1. Show Some Attitude

Attitude is what literary agents call “voice driven.” Your characters need to be snarky, or witty, or funny, or droll.

Nothing is more dull than a first person narrator who speaks like a computer on the page. The more personality you can infuse into your narrator, the more fun the reader will have.

Which first person narrator is better?

1. “I went into the bar and decided to ask the bartender for a drink. Even though the bar was closed, the bartender was able to pour me a beer. I tried to read the newspaper but it was all the same stuff I read every day.”

2. “What about a teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up with me? I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad’s voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of “Yellow Submarine,” which is a song by the Beatles, who I love.”

The first one isn’t terrible, but it’s not great either. It’s straightforward, like Hemingway. This is the voice of a private eye or a recent divorcee or some other hardscrabble character. But it doesn’t tell you very much about the character through the voice alone.

The second one is from Extremly loud and incredible close by Jonathan Safran Foer, and as Joyce Carol Oates noted, it has the most elusive and best quality of writing: energy. If you can put your energy on the page, readers will keep reading to soak up that energy.

Your characters need personality, and that personality should be embedded in every sentence of your manuscript. It should especially come through in the dialogue, where you have a wonderful opportunity to fly your character’s freak flag (do they speak in dialect? What’s their catch phrase or filler words?).

Advice: Start a manuscript in first person when you hear a voice talking inside your head. I mean actually hear, like a gravelly timbre of a truck driver or the screech of an elderly woman or the plaintive innocent bleat of a child. The voice will be the voice of your character, and it will be telling you a story verbatim.

2. Highlight Your Character’s Self-Deception

One of the most beautiful things about writing in the first person is that your narrator has a blind spot. Maybe even a few blind spots.

For instance, they could believe that they’re Casanova or Helena of Troy, but we’ll see, as person after person in bars turns them down, that their self-perception is incorrect. They could believe they’re amazing at their job as a detective, but after they bumble one case after another, we the readers understand that they’re terrible.

If you can help the reader understand that the character lacks self-knowledge, it’ll create tension between what the reader knows and what the character knows, and the reader will keep reading to see if the character ever arrives at self-discovery. 

In third person narrating the dramatic irony comes from a character not knowing that someone behind the door is about to jump out with a knife (but the reader knows), while in first person the dramatic irony comes from the audience realizing something about the character that the character doesn’t realize herself.

The more blind spots you can give your narrator, the more the audience will be invested in the complexity of the character.

Danger: If you have your narrator have too many blind spots, they’ll come off as naive or half-witted, which will sabotage the reader’s respect for them.

3. Reliability

Does your character only lie in small, understandable ways, like believing they didn’t mean to be mean to someone they hated? This is routine self-deception, and virtually every character will have this to some extent.

Or does your character fundamentally misrepresent the world, the truth,  and other characters? This is pathological, and your character will be revealed as mentally unstable.

Every first person narrator is unreliable to some extent. But some are more unreliable than others. If you don’t decide as an author how much the reader will be able to trust your character, and in what part of the narrative they are lying (even if it’s a small lie, or a lie to themselves), then you’re missing one of the best parts about first person narration.

4. Shine Light on More Interesting Characters

I call this the Watson Approach. The Sherlock Holmes stories would be terrible if Sherlock Holmes were the narrator — we’d see right into his brain and all the mystery and tension would evaporate as soon as he figured out the crime.

No, it’s essential that the bumbling Watson narrates the story, because he can shine a light on the brilliance of Holmes.

Every first person narrator has the unique opportunity to direct all the attention onto another character. So what should you do? Populate your novel with eccentric weirdos, people that pop and dance when seen by your narrator.

And describe all these people through the unique lens of your character. What makes Watson the perfect narrator is that he’s methodical and direct. What might make your character the perfect narrator is that he keeps on describing people we recognize to as dangerous freaks as souls full of light and goodness.

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