First-person narrative is one of the most affecting and engaging ways to tell a story.
Whether in an eighteenth-century epistolary novel, a nineteenth-century ghost story or a twentieth-century thriller, first-person storytellers are a fundamental part of fiction. For writers of fantasy, though, it can be a difficult fit.
If you’ve even glanced at my Will stories, you’ll know I love first-person narratives. All of Will’s adventures are told by him in the first person - he is both the narrator and the hero of these stories. Since I’m so in love with the immediacy and flow of writing tales of magic and monsters in this voice, I thought it was worth sharing a few thoughts on it. This isn’t a detailed guide, just some ideas drawn from my own experience, but if you’re into fantasy fiction, you might find something that resonates.
All This Scope and Only One Voice?
Fantasy is BIG, right? The classic fantasy tale is epic, with lots of characters and locations and inter-connecting plots, a hundred pieces all moving across the board towards a set of immense climaxes. To attempt to tell such a story through the eyes of one character can only scratch the surface of this kind of fantasy. It's too restrictive, limits the scope and the scale of your story-telling.
In truth, though, this needn't be a problem. If you want to keep things epic, there are a few solutions:
Have your narrator be everywhere. This is the most problematic. How can one character be at all the key events in your epic tale? There are going to be a lot of unlikely coincidences, I fear, or - at the very least - a breathless narrator running everywhere. "I just so happened to be passing the Queen's chamber when I overheard this conversation!" Or does your narrator have some Zelig-like power to be present at all the big moments? If you can make this work then you've got an intriguing story-telling angle, but it won't be easy.
Have more than one first-person narrator. Plenty of writers can make this work for them but it’s an approach that brings a whole load of problems, not least that multiple first-person narratives need each voice to be wholly distinct. The reader must never be in doubt about who is talking (unless you're using that confusion to help tell your story, in which case best of luck). Also, you run a huge risk of making one narrator more engaging than another, tempting the reader to skip or speed-read the story from the perspective of Mog the Magician when they much preferred the style of Benjamin the Bowman. Where multiple narrators can really shine, though, is when you have them telling different versions of the same story. Rather than using them to try and cover lots of ground, multiple first-person accounts of the same events can really make your story sing. Think of The Left Hand of Darkness, where we get a view of the events from both Genly Ai and Estraven.
Other characters share their tales. Rather than try to have your narrator be present all the time, other characters can fill them in when necessary. Of the three approaches, this is the one that has the most potential. It can easily become a tiresome trope as yet another character turns up to tell our narrator about something that happened elsewhere but, used well, diversions can bring much-needed colour to the story, giving us a break from that single narrative voice without taking us into the muddled territory of wondering who is speaking. This approach balances the need for a single, strong central voice with the need to leaven that experience with other voices from time to time.
All these challenges point to something positive: the restrictions of the first-person narrative can be turned to your advantage, and fantasy helps make that happen. What if your narrator is somehow magically capable of being in two places at once, or some enchanted item lets them eavesdrop on conversations in other places, so allowing them to tell parts of the story not directly their’s? And what happens if the narrator comes to rely on this ability then it is taken away, leaving them in the dark? Suddenly, our story-telling limitation opens up new possibilities.
Keep it Simple
Then again, if you’re struggling with making first-person narratives work for your story, maybe it’s not because the first person isn’t right for your story but more that the story isn’t right for this kind of voice. What I mean is, first-person story-telling works best when you keep it simple and personal. If you want to go big, first-person might well bring more problems than it brings solutions.
What first-person narratives do well is to bring the story down to a more human level and in doing so they encourage simplicity. Telling epic stories using the first-person is tricky, but simpler bring out the elegance of this voice.
Not all fantasy needs to be HUGE. Once again, Le Guin is our guide. Though they're not in the first person, consider novels such as A Wizard of Earthsea or The Tombs of Atuan. What is at stake in these tales is someone's soul, not entire worlds. The stories grab us because in them we follow one person’s trials, not those of entire kingdoms, and so the emotional stakes matter more: so what if the entire kingdom is to be plunged into darkness if we don't care about how this will affect the characters? Following the fate of one engaging character, facing their own demons, can be much more moving and exciting than spinning the gajillion narrative plates of epic fantasy. The story doesn't have to be epic to make these things count and for to still be fantasy.
The key idea here is intimacy, making use of first-person fantasy as more personal - stories about people caught up in war and magic, in quests and political plots. As the writer, first-person has the tendency to push you into thinking more closely about the humanity of your story and characters, of the direct effects of magic and monsters upon relatable people. Remember: regardless of the voice, this a story not history, so think about the kind of story you want to tell in that voice. Use this method of story-telling to shape your story - don’t try to to shape your story-telling to the narrative. Massive epics don’t work as well with first-person, so think about the scope and scale of your story and why first-person is right for it.
Immediacy
The first person voice has a directness that, done well, elevates the story-telling, gives it immediacy as well as intimacy. The narrator tells us how things feel as much as relating the details of what occurred, leaving us in no doubt about their attitudes. So the reader builds a more direct relationship with the story-teller. First-person narratives help the reader identify with the story-teller, and this works particularly well for a genre like fantasy where it can be all to easy for the reader to find no common cause with your protagonist. A familiar trope in fantasy is the innocent embroiled in some larger quest or trial - Frodo, Harry, Luke. They know little about the world they have entered, just like the reader, and their first-hand experience becomes the reader's first-hand experience. A first-person voice can really push this sense through. The reader is brought much closer to the experience of the protagonist as they discover this new world together. What’s new to the reader is also new to the story-teller. The story is no longer authoritarian - it has come down to the reader's level and shares with them each step of this journey of discovery.
The immediacy of a first-person narrative really brings this home. By connecting more directly with the protagonist, each blow, each set back and each victory can carry much more emotional and narrative weight. The story isn’t telling us about what happened to someone - it’s telling us about what happened to ‘me’.
So on we go…
If there’s one message to take away from this it’s that the intimacy and immediacy of first-person stories changes the type of story you’re telling. If you want to give writing fantasy in the first-person a try, then consider what kind of story you want to tell and why that story would benefit from the first person. Also remember that fantasy, and magic in particular, might help you overcome some of the limitations of that narrative voice.
I hope this has been interesting. In a few days I’ll post Part II which looks at how ramping up the subjectivity really makes the first-person story sing. In the meantime, if you’re interested, you can get free copies of some of my stories by clicking this link: