Writing First Person – Writing Advice

First person is probably my personal favorite and I’ve spent a long time writing in it. First person involves getting inside the main character’s mind and telling the story from their POV, telling it from their eyes and with their thoughts and placing the reader inside the mind of the character. Famous examples of first person stories are The Hunger Games and Percy Jackson (and most of Rick’s books).

1. Know the MC. This is the most important thing with first person. It’s not going to be good if you don’t know them well, since you’ll be writing from their POV through the story. You want to know what they think and how they think, what they believe and why. You want to know their past, you want to know as much about them as you can. Try writing a piece from their POV, a monologue of their thoughts and the way they think and act, a scene that won’t necessarily make it into the story but will get you into their mind.
2. Decide your style. I generally define first person into two styles, narrative first person and aware first person. Aware first person is used in stories like Percy Jackson, where the narrator is some what aware of the reader. Percy Jackson occasionally offers comments for the reader specifically, and in Trials of Apollo, Lester/Apollo addresses the audience many times. Narrative first person reads like a traditional narrative, the main character is not aware of the reader, you simply see the story through their eyes. 
3. Decide how much their thoughts are going to influence the story. Some first person narratives don’t include much specific character thought, while other stories are constantly influenced by it. You want to decide how prevalent their thoughts and opinions will be throughout the narrative. 
4. Create balance. When writing first person, I find it’s really to fall entirely into telling or into showing, when there should be a balance between the two. If you are constantly showing, the story is going to include a lot of unnecessary exposition. If you are only telling, the story will be incredibly dry and boring. You have to create a solid balance between showing and telling (this is important in all forms of narration, of course, but is especially important in first person POV). 
5. Learn how to describe emotions/actions from a first person POV. This is something I often struggle with, but it’s incredibly important. It can be hard to describe emotions if you haven’t felt them or actions if you haven’t done them, but accounts from others can be extremely helpful in describing them. 
6. Remember that the narrative only includes what the POV character is aware of. If they wouldn’t know it, the reader can’t know it (unless you have multiple POVs). If a character is knowledgeable about a specific thing or has been trained to notice certain things (like Shawn in Psych), their narration will include details on those things. If they’re a soldier, they’ll know soldiery things. If they’re a cheerleader, they’ll know cheerleader things. If you don’t know about those things, you’ll have to research them.

Writing in first person is all about learning to think as someone besides yourself. You can, of course, write from the POV of someone just like you, but there may also be times when you need to learn to think like and understand people who are different from you. And like everything, the only way to get better at the style is to spend time writing it and studying it.