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@edmund-lloyd-fletcher In third-person, you can kind of get away with ignoring the construct of “narrator as character” and “narratee as character.” Though you can just write first-person as third-person limited with different pronouns, I feel like that ignores so much of the potential utility of first-person.

In first-person your narrator is explicitly the viewpoint character, but your narratee determines what the narrator reveals.

For stream-of-consciousness and purely experiential first-person, everything that flows through the character’s mind ends up on the page.

For epistolary, your character thinks long and hard about what they put on the page. If they’re writing in a journal, they might start by skirting around deep-seated issues and grow over the course of the telling, rather than just the experiencing, as they work out their issues on the page and acknowledge their inner turmoil. Or if they’re writing to a friend, they’ll refer to things from the shared past with that character and will make asides and explanations based on the unique needs of that narratee.

For writing in which the narrator reflects on events that happened a long time ago, you apply retrospective shading to the entire story, framing youth and inexperience in the light of the older and wiser self.

I think what most people see as the weakness of first-person is failure to account for the narrator-narratee relationship, causing the structure and plot’s utility to clash with the diagetic focus of the viewpoint. I won’t say “of the protagonist” because it’s not required your first-person narrator is the protagonist, and we see this in The Great Gatsby.

Usually, I notice this in dissonance between what the viewpoint describes and what a competent character notices. An eight-year-old might describe a scene and not understand it, but they focus on all the most important (to the reader) details anyway, for the sake of utility. On the flip side, a hyper-competent character might look at a scene with a simple, obvious explanation, but for the sake of drama they assume the worst of a character involved who screams “It’s not what it looks like!” while covered in blood. In third-person we could get away with both by separating narrator and viewpoint character, but there’s no excuse in first-person unless the narrator is reflecting upon a situation where they didn’t know what happened, and is explicitly recounting at a later time.

You will tell in first-person, and that’s not bad. It’s just part of the mechanism. The poor reputation of telling is its lack of depth, and that comes only when you tell the focal point and do nothing else with the text. We’re not filmmakers, where everything that isn’t dialogue is necessarily shown. We’re storytellers.

To balance showing and telling in first-person, understand the experiential/reflective dichotomy. Every bit of text either describes what the narrator senses, or what they think of it. The strength of the viewpoint is the web between the outside world and the character’s inner life, something which lets us become uniquely intimate with our characters. My grandmother’s stories aren’t valuable because she shows instead of tells, but because she has a unique perspective of a time and place I can’t experience today, and she tells of the past and then tells me how it made her and the world what they are today.

Telling does not preclude good writing, and neither does the first-person perspective. The skill floor is just higher. It demands you learn when to use description versus narrative summary, when to let a rapid conversation flow and when to slow that flow with reflection, how to show gesture and action when you have no outside view of the narrator, and how to structure a plot when, likely, only one viewpoint is available.

Last week in the book club discussion, we talked about the strength of the narrative style in The Promise of Jesse Woods, and you’ll want to check it out: https://storyembers.org/forums/topic/the-promise-of-jesse-woods-week-1/