It's a great news kind of day! My article, "The Inherent I: 4 Reasons for Using Fabulous First-Person POV in Flash," was published by Women on Writing today. Read the whole article below, as well as a free prompt to try. 😎
Interested in more? I’m taking sign-ups for my April Flash Fiction course: clickety!
“The Inherent I: 4 Reasons for Using Fabulous First-Person POV in Flash”
By: Melanie Faith
Both flash fiction and nonfiction often feature first-person narrators. What are the advantages of using I speakers when writing flashes?
First person is focused. A speaker in first-person narration showcases their own inner landscape, feelings, and outlook. Whether fiction or nonfiction, a first-person speaker follows one person’s tightly-woven motivations, blinders, opinions, hopes, and goals. There’s no head-hopping involved!
Since flash is so small, it’s helpful to have a narrow, beam-of-light approach rather than several POVs competing for the very limited space available under 1,000 words, but often much less.
First person is natural to the ways we think and already form stories. From the time we start to talk, I, me, and my are some of our first words we learn to speak or to write. When we tell friends about the picnic we enjoyed or the meal that went terribly wrong, chances are very strong we frame our anecdotes in first-person. It’s often our default mode when communicating via text, email, or video conferencing as well. Humans inherently express our own experiences using I statements. Why go against the grain in our writing?
First person includes room for surprises. Yes, it’s first-person narration, but in the case of flash fiction especially, that doesn’t have to mean the character presented has to share all of your own experiences, feelings, or beliefs. In fact, it might be more fun to play devil’s advocate and writing a character who is your polar opposite.
Say, you are a marathon runner who’s just had an injury and has been limited to moderate exercise and no training for the next six months during physical therapy. You’re itching to get back on the track, back to your passion for the sport, to your next race. Flip it and reverse that energy as you recuperate. What if your protagonist has never run a marathon in his life? What if he actually detests running? What if someone dares or even bribes him to run a marathon or else there will be consequences? Yep, you can write this in first-person POV to see life from his perspective. Or perhaps from the perspective of his coworker, Meghan, who has issued the challenge/bribe. What’s her perspective like, and why is she making this request/demand?
First person could include any of these details, just not all of them at once. You never know what you’ll learn about yourself—or others—or your favorite sports, hobbies, pastimes, and more through leaping into another person’s eyes.
First person includes promising limits. Yes, first person can be limited, but that’s also part of its charm.
In a nonfiction flash essay, for instance, the reader does not get to delve deeply into the feelings or actions of many others, unless those are in relation to—and shed important light on—the first-person speaker’s journey. It’s all about the speaker, baby!
The reader gets to intuit and experience the speaker’s limits and foibles as well as their strengths and fears.
What a writer reveals in first person as well as what must be left out because it is told in first person provide a compelling insight into human behavior, both for the individual and for people in that setting or time period or group the speaker belongs to, or wishes to, or never will.
Try this prompt! Set a timer for fifteen or twenty minutes. Write in first person about a time when the I speaker—whether you or a made-up character—felt left out of a group. Do not use the word disappointed anywhere in the flash; instead, demonstrate it with the I statements the person uses, their astute observations about why they wanted this inclusion but it hasn’t come to be, and/or in their actions or refusal to act. Go!
Photo courtesy of Nathan DeFiesta on Unsplash.com