Go to any writing forum, and you’ll probably come across at least a few agonised discussions on whether third person is ‘better’ than first person. More often than not, the whole thing will be kicked off by someone asking if third or first person narrative is better for their particular book, but it’s also common enough to see people arguing the respective merits of each in the abstract. There is an unspoken rule governing these discussions, which goes something like this:

1. Everything of importance worth saying about first vs. third person narration has already been laid out in simple, easy-to-digest writing advice and can be summarised in a series of pro and cons for each.
2. More experienced writers are duty-bound to regurgitate this advice whenever their less-experienced friends request it.

The second point may or may not be valid.

The first one definitely is not. Here’s why.

If you’ve been writing for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with those little charts that explain the pros and cons of both first and third person. They usually go something along the lines of ‘First person = immediacy/identification with narrator but limited viewpoint, third person = wider viewpoint(s) but limited immediacy/identification’. What most people take away from these things is the idea that each viewpoint choice carries certain automatic benefits, which you must weigh up against its corresponding downsides. Choose first person, so the received wisdom goes, and the reader will identify more easily with your character.

That’s not true. I mean, it’s obviously not true, and I suspect most people know it isn’t true, yet you see the same advice trotted out again and again all over the internet: “Well, if you write it in first-person people will identify more easily with your main character…”

I think this stems from the notion that having a viewpoint which resides firmly in one character’s head must result in the reader having an easier time identifying with that character. I mean, how could it go wrong?

To put it bluntly, it could go wrong if the writer has no idea what they’re doing.

Consider how easy it is to ‘break’ a third person narrative, by which I mean how easy it is to turn a simple stylistic choice into something that could ruin your entire novel. All you have to do is write a third person novel in which the viewpoint sticks rigidly and closely to a single character from beginning to end – boom, you’ve just ruined your novel. (Well, probably. I guess it could still end up being good, but the sheer monotony of having the same close viewpoint chapter-in and chapter-out will probably overshadow its better qualities.)

It’s a little bit harder to explain how you can break first person, even if it is (sadly) no more difficult to do in practice.

Fitst of all, keep in mind what writing in first person means. Every description, thought, action and emotion is being filtered through the mind of your viewpoint character. They’re the ones telling the story, to a degree that goes far beyond even the closest examples of third-person narration. Everything goes through them and is filtered through them. (Although it isn’t filtered through them – note the difference.) In other words, first person is about a hell of a lot more than just writing ‘I’ instead of ‘He’ or ‘She’.

Unfortunately, an awful lot of writers don’t seem to have gotten that particular memo.

I’m going to use Susan Ee’s Angelfall as an example, mostly because it’s self-published and is thus less likely to incite people to come and spray butthurt all over the comments thread. This is from early in the book, when the main character witnesses a bunch of marauding angels doing their thing:

They have different colored wings. The one who smashed into the car has snowy white wings. The giant has wings the color of night. The others are blue, green, burnt orange and tiger-striped.

They’re all shirtless, their muscled forms flexing with every movement. Like their wings, their skin tones vary. The snowy-winged angel that crushed the car has light caramel skin. The night-winged one has skin as pale as an egg. The rest range from gold to dark brown. These angels look like the type to be heavily scarred by battle wounds but instead, have the kind of perfectly unmarred skin prom queens around the country would kill their prom kings for.

There is nothing about this that would look out of place in a third-person novel. You might be tempted to say that the ‘prom queen’ comment sounds like the main character’s voice intruding in a very first-person way into an otherwise entirely descriptive paragraph, but it still wouldn’t need any tweaking at all to work in third-person. It’s also not that specific to the main character.

This wouldn’t be a problem if it was an isolated incident, but the entire novel is written this way. Most of its action scenes would need only a quick find-and-replace to be converted form first to third person. It would even be relatively easy to do this with most of the more introspective scenes – I know, because I was doing it in my head the whole time I was reading it.

The cumulative effect of all this not-first person was that I started to feel less invested in the main character’s plight rather than more so. By some strange alchemy, the text managed to convert the main character into an empty space around which the rest of the novel revolved. And what do you call a novel with a hole in it? You call it…uh, not a very good novel. Yeah.

(I realise that you may may be tempted to object that a novel-hole lets the reader ‘put themselves in the place of the character’, to which I would point out that that’s only a good thing if you’re writing a Choose Your Own Adventure book.)

The problem here is that the book is largely concerned with the external: movement, action, what the main characters sees and hears, what the people around her are doing. That isn’t, generally speaking, the kind of thing that first-person is best used for. It works best when created a sense of the character’s own interior: what they feel, what their internal mental world consists of, how they respond in their own way to what’s going on around them. If you’re primarily interested in the external actions of your characters and the world they inhabit, just go with third person and mix things up with multiple viewpoints. Why multiple viewpoints? Because it can do wonders for a flat character if the reader gets to see them through someone else’s eyes for a while. I would have killed to see the main character of Angelfall from a different viewpoint, if only because her own viewpoint was doing such a terrible job of letting me connect with her.

The other oft-ignored point about first person I want to make is that it immediately poses a question to both reader and writer. That question is ‘How is this being told?’ Is this supposed to be a real document or artefact from the fictional world it describes (see The Handmaid’s Tale for a well-known example of that), or is it literally being narrated to the reader by the main character? Is there, in other words, a tacit agreement between author and reader that the name on the front cover doesn’t matter, and that for however long the book lasts it will be the viewpoint character running the show? Or is the novel supposed to be taken at face value, with the assumption that the reader has gained privileged access to that character’s stream-of-consciousness?

You need to be able to answer that question. You really, really need to be able to answer it, because it determines exactly how much you can experiment with the literary possibilities of first-person. (Which, once again, should be the reason why you’re doing first-person to begin with.) If your novel is being conveyed to the reader in real-time, then you must establish how much time has elapsed since the events being described, if any. You also most likely can’t have the main character go into long passages of self-reflection, at least not if you’re serious about making the whole thing seem like a realistic facsimile of the spoken word. If the novel is being ‘written’ by the main character, then you cannot ever break persona; you can’t have them know things they couldn’t know (although you shouldn’t be doing that anyway), you can’t have them suddenly wax philosophical on the semiotics of the divine if it’s previously been established that they have no formal education, and you can’t blithely skip over major character events that any real person would want to linger on if they were writing their memoirs. You also, once again, have to give the reader some idea of when they’re supposed to be writing, and under what conditions.

Does that all sound completely irrelevant to your novel? Please, write it in third-person.

Are you more interested in action scenes than all of the crap I just talked about? Write in third-person.

Do you really want three or four viewpoint characters, but it’s okay, you can totally distinguish the voices of that many characters without turning the book into a confusing mess? For the love of God, write it in third person. 

Your nitpickier readers will think you for it.