I'm done with first-person narration
He's done with first-person narration...
Persona non grata
Last week I finished working on the edits for my next book. This means I finally had time to go over other manuscripts that are almost ready to send out, but that could do with another round of edits. One of these, a short novel, mixes first- and third-person narration. I think the piece works well as it is. And yet, for a couple of hours yesterday I messed with it, shifting all of the text to the third person, only to hit the undo button like mad in the end. The other manuscript I returned to — a collection of five long short stories — eschews the first person altogether. I’ve even made a concerted effort to minimise the narrator’s voice in it. No radical changes were deemed necessary here.
Thing is, I once loved using the first person in my fiction but not any more. For quite a while now, I’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable with it.1 Why does it make me uncomfortable? Maybe this is motivated by an allergy to self-referentiality? I don’t think this is the case, since I have no problem reading first-person fiction by others. My issue with first-person narration is how often it is automatically taken as truth — and what this means for me as a writer.
It’s always a lie. Really…
First of all, I see this as a contemporary issue. And by “this” I mean the tendency, even among seasoned readers, to assume that a first-person narrator typically speaks for the author and presents a truth.