Now the topic: Submerging the “I” First, to give credit where it’s due, a writer named Peter Christopher (author of Campfires of the Dead) told me about “hiding the I” as he called it. The theory is, you can write in the first person, but nobody wants to hear a story told that way. We’re too ready for a first-person story to be boasting and bragging. A hero story. Nobody wants to hear that crap. So the moment we see that “I” on the page, we recoil. It bumps us out of the fictional dream – the same way a self-absorbed person irritates you. It’s always: I I I, me me me. But, the problem is that a first-person story has more authority. It seems more authentic than a third-person story. In this era where we know about the “spin” that everyone puts on their version of reality – Rush Limbaugh versus the Liberal Media Conspiracy – it’s getting harder to trust an omniscient, third-person narrator that tells the story as if from the viewpoint of God. No, a story told in the third-person can seem thin, even cowardly, mostly because we don’t have the added dimension of knowing who is telling it, and how their agenda effects what they choose to reveal. The best example I know is The Great Gatsby. Sure, you can read it as if Nick Caraway is honest – he even brags about his honesty – but by the end of the book we see him being dishonest. At that point, the whole glory of Jay Gatsby comes into question. Was he really so cool… or does Nick make him seem cool so that Nick’s own youth will seem more exciting and romantic? Does Nick make Jay wonderful and then kill him so that Nick’s own chickenshit retreat to his Midwest family seems justified? See? That’s the wonderful extra dimension you get by using first person. You get to play with the honesty of the narrator. What writers call the “Unreliable Narrator.” With third-person, well, you don’t really wonder about God’s honesty. You just assume it. End of story. Plus, a first-person story is better grounded in the “real” world. Consider movies such as Citizen Kane and The Blair Witch Project. They rely on a non-fiction device (yes, I
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