What I don't know: The perils of first-person narration

It is a common misconception that first-person is an easy point of view to write from.  We as writers can limit the world to a single set of prejudices and a single worldview, but there are many subtle inconsistencies that hard to catch.

I'm your first-person narrator.  Here are a few things that I don't know.

* I don't know what I look like: Be careful with personal details

By definition, the reader is seeing things through the narrator's eyes.  That means we as writers have to be cognizant of the fact that what the narrator is seeing has to be believable.  For example:

Color crept up my neck.

I can't see color creeping up my own neck.  From experience, I might know that my face gets red when I'm embarrassed, but I can't physially see it. It puts a certain distance between the reader and the narrator, and the most powerful aspect of this POV is the closeness it establishes between these two.  Anything you do to create distance is going to distract the reader.

Instead, focus attention away from the visual and onto the sensory.  For example:

Heat crept up my neck

This conveys the same connotation of embarrassment, but without the visual sense of color.  The reader will deduce color from the overarching sense of embarrassment.

* I don't know what I don't know: Be careful of personal anachronisms

It's easy to insert aspects of a character that don't fit if you're not thinking about it.  We as human beings have a variety of life-experience, and we as writers draw from that pool constantly as we work.  Our readers, too, have similar experiences, so they will identify with the images we’re trying to convey.  But when they don’t fit a character, they detract from the plot.

Here's an example: It's the thirteenth century and the main character has spent her whole life in a monastery.  Before the story takes place, she'd never witnessed life beyond the walls.  But she says the following in the narrative:

The ale made me feel dizzy and seasick.

His fever raged till his skin burned and he flailed his arms and legs like an infant.

These are personal anachronisms.  This character has never even seen the sea, much less been on a boat.  How can she know what moving water even looks like, much less connect it to the fact that it sometimes makes people nauseous?

She's never even seen a baby, much less held one.  How can she know babies flail their arms and legs, and curl up like little bugs when they're scared or hurt or just plain angry?

By imbuing a first-person character with memories or thoughts that contradict the established or emerging characterization, we as writers discredit ourselves and all the work we've done.  It makes the character falsely knowledgable, which is off-putting to a careful reader.

Character sheets help some writers keep these things straight, either on paper or electronically.  Some writers have complete profiles and backstories written for their characters.

* I don't know what you know: Be careful with others' motives

A first-person narrator only knows what's in her head.  She can't know the reasons other people do things, unless they tell her.  She can guess their motives, but if she passes them off as gospel, it has an omniscience to it that discredits her as a POV character.

One bushy eyebrow arched, but he inclined his head to hide it.

How do I know he was trying to hide it?  I don't know this for a fact; I'm only inferring it.  But the way this statement is worded, it seems like I know this was what he was doing for sure.  All of a sudden I'm in his head, telling the reader his motive for inclining his head.  I've just jumped POV in a scene, and that's a cardinal sin.

Head-hopping is never a good thing for a writer to do, as it interferes with the perspective the reader is building.  In the first-person world, it is especially distracting because the power in the POV comes from its intimacy, and when you let in other perspectives, you lose that.

Watch for connectors like to, since and because, as they can indicate a potential for head-hopping.

* I don't know what others see: Be careful with observation

Similar to ascribing motive to a character outside the first-person narrator, a writer has to be careful not to interpret what another character is seeing.  This is particularly true of aspects of the narrator herself.

He noticed me gaping and nodded affably.

Right now, the reader no longer in the narrator's head; the reader is in the other character's head seeing the narrator gaping.  The narrator knows she is gaping, but she cannot see it.  The verb notice implies seeing, and the narrator is telling us what the other character is seeing without being able to see it herself.

Double-check any verbs involving sensory input (see, hear, touch, feel, look, glance, etc.) to insure their antecedants are appropriate to the first-person narrator.

* I don't know my own physiology: Be careful with bodily functions

Blood raged in my veins.

Really, can you feel your own blood?  Do you know what it's doing?  And we certainly hope it's in your veins.  If it weren't, you'd have a worse problem than a poorly constructed sentence.

This is just lazy writing.  It has no physiological leg to stand on.  It's meant to communicate emotion somehow in a purely physical way.  It doesn't work.  In the first-person world, it is especially problematic, as it assumes a narrator has direct contact with her bodily functions.

It's also a passive construction, which is addressed below as its own separate issue.

* I don't know what my body parts are doing: Be careful with passive construction

In effort to eliminate the forest of "I"s on the page in a first-person narrative, it's easy to try to creatively wangle constructions to vary the sentence structure.

My feet fumbled clear of the stirrup

My mouth quirked in a smile

My shoulder hitched

Body parts don't move on their own.  There has to be some active agent causing them to move or it just seems ridiculous.  Besides, the removal of the subject pronoun I takes away from the overall tone of intimacy created with this particular POV.

Of course you don't want to start every sentence with I went or I found.  But passive constructions put distance between the narrator's consciousness and the reader's, by substituting a part of the whole (feet, hands, eyes) for the whole mind.

However, some passive constructions work, even in the first-person world, since they involve involuntary movements of the body.  Hands can tremble on their own, and hearts might race involuntarily at the sight of something scary or sexy.  Just be careful to know the difference.

* I don't know what I'm not there for: Be careful with reactions

The writer is omniscient in a way the first-person narrator is not (or rather, should not be).  Imbuing the narrator with knowledge she would not have through misplaced omniscience is a form of head-hopping, in that the reader jumps from the limited viewpoint of the narrator and enters the writer's omniscient mind.

She went white and shook with rage when she found out I ignored her command.

How do I know this?  Context implies I was somewhere else when she found out, so how can I know how she looked or what she did?  This construction puts the reader outside the narrator's POV to understand a response to a stimulus.

There are no consistent tells to alert a writer to this construction.  The best way to catch these is to be aware they exist, and double-check scenes in which the narrator is removed temporally from the action.

* What I do know

The first-person perspective has great impact when it's done invisibly.  The reader assumes the narrator's identity, down to her very senses, and absorbs the plot in an entirely different way than other points of view.

First-person works best when the plot requires the sort of limitation inherent in this POV.  If you can rewrite the first chapter in third-person and it still makes sense, you might want to rethink using the first person.

A first-person narrative is at its most effective when nothing stands between the reader and the narrator, including the narrator herself.