These people plough through hundreds of stories, one after another, and they’re likely to feel a certain lassitude when every story is told in the same way. Thinking more practically, using the third person may help you to catch the attention of an agent or editor reading your work. From an artistic perspective, the third person offers some fascinating storytelling possibilities not available with first person, and it also guards against a certain me-me-me indulgence that’s easy to fall into when every other line contains an “I.” Perhaps many of those first person narrators are really author Is posing as fictional Is, and, yes, there is sometimes a fine line between fiction and memoir, but there’s a reason they are shelved in different sections of the bookstore. Let’s not overlook, however, the many merits of the third person narrator. We wouldn’t want Ishmael to introduce himself with anything other than “Call me Ishmael,” nor would we want Jane Eyre to deliver her good news any other way than, “Reader, I married him.” In the first person, we, the reader, actually become the character, walking around in his shoes, viewing the world through her eyes, hearing the tale straight from the horse’s mouth. The first person allows us to inhabit a fictional character more fully than is possible in any other point of view, or even in any other form of storytelling.

The first person narrator is a wonderful device. Whatever the cause, the first person point of view has clearly become the default choice for most fiction writers, and though it’s not a bad choice, it’s not the only choice.ĭon’t get me wrong. Why are there so many Is out there now? Perhaps it has something to do with the current popularity of the memoir or perhaps it’s just that it seems easier to write a story in the first person. It got to the point where I cringed every time I began a story and ran into that ubiquitous “I.” (Count me among the guilty as I’m using it even for this article.) (Genre fiction heavily favors the third person point of view.) While compiling an anthology of short stories, I made a startling discovery-the vast majority of contemporary fiction is being written in the first person, so much so that we seem to be suffering an overpopulation of first person narrators. Perhaps that was once true, but no more, at least not in the field of literary fiction. I had always assumed that the split was relatively even between first person and third person narrators in fiction and had even heard it said that the third person was the more prevalent of the two.

Next time you start writing a work of fiction, stop (or at least pause) before you type out that fateful word “I.” Why? The first person narrator in contemporary fiction is seriously overused.

Narrator point of view