{"id":212,"date":"2016-12-13T02:58:51","date_gmt":"2016-12-13T02:58:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/?p=212"},"modified":"2020-08-15T16:40:24","modified_gmt":"2020-08-15T16:40:24","slug":"first-person-narration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/?p=212","title":{"rendered":"First Person Narration"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"LEARNING FROM THE MASTERS: THE USE OF “I” IN FIRST PERSON NARRATION: About every third story of mine is in first person. It’s good for voice pieces, and sometimes making the character the narrator feels like the best choice, but when revision comes around, my manuscripts are flooded with “I”s. Ton of them, which bothers me, so the first revision step is to cut them down. Really, five “I” uses in a single paragraph is amateurish. So, tonight, while preparing for tomorrow’s 9th grade class, I reread Truman Capote’s beautiful “A Christmas Memory,” which is 4,800 words long and written in first person. In all those words, the narrator only refers to himself with “I” about twenty-five times. He’s 163 words into the story before it appears the first time. Some student papers will have twenty-five “I”s in the first 250 words, and my own first drafts are hardly better.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The pronoun shows up more often than that in Capote’s piece, but the other uses are in dialogue from the character’s “friend,” his elderly cousin. It’s admirable restraint, and a true lesson in handling first person narration.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

LEARNING FROM THE MASTERS: THE USE OF “I” IN FIRST PERSON NARRATION: About every third story of mine is in first person. It’s good for voice pieces, and sometimes making the character the narrator feels like the best choice, but when revision comes around, my manuscripts are flooded with “I”s. Ton of them, which bothers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,3,41],"tags":[61,62,10],"class_list":["post-212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-craft","category-writing","category-writing-advice","tag-first-person","tag-point-of-view","tag-writing-advice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=212"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":214,"href":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212\/revisions\/214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jamesvanpelt.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}