really, nothing happened. Yes, we've learned some things about him, but there is no story here. It’s all explanation. Aaron already knows all this about himself, and he’s sitting by himself on the bus, so who is he talking to? The reader. But the reader isn’t part of the story. The reader doesn’t exist in Aaron’s world, so there’s no reason for Aaron to be talking to him.

So how do we get all this info to the reader without talking to him? Through action and dialogue. In this case, the easiest way is to give Aaron someone to talk to.

Example

I sat on the bus and stared at the paper in my hand. Cora Bentley, 17 Wildwood Terrace, Atlanta, Georgia. Dad’s sister, and a total stranger. And I was stuck with her, at least until I turned eighteen. Five years with a total stranger.

“Mind if I sit here?”

I looked up. A kid about sixteen or seventeen stood there. “No. Go ahead,” I said.

He tossed a backpack into the overhead luggage rack, then sat beside me. "So, where you headed?” he asked.

“Atlanta.”

And as the conversation progresses, the rest of the information comes out. The opening starts with story, rather than a lot of blather. And the conversation will help with the characterization of both characters.

The ‘I’ Syndrome

Another problem with first person is constantly saying ‘I’ did this or ‘I’ did that. Too many ‘I’s’ in a story can easily become annoying to the reader. Generally, they’re the result of falling into the telling and talking to the reader traps mentioned above. Solve those problems, and the ‘I’ count will magically dwindle away.

First person can be a powerful way to tell a story if it's done right. Conquer the common problems and you just might come up with a winner!

Poetry Friday: Robert Louis Stevenson

Once again, the mind returns to poems learned in early childhood - and so, for summer:

At the Sea-side

When I was down beside the sea
A wooden spade they gave to me
To dig the sandy shore.

My holes were empty like a cup.
In every hole the sea came up,
Till it could come no more.


Bed in Summer

IN winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people’s feet
Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?


The Swing

HOW do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
Rivers and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside—

Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown—
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!

Women of Wednesday: Rachel Carson - Passionate Woman, Powerful Words

This Wednesday as the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico continues, the woman on my mind is Rachel Carson. Born in 1907, she had worked for the US Fisheries Agency for years before publishing her first books in the 1950s, and was a best-selling author when she turned her pen to the looming crisis of pesticides in the environment. I remember the sense of foreboding that the cover of Silent Spring evoked (I was way too young to read the book in 1962) and the way it changed our thoughts about those aerial mosquito treatments when the notices from the town warned us to stay inside.

Rachel’s life will sound familiar to most of us – a child who began writing almost as soon as she could read, who wrote essays and magazine articles throughout the years she worked at her “day job,” not actually becoming a “full-time” writer until after two of her books had become best-sellers. She supported her mother and sisters, and later adopted her orphaned nephew and cared for her aged mother. So few women writers ever have the luxury of “just writing.” And yet Rachel did not allow her busy-ness to interfere with the things she was passionate about, keeping up with her research and her writing along with the demands of her life. She maintained her passion in the face of rejection and dismissive responses, sounding the warning cry about wide-spread use of wartime chemicals as pesticides during the heyday of “better living through chemistry.” The well-funded attacks on her research and her credentials sounds eerily familiar, even today.

Ironically, considering that much of Carson’s research had been into the carcinogenic effects of pesticides in the environment, she developed breast cancer while she was writing Silent Spring and succumbed to it in 1964, 6 years before the establishing of the Environmental Protection Agency and a decade before the phase-out of routine use of DDT. Her legacy continues, however, and today it is taken for granted that the government has some responsibility to protect the environment and the public from toxins and pollutants.

Mentor Monday - Thoughts on revising: Real Writers are re-writers.

One of the best things about writing the Notable Women profiles is also one of the hardest. They are SHORT! And it’s hard to write tight. The good thing is that trimming and tightening to come in under that word count is good training for any other writing we do.

Most of us tend to write weakly. We hedge our statements (with words like “most of us” and “tend to”) so we can’t be wrong. We buffer our words (“almost,” “rather”) to avoid giving offense. We write in the passive voice (“was spoiled”) so we don’t have to assign responsibility. Like politicians, we generate lots of words with very little content. Weak writing is innocuous, but bland. Readers don’t enjoy being bored, so editors don’t buy boring writing. 

Cutting waffle words strengthens writing. Believe what you write, and proclaim it with confidence. (This applies to fiction as well as non-fiction. Although your characters and plot are fictional, you must “believe” in them if you want them to come alive for your reader.) Watch out for “usually,” “probably,” “basically,” “kind of,” and their wobbly-kneed brethren. And no impersonal pronouns! If you catch yourself writing “one knows” or “one does,” stop and ask, “Who, exactly, is this ‘one’?” If it is you, say so. If not, rephrase the thought. (I know, your sixth grade teacher told you never to write “I.” That was to force you to focus on the subject, not on yourself. Still a good guideline, unless you’re writing op-ed pieces. What are you doing in this story, anyway?)

Be ruthless with the passive (“was broken,” “has been lost”). Ask “by whom?” Chances are, if you find passive constructions, you’re “telling” what happened. Back up and show it happening instead.

Good fiction techniques make for strong writing, even in non-fiction. Set the scene, develop the characters. Anecdotes illustrate points and draw the reader into the subject. Believable people capture readers’ interest, so they want to finish, to find out what happens. Sensory details bring writing to life. Your reader should not only see the scene you describe but hear the voices on the street, smell the passing bus, taste the smoke and feel the heat of the fire. Or taste the chocolate soda, hear the jukebox and feel the cool plastic restaurant seat.

All those details take extra words – which means cutting even deeper into the text. Make every word count, and you’ll make your word count.

Ready, set – trim!

Poetry Friday: Crossing the Loch

Crossing the Loch

Remember how we rowed toward the cottage
on the sickle-shaped bay,
that one night after the pub
loosed us through its swinging doors
and we pushed across the shingle
till water lipped the sides
as though the loch mouthed 'boat'?

I forgot who rowed. Our jokes hushed.
The oars' splash, creak, and the spill
of the loch reached long into the night.
Out in the race I was scared:
the cold shawl of breeze,
and hunched hills; what the water held
of deadheads, ticking nuclear hulls.

Who rowed, and who kept their peace?
Who hauled salt-air and stars
deep into their lungs, were not reassured;
and who first noticed the loch's
phosphorescence, so, like a twittering nest
washed from the rushes, an astonished
small boat of saints, we watched water shine
on our fingers and oars,
the magic dart of our bow wave?
It was surely foolhardy, such a broad loch, a tide,
but we live—and even have children
to women and men we had yet to meet
that night we set out, calling our own
the sky and salt-water, wounded hills
dark-starred by blaeberries, the glimmering anklets
we wore in the shallows
as we shipped oars and jumped,
to draw the boat safe, high at the cottage shore.

This poem is called "Crossing the Loch" by Kathleen Jamie from Waterlight: Selected Poems. © Graywolf Press, 2007. 

Kathleen Jamie is a poet new to me.  I think she is already a favorite.  You can listen to Garrison Keillor do a fine reading of Crossing the Loch, here.

 Row on over to Laura Salas's place for some more Poetry Friday offerings . . .