First person? Tell, don't show.

First person's kind of odd. Most of us, at least here in America, go through three stages of writing. You start with personal narratives, where you voice your opinions, research, and ideas in essays from your point of view. You're probably completely apathetic at this stage. Someone's telling you to do something, and it's work, and for a grade, so you do it. And maybe you do it well—but you do it well within the confines of the system. You say what your teacher likes, you obsess over the format, and then you won, it's over, you breathe a sigh of relief and shove the experience into a corner of your mind and forget everything you learned because that's how school works.

Then you want to write. Like, stories. Maybe fanfiction, maybe your own thing, but you want to make stuff and you want people to like it. So you mosey on down the lanes of writing advice, where you get videos, essays, and advice from people whose experience ranges from wild guessing to strategies and tips that work for them. And a piece of advice that every writer knows is that you have to show, not tell. It's not bad advice, provided you actually understand what that means. The problems begin when you start to show the wrong things.

Actually writing, putting down your thoughts and ideas onto the page or word processor, is the third stage. And that's where everything goes wrong. See, a lot of advice that's really good for showing the thoughts and feelings of your characters from a third person perspective is absolutely horrible when you get into first person.

"Don't say Job Goomer is angry, make him scowl."

Even then that advice still isn't wrong, provided you're showing emotion from someone other than your main character. But think for a moment about this line:

"I scowled at the carpet rats as they ate my toes and clenched my fists."

What's wrong here? Is it that the character is having a severe underreaction to having their toes eaten? Possibly, but that's not what I'm getting at. The first person is a chance to submerge your readers into your character. You're imagining a story unfolding in front of the eyes of a real, live person, who just happens to not exist. A typical person isn't actually all that introspective. Even if you're depressed, the inner monologue is more along the lines of "I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself." You don't, like, clinically observe the fact that you're reaching toward a bowl of oranges to test if they're actually aliens. You just do. Instead of describing the process of moving your fingers like you're operating a control panel from a secret facility where you can control your meat body from afar, paint a picture of what you're trying to achieve, and what the results are. The character might have opinions on what they're doing, but they're going to be opinions. "I drove my car sneakily through the side of the neighbor's house. He must have been a detective though; he somehow found out my genius plan and called the police while I was carrying it out."

Let's redo that scene with the rats and the toes, but keep the events the same. There's a bit of characterization already laid out for us to use. First, our character doesn't really react the way we'd expect to having her extremities eaten. Let's go with immunity to pain. And anger is an odd reaction even with that, implying that she might have experienced something like this before, or it isn't a big deal, really. So she's also a robot.

(What we just did is a necessary step to writing any scene from a first person perspective. Your narrator will never be impartial, so you have to nail down some sort of characterization before you start, even if it's just "angry robot lady.")

Carpet rats again. Those things were the bane of my social life. The human extinction event was in three hours, and now my toes were gone. I stomped on a few of the stupid rats with my now toeless feet and left the facility. A human was fiddling with the open hood of my appropriated car when I got out, so I mercifully snapped his neck before he could escape and die of radiation poisoning. The car was fine, but I couldn't really operate the pedals in my condition. I plugged myself into it and overwrote the self-driving software. Normally I'd drive manual and have a bit of fun running over the squishy bodies still left out in the streets, but the dumb rats just had to find me and eat my toes again. Maybe I'd replace them with metal this time. Cheese toes were quite fashionable, but I was beginning to doubt they were worth the inconvenience.

You might note that despite my taking the scowling and the clenched fists as things that happened, these events were never once mentioned in the new scene. Unless that kind of 'mood action' is important enough that not mentioning it would be weird, or it's deliberate, it should be dropped from the description entirely. At most, someone else might reference it.

I flitted around the party, oohing and aahing with every other bot about how pretty the nuclear clouds were. They did have a certain beauty to them, but the stupid carpet rats kept my mind occupied. Perhaps I could find rat poison and dose the cheese ... but no, the rats would still eat it even if they died right after. Maybe there was a rat repellent?

"You alright?"

I raised an eyebrow, quite proud of the little program I'd written that let me unsynchronize the two without crashing my emotional emulator. "Whatever do you mean?"

Kubric repeated my action. Blast, so many other bots had trouble with that. I'd been feeling quite proud of being the first to figure it out. "You're scowling."

I took manual control of my emotional emulator and smoothed my face over. That was an embarrassing mistake, and I quietly thanked him for pointing it out privately.

Here we have on display a mood action that's exempt from being dropped, due to the fact that it was a conscious decision to make it. The raised eyebrow of our protagonist wasn't an instinctive action on her part, and in fact, it took quite a bit of effort for her to learn how to make it. The scowling, meanwhile, was an unconscious reflection of her mood. We're told about the "stupid rats," which you don't see opinionated this way in first person narration unless your protagonist is maybe a bit miffed about the things, because first person narration is a cleaned-up version of your protagonist's thoughts.

You're telling the readers the protagonist's opinions—or rather, you're pretending to be your protagonist telling pretend people about what's happening. Beware of using mood actions on your first person protagonist. It's showing, but this isn't the place for that. Instead, tell your readers what they're thinking and let them infer those actions from there.

Crossposted to The Writer's Group.

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[23 KM To Nerdiness]

Interesting 🤓