First-Person Narrative

(originally published on Grub Street’s Friday Five-O)

I’m a fiction writer who loves to use first person point of view. However, I keep hearing from many expert writers that the first person is BAD. A magazine editor even rejected my story recently on the grounds that he “doesn’t accept first person narratives unless there’s an exceptionally good reason for it.” What’s so bad about first person, or is there something wrong with my taste?

—The “I” 

Dear I, 

I hear ya. I’m the same way. I love writing sentences that include the word “myself.” I think about my “I,” therefore I am. Everyone needs an “I,” the same way we need its homonym, the “eye.” It’s how we see.

The problem is not the use of the “I,” but the misuse of the “I.”

Are we alone? Can I tell you something? I think a lot of memoirs are bad. I think a lot of thinly fictionalized autobiographies are bad. I know mine was. This is us as writers using what might be called the conditional I. You know, the one based on conditions: the house you grew up in, the people who surrounded you, your culture and place of birth, early experiences, etc.

The conditional I puts things in because they happened. My feelings need to be recorded. That relationship needs to be addressed. And we end up with a very long diary, or a dream that we tell at breakfast without having any idea what it means.

But what if there was an unconditional I? An eye that could range to the farthest horizon, bounded only by possibility, rather than history. Would we be able to accept it? Or would we always be looking for the factual evidence that a certain fictional character or situation is based on?

The French poet Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961), was frustrated by the same kind of misunderstanding of some of his works: “They don’t see but one character in all my books,” he said. “Cendrars! L’Or is Cendrars; Moravagine is Cendrars; Dan Yack is Cendrars—I’m annoyed with this Cendrars!”

One simply can’t reject first-person narratives without investigating whether the writer has used the conditional or the unconditional I. I’m not saying that the unconditional I is easy to come by — it isn’t. It requires a full acceptance of projection before the imagination can take over, and that may be one of the reasons that your experts treat it as rare.

Let me tell you a story about me. I used to carry a typewriter around Prague to write my poems. I had transportive moments of writing one word after another that I would keep. I also wrote a bunch of crap that didn’t justify all the Becherovka and cigarettes that I had consumed while writing it.

My point is, that year I broke the “I” key on my typewriter.

My wife (then-girlfriend) thought it was a great joke. She and the wizardly Armenian repairman had a good laugh over it. “He broke the ‘I’ key! Heh heh heh…” But it really wasn’t that funny. I was getting the message that the conditional I and I had to part ways.

I use the “I” a lot these days, but I try to remember to make it unconditional. The unconditional I doesn’t care if the story it tells is not exactly what happened. The unconditional I assumes that you understand what I’m talking about. The dialogue that goes on between the unconditional I and the reader is based largely in potential, as opposed to the treadmill of trauma.

Send me the name of the editor who doesn’t want that!