I Me, Her She

 Michael - Alternate Thursdays

One of the things an author has to decide is the voice that tells the story. It’s often quite a hard choice. If one decides on first person, that means that the main character or protagonist herself is going to tell the story. It has plusses and minuses. Among the plusses are that the protagonist is in action on every line. She is saying what she did or is doing (if one opts for present tense) in every sentence. Right away that points out a disadvantage. If she is telling the story in the past tense, we know she survives to “tell the tale”. (That’s not a huge disadvantage though because protagonists usually don’t get killed off during a story anyway no matter how long the odds of them surviving.) The important thing is that her voice is the voice of the story and that feeds back strongly to character. Everything relates to her.

So is this a great way to develop character? Yes, as long as one’s careful to avoid tropes. A classic is: “I looked in the mirror and saw a pert face with wrinkles starting to develop around the eyes.” Rather let the reader imagine her, and let her age develop from other background information. Readers are smart. They don’t need to be told everything and can get bored if they are.

From the point of view of a mystery story or thriller, a disadvantage is that you can only tell what the protagonist has seen or experienced herself. Often tension is built by seeing the bad guys getting close or betrayals taking place. You can’t do that in first person. Also, since everything is in the protagonist’s voice, it better be a voice that the reader is prepared to listen to for the whole book.

When Stanley and I started our stand-alone thriller Dead of Night we decided we were going to try for first person. We also decided to use present tense, hoping that the immediacy and strong voice of the protagonist would help carry a thriller. We were also keen to try something new and stretch ourselves from our third person past story telling of Kubu. It didn’t work for a variety of reasons that we didn’t completely understand. First, to be in your character’s head for the whole book, you need to know the character really well. For us, this was a new character and being pantsers we like things to develop as we go along. That's hard to do in first person with a character you don’t know. Stan volunteered to write a few chapters about her background and see where that went. It ended up as a separate novel – Wolfman. After that we certainly knew Crystal Nguyen better and although we dropped the present tense, we wrote the whole book in first person.

Our editors were not delighted. Basically, it didn’t really work. We rewrote the book, but still Crystal’s voice as narrator didn’t seem to ring entirely true. Eventually, at our editor’s request, we took the “nuclear option” and rewrote the whole book in third person close. That means that the narrator follows the character page by page but is still observing, not telling the story in her voice. That approach worked much better, and that’s how the book was eventually published.

Afterwards we thought about why this particular book caused us so much trouble, even after we got to know Crystal really well. We came to the conclusion that perhaps it was too challenging for two people to be inside one person’s head at the same time, which is what we were trying to do. Narration has to be in a consistent voice too, of course, but if one thinks about it, the narrator is not a person, not a character in the story. So the voice must be seamless, but the internal thoughts behind it can vary somewhat.

We have written a few short stories in first person, but our way of writing short stories together is quite different from our novels. For a short story, one of us writes the whole first draft and then sends that to the other for edits, comments, suggestions and so on. Thus the voice is really one author’s voice not the voice of two authors writing together.

For example, The Ring is a short story we wrote for the Crimefest anthology Ten Year Stretch. I was intrigued by the informal recyclers who operate in Johannesburg (and many other cities around the world). On the day when a suburb puts out its garbage for collection, they appear early and sort through it for bottles and cardboard and any usable items that the suburbanite no longer wants or needs but that they can use or sell. These are then loaded onto homemade trolleys and dragged to where they can sell the items.

I wondered how they thought about their informal jobs and chatted to one who filtered my rubbish where I was living at that time. Afterwards, I wondered how he would react if he discovered a body in the bin? Or better than a whole body, what about a chopped off head? I never had any doubt that the story should be in first person. I didn’t want to describe his reactions, or what he thought of the police. I wanted him to show us himself. It seemed to work pretty well, and received a positive reaction from the editor and readers of the anthology.

If you would like to read it and judge for yourself, you can download it HERE as a pdf from our website. I’d love to know what you think. Would it have worked as well in third person? And while we’re on the subject, if you’re a writer how do you choose between I Me and Her She?