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Writing in the first Person - too many "I"s?
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Will has the definitions correct.This isn't a vote of confidence, but a statement of fact.
My first novel was (an odd phrasing; isn't it still?) first person-present tense and I had a difficult time with the I pronoun as well. what I ended up with is a personal pronoun balance agreement. I tried to referred to the main character with "I" and "me" only when an event was exclusive to him while in the company of others or for the sake of detail. I used "mine" when it was important to denote one object or idea from another. Mostly I "hid" the pronouns behind sentences that added to the scene. Besides, a moving target is harder to hit. Example: "I was cold and soaked when I got up from the floor." I would instead say something like "water gushed from my pockets as arms numb from the wet and cold pushed me into a standing position. The arms looked like mine, though I was sure the blueish tinge was new."
I had to rewrite the entire book several times before I found that balance. I absolutely failed at the letter of my rule, but by keeping it in mind, it made for a better read; at least I think so.
Mobi wrote: "One of the most notable writers in the first person who breaks almost every writing rule in the book is the late, great, Damon Runyon.He uses gangster slang throughout and writes exclusively in ..."
Runyon's use of language puts the reader straight into the stylised world he writes of. The same is true of P.G. Wodehouse, who often seems to invent his own languge.
Both so different, yet hugely enjoyable.
As long as your readers enjoy it, what does it matter?
(Except of course using the word 'less' when you really should be using 'fewer', in which case a death sentence should apply!)
Will I find your advice clear and excellent. Indeed this group is more useful to me as a writer than any other.A thing that strikes me is that we need to know who reads our books and why. Not everyone likes the same genre or writing style of course.
For example, to me Stephen King can be well argued to be a 'good writer' as he has sold a lot of books. Yet I have never been able to read one all the way through even if I force myself. Reading them is like watching paint dry to me, only you know right away how long the paint will take to dry and what it will look like.
Yet the example given illuminates to be a bit why some find him entertaining.
However, the example dialogue given makes me think of someone trying to 'mimic a dialect 'of speech that I am very familiar with.
Now anything Victor Hugo wrote is prcieless to me.
There are the rules one mucc be cognizant of to write 'well' but to sell your work you need to know who you are selling to, what those people want. But discovering that is often trial and error.
There is I feel alwayys a group that wants to read a given style and genre even if the writing is not stellar.
The Author P D James said that the first rule of being a successful writer is to entertain. Not all brands of entertainment suit all people, thus there are variants. Being an ENTERTAINING storyteller aptly describes most writers of fiction.
Peyton wrote: "There is I feel always a group that wants to read a given style and genre even if the writing is not stellar. ..."This is true. Romance is not one of my favorite genres, but I do not judge its quality or its value to its millions of readers. There is a certain comfort - an odd kind of security, if you will - for the reader in its formula, as a nursery rhyme appeals to a child. And I would think that there is an anticipation among its readers in how the author will bring something fresh and unusual to this age-old story line, time after time. That takes no small amount of creativity. (And let's face it - there are only four basic story lines out there - Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Man, Man vs. Himself, and any combination of these.) I find myself always curious (and I'm sure I'm not alone) about any given author's take on and treatment of a subject, regardless of genre. I always learn something.
Most writing is not stellar, including mine. I strive toward it, but will always fall short of my vision. But a good story is a good story, no matter the genre. The heart in the story, the author's commitment to the integrity of the story, will guarantee readership. Chance, fate, timing - these may govern how popular a book becomes, and we can't control them. But we must write the stories that we must write. We can, should, and do write with a certain audience in mind, but we should not undermine the integrity of our stories in order to pander to the reading public, which can be as fickle as the wind.
A friend of mine, since deceased, wrote his memoir of growing up in a rural community and then of his experience as a combat Marine in WWII. His writing is far from stellar, but his heart speaks through his words, and in reading his memoir, I felt that I was at his kitchen table, sharing coffee and hearing him tell his stories. It's that sense of wonder and joie de vivre that gives his story life.
Exactly. TELLING the story. Before man could read or write, the great sagas were told around a burning fire by he or she who was the keeper of the peoples' legends, stories passed down VERBALLY from one generation to another. Hence, yes, a man telling his story at the kitchen table. It comes from the heart.
(It looks like we've drifted off topic. Again! These threads can be worse than a game of Telephone.);-)
Mobi wrote: "To give you an example, if I write: "I looked along the bar and saw two girls sitting there" She tells me it should read: "There were two girls sitting at the bar.""It isn't so much the use of "I" itself as the "I" is flagging weak writing. Specifically, wordiness. I'm editing a book with the same problem; the author isn't writing in the first person, but his characters are always "looking" or "noticing" things. It's technically (barely) "action," but it only exists to describe the scene for the benefit of the reader. It gets dry and repetitive fast. It falls in the same category as people who compulsively put dialogue tags on EVERY change of speaker.
If "I" is telling the story, then "I" doesn't have to "look" at everything. That just generates unnecessary wordiness. Look at your sentence; look at her sentence. Which is longer? Does your sentence convey anything that her sentence doesn't? Then why are you using more words? If you want a guide about when to let "I" get into the descriptions, then put it this way: Would the narrator be saying this if they were talking to someone else in the book? Or is it something they're just explaining to the reader because the reader isn't in the story? if it's only being described for the benefit of the reader, leave the describer out.
Mobi wrote: “To give you an example, if I write: ‘I looked along the bar and saw two girls sitting there,’ she tells me it should read: ‘There were two girls sitting at the bar.’ ”And while we’re at it, let’s get rid of the passive wording and change the sentence to “Two girls were sitting at the bar.” What does the word there add to the meaning?
Less passive: "Two girls sat at the bar." Or if you DO want to keep the narrator in the forefront: "I noticed two girls at the bar."
Sally wrote: "Less passive: "Two girls sat at the bar." Or if you DO want to keep the narrator in the forefront: "I noticed two girls at the bar.""Even better. Kudos.
Personally, I don't care for "I noticed two girls at the bar". This is precisely the sort of filtering language that we have been talking about. If the first person narrator talks about two girls at the bar, then it is pretty obvious that he/she has noticed them. Unless the verb adds something, we can take it for granted that everything reported by the narrator has been seen, thought or heard by the narrator.If we want to bring the narrator into the action then we ideally need some sense of what the narrator was thinking about the two girls. "I was excited to see two girls sitting at the bar" would be better.
Or we could inject some details about the two girls. Just sitting at the bar doesn't tell us much. Isn't that what most people do at a bar? That's when we try to breathe some life into it like: "Two girls were sipping cocktails at a bar." or "Two tweens were nursing hour-old skinny lattes."
Will wrote: "Personally, I don't care for "I noticed two girls at the bar". This is precisely the sort of filtering language that we have been talking about. If the first person narrator talks about two girls a..."I agree totally. The 1st person can be hard to manage if it is not used to bring the reader closer to the narrator and deeper into the subject. It should enhance the point of view not banalise it. So, in The Great Gatsby Nick Carroway give a very close and personal account of Gatsby's decline which renders it more poignant and more credible than a detached 3rd person universal could have done. Hearing it through his voice makes you a participant, rather than a spectator. The same narrative enhancement is, of course, used to a stunning effect in To Kill A Mockingbird.
In the passive voice, the object and subject of a sentence are swapped around. Sometimes there is no subject. "Fred drank a glass of wine" is a sentence in the active voice. "A glass of wine was drunk by Fred" is passive, as is "A glass of wine was drunk."
Filtering is when the narrator's senses are included in a sentence as well as some secondary action that the narrator is seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling. "I saw Fred drink a glass of wine."
Arguably nearly all filtering sentences are written in the active voice. "I saw the moon" has a subject and object in the correct order. It's a sentence in the active voice.
I'm normally a great fan of nuance and subtlety in language. Rules are there to be broken. Language is continually evolving. A good writer can bend and break conventions. But in this case I am struggling to see how filtering and the passive/ active voice can be conflated. They are two different things.
Is it splitting hairs to get definitions right? I don't think so. We will have people reading this who will never have heard of filtering or passive/ active voices. I'd like to think we were giving them good advice and not confusing them.