First person and the dangers of suckage

The writer who shuts himself up in a room and goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for that is what literature is.

Orhan Pamuk

God save me from writing literature on purpose.
Nevertheless: hiding yourself from view does require a certain artistry, whether you're vying for grant money from the Important Persons League or coveting Dan Brown's spot on the New York Times bestseller list. This problem is particularly acute if you've foolishly decided to write a first person narrative, like I have.

I say "foolish" because, although I've heard many neophytes claim that writing in first person is easier, it's not. At all. What they haven't figured out yet is that yes, it's easy to write in the first person, but it sounds just like them.  If they're writing a speculative fiction piece, it sounds like a  twenty-something protagonist with a quirky modern sensibility caught in the spaces between worlds. If they're writing horror, it sounds like a  twenty-something protagonist with a quirky modern sensibility who's discovered a nest of vampires in the basement of his apartment building. If they're writing romance...well, you get the idea. Writing in the first person is easy. Doing it well is another task altogether.

Writing well in first person is inherently more difficult because you're got pull off narrative sleight-of-hand. Unless you've opted for memoir, journal entries, or some other device, you present the reader with a challenge, which they may or may not consciously articulate: how am I able to hear this voice? You've got to be slick enough to get the reader to immediately suspend disbelief. One way to do that is to just dazzle the reader with the big big cleverness. Look at the first two sentences of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange:

"What's it going to be then, eh?"

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.

I mean: who cares how we're hearing this, right? Look at that! It's too cool to wonder about the mechanics of it, and Burgess keeps that up through the whole book, addressing us ("O my brothers and only friends") as though we're sitting at the milkbar and hearing the story from Alex's own mouth.

In Life After God, Doug Coupland takes it even further:

I was driving you up to Prince George to the home of your grandfather, the golf wino.

What risk! Coupland's brash assumption shanghais the reader, making you a participant in the story. A certain type of reader would immediately ask, "You were?" But these people are probably unreachable by such narratives, so I don't care about them.

You can use a combination of techniques. In The Children of Men, P.D. James intersperses journal entries with third-person narrative. In The Movie Lover, Richard Friedel adopts the tone of a memoir for the first third of the book, and then pulls off a switch to third person and back again which, by all rights, shouldn't have worked, but did. It worked because he used the third person to give us a tidbit that we didn't know that we were wanting until the very moment he offered it.

In each case, you as a storyteller have to be compelling enough to make the reader overlook the impossibilities of your first person narrative. Some audiences will be more receptive to this sort of trickery than others, but if you can't manage it, you'll fail. And then you'll feel bad and eat too much and get fat and die in obscurity.

Another problem occurs when the first person narrator is an embarrassingly obvious stand-in for the author, turning what is ostensibly fiction into thinly-veiled autobiography. This can go two ways. The first and most common is that you'll run smack into the depressing reality that your life and the conflicts therein aren't nearly as interesting to other people as they are to you, no matter how gut-wrenching you find your own pseudo-prose or how well you think you've disguised yourself. The second and far-less likely path is one of radical embellishment, which will eventually get Oprah mad at you. This requires a certain tweaked genius to actually accomplish.

At the moment, I've got a protagonist who's achieved the academic success I thought I wanted a decade ago, lives a lifestyle that I've fantasized about, has written a bestselling book (non-fiction), with another on the way. He drinks a lot and has access to exotic pharmaceuticals. He lives in a city I used to live in--albeit 25 years from now--and he's smarter and better-looking than I am.  Because this fellow is living a sort of fantasy life of mine, I risk creating a narrator who is merely a surrogate for myself and writing a masturbatory monologue that no one cares about.

The trick is mastering that sleight-of-hand. In his story "The '84 Regress," Douglas Lain begins with:


I'm not going to be as energetically weird as Lain, or as brash as Coupland, or as clever as Burgess. Which leaves me with two things: story and character. I've got to create a narrator who captivates the reader, and put him through situations that motivate the reader. The first captures his interest, the second keeps him reading. I don't care whether this project ever gets labeled "literature."  All I care about is whether I'm skilled enough to keep the reader engaged from the first page to the last.

Oh, that's all? No problem.

Yikes.