Is First Person Point of View Right for Your Story? Five Approaches (+ Examples)

First person point of view is hugely popular in certain genres: YA and Romance, in particular. It’s also a perfectly fine choice for literary fiction—think David Copperfield (narrated by David Copperfield) or To Kill a Mockingbird (narrated by Scout Finch). But is it the right option for your story?

We’re going to take a look at different approaches to the first person perspective and different examples of it, but first, we’ll clarify what first person point of view is.

What is the First Person Point of View?

The first person perspective is the “I” perspective, using the pronouns I, me, and my. Think “I walked back down the street to my house” not “John walked back down the street to his house.”

The first person narrator will usually be a single character … but if you want, two or more first person POV characters can share the story. If you have a split narrative like this, each chapter will usually have a heading with the narrator’s name, so you know who the “I” is right away.

First person stories can be told as if the character is actually talking to you, or they can be told without any sense that the character knows they have an audience. We’ll come to examples of both of these (plus some other approaches) shortly.

What Genres Use First Person Point of View?

Any genre can use the first person, for short stories or for novels. However, the first person point of view is definitely more common in some genres than others.

Genres that frequently use the first person include:

• Romance – almost all contemporary romance novels are first person. Historical romance tends to be written in the third person, however.
• Young Adult – most YA novels are first-person. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but it’s definitely the most popular option.
• Thrillers – many thrillers (particularly domestic thrillers) opt for first person.
• Urban Fantasy – fantasy novels in contemporary, urban settings often go with first person. (Other fantasy subgenres differ.)

It’s possible to have a novel that uses both the first and third person perspectives. The usual way to do that is by including letters or diary entries in the story: Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club novels do this by having Joyce’s POV scenes in the form of her diary entries and everyone else’s told in the third person limited.

A more unusual option is to have some first-person and some third-person POV parts of the story. Sophie Hannah does this in her Culver Valley crime series, where the individual protagonists of each book narrate their scenes in the first person, and the detectives (primarily Simon and Charlie) have their scenes in the third person.

Usually, though, you’ll need to come down on one side or the other! First or third person … which is going to work for your story?

Choosing Between First and Third Person for Your Story

When it comes to your own novel, it can be tough to know whether first person or third person limited is the better option. (Third person omniscient is also a possibility, of course, though you’re unlikely to be considering first person as an alternative to that, as they’re such different perspectives.)

The first person and third person limited perspectives have some different advantages and disadvantages.

First person advantages: 

• Using the first person gives a sense of immediacy—even of bringing the reader into the character’s confidence, sharing the character’s thoughts throughout the story.
• The first person allows for unreliable narrators who aren’t telling the truth (to the reader or perhaps even to themselves).
• This perspective lends itself well to a certain narrative voice: a knowing, sardonic, or witty narrator can come across strongly in first person.

First Person Disadvantages

• Handling time can be tricky in the first person (the late Holly Lisle has a great post about that here). If you’re moving through the story with the character, how do you handle it if you want to jump a few months to the next exciting bit?
• Some readers simply don’t like the first person perspective—and can have a surprisingly strong reaction against it, like this reader who says it makes them want to “hurl”.
• Editors and agents may see third person as more “professional” and first person as a hallmark of a beginner writer. (This doesn’t apply if you’re writing in a genre that’s predominantly first person, e.g. YA.)

Third Person Advantages

• It’s easier to have multiple narrators in a third person story than a first person one, so if you’re telling a story that needs to follow several different characters, it’s definitely the easiest option.
• Third person is more popular overall (not in every genre, though). It’s an uncontroversial choice: I’ve never come across a reader saying they “hate” reading stories written in the third person.
• With third person, it’s easier to foreshadow things to the reader that the character is still in the dark about.

Third Person Disadvantages

• You can absolutely have a third person limited narrator who’s self-deluded, but you can’t really mislead the reader in the same way as with a first person unreliable narrator.
• It’s a lot easier to accidentally “head hop” writing in the third person (jumping to a different character’s POV without fully controlling the narrative).
• Many readers feel there’s less of a sense of intimacy in third person—though I’d argue that a very close third person can do nearly as well as first person in this regard.

Ultimately, the choice is up to you. You want to opt for the perspective that makes most sense for the story you want to tell.

Part of that is considering the genre of your story. If you’re writing a contemporary YA romance, first person is normally going to make most sense. (Though nothing is mandatory!)

If you’re really not sure what to use, I’d suggest going with the third person point of view—it’s more common and less divisive.

Assuming that you do opt for first person, though, you now need to decide how exactly to handle that perspective.

Five Distinct Approaches to First Person Point of View

When we looked at the third person limited perspective, we went through several different approaches: A close (deep) third person, with the character’s voice woven into the narrative; a closish third person with indirect thoughts; and a slightly more distant third person with direct thoughts, given as internal dialogue. The omniscient point of view.is an even more detached option.

With first person POV, you might think that we’re always at the same degree of closeness to the character (after all, we’re inside their head). But there are different ways you can tackle this.

1. First Person Narrator-Writer (Epistolary Fiction)

The first person narrator can be a writer of letters, diary entries, emails, or even text messages.

Many 18th century novels, like Samuel Richard’s Clarissa (1748) and Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782) were epistolary. Plenty of more recent classics are, too.

This form can lend itself to humour (C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters is a favourite of mine) and it can also hold the reader at a distance from the action, perhaps having them piece together the story a bit like a puzzle. It also allows for lots of different narrative voices entwining – The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society does a great job with this.

2. First Person Narrator Relating the Protagonist’s Story

If you want to write your story as a more conventional narrative, rather than through letters, then one approach to the first person POV is to have a narrator who isn’t your main character. This perspective is sometimes called “first person peripheral”.

This can give a more detached perspective on the story, perhaps making the central character appear more mysterious and unknowable. Good examples of this are Sherlock Holmes (narrated by John Watson, not Holmes) and The Great Gatsby (narrated by Nick Carraway, not Gatsby). Watson is considerably more involved in the action than Carraway, but neither of these are the protagonists of the stories.

3. First Person Narrator Telling the Story to Someone

We’ll come to examples of first person narrators who are simply getting on with the story, with no sense of an audience … but in some novels, the first person narrator is talking to someone. This might be you, the reader, or it could be an actual person within the story, like a prison guard, therapist, or an unknown sympathetic party. They might not appear in the story as a character at all, though the narrator may address them as “you” at times.

J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye works like this: Holden Caulfield starts off by saying, “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me…”

Note: This is different from a second person point of view, as the “you” in this sentence isn’t the protagonist of the story.

4. First Person Narrator Telling Their Story After the Fact

Some first person narratives involve the narrator telling their story at some future point, after the action has taken place—but without the sense that they’re telling it to the reader or another character. In this looking-back narrative, we know that the first person narrator survives the story. They can also foreshadow things (“little did we know at the time…”).

The first page of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird clearly sets up the perspective of a teen or young adult looking back on events from her childhood: “When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. … When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident.”

5. The Main Character, Telling the Story As it Happens

Another option is for your main character to narrate the story as it’s happening to them. This doesn’t have to be in the present tense, though it often is.

The character simply tells the story as it unfolds, as a third-person narrator would. Sometimes, they might tell us about something from the past, but the vast bulk of the story is their present. It’s as if we’re inside the character’s head, seeing everything they think and feel.

Veronica Roth’s Divergent has Tris narrating things as they happen. Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s The Inheritance Games is another example, this time in the past rather than present tense.

Different Styles in First Person Narration

The above approaches will influence how close (or not) the reader feels to your first person narrator … but another crucial choice you need to make is around the style of your first person voice.

The third person perspective can draw on a character’s voice and way of phrasing things, but this often comes across even more vividly in the first person.

Stylistically, the first person can be intensely coloured by the character’s own voice and way of phrasing things—this can work well for unusual characters, perhaps who’ve had an unconventional education and upbringing, or for characters in futuristic societies.

Examples of a Strongly Voiced, Unusual First Person Narratives

A strongly voiced first person narrative can be a unique, memorable part of your story. Here are a couple of examples from books I read years ago and still remember for the vivid narrative voices.

Because of the strict views of my uncle regarding the education of females, I have hidden my eloquence, under-a-bushelled it, and kept any but the simplest forms of expression bridewelled within my brain. Such concealment has become my habit and began on account of my fear, my very great fear, that were I to speak as I think, it would be obvious I had been at the books and the library would be banned. And, as I explained to poor Miss Whitaker (it was shortly before she traigicked upon the lack), that was a thing I did not think I could bear.

– From Florence and Giles, John Harding

I had reason to leave Glasgow, this would have been about three four years ago, and I had been on the Great Road about five hours when I seen a track to the left and a sign that said ‘Castle Haivers’. Now there’s a coincidence I thought to myself, because here was I on my way across Scratchland to have a look at the Edinburgh castle and perhaps get a job there and who knows marry a young nobleman or prince. I was only 15 with a head full of sugar and I had a notion to work in a grand establishment.

– From The Observations, Jane Harris

Examples of a Distinctive First Person Narrative Style

You don’t have to go as far as the examples above with your first person style. Even a less unusual first person narrative voice can be distinctive, without having particularly unusual word choices. We get a sense that these characters may be a little unusual in how they think about things, based on how they narrate the story.

Phone rings as Doctor Patel is prescribing meds for Holly (little girl with leukaemia). Bad timing. Very bad timing. Doctor Patel not happy at interruption, and makes her feelings clear. Seems to have forgotten that I, too, as night nurse, should have gone home at 8 a.m., and yet am still here dealing with ill people and grouchy consultants like Doctor Patel.

– From Flatshare, Beth O’Leary

It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs Shears’ house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog. The points of the fork must have gone all the way through the dog and into the group because the fork had not fallen over. I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this.

– From The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon

Examples of a Conventional First Person Narrative Style

Many novels go with a more conventional first person narrative style: the character’s personality comes across, but the writing itself is fairly straightforward. We don’t pick up anything particularly unusual about the character’s personality or voice purely from their word choices and sentence structure.

Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest. I was sitting in my hideout watching cartoons when the news bulletin broke in on my video feed, announcing that James Halliday had died in the night.

I’d heard of Halliday, of course. Everyone had. He was the videogame designer responsible for creating the OASIS, a massively multiplayer online game that had gradually evolved into the globally networked virtual reality most of humanity now used on a daily basis. The unprecedented success of the OASIS had made Halliday one of the wealthiest people in the world.

– From Ready Player One, Ernest Cline

I made it to school on time but barely. I had a habit of cutting things close. I walked the same tightrope with my grades. How little effort could I put in and still get an A? I wasn’t lazy. I was practical. Picking up an extra shift was worth trading a 98 for a 92.

I was in the middle of drafting an English paper in Spanish class when I was called to the office. Girls like me were supposed to be invisible. We didn’t get summoned for sit-downs with the principal. We made exactly as much trouble as we could afford to make, which in my case was none.

– From The Inheritance Games, Jennifer Lynn Barnes

If you do go with the first person POV for your novel, you can use any of the approaches above and any style you want.

You could, for instance, have a bystander narrator who tells the protagonist’s story in a very strongly voiced, unique way. (This wouldn’t be a particularly conventional or obvious choice … but I can absolutely see it working.)

Or, you could have a narrator-writer who sends letters in a distinctive style, without making it too unusual. You could have a narrator telling their story to the reader in a very strongly voiced, unique way… or any other combination of approaches and styles.

First person might well draw you in as a writer, and it can be a powerful point of view to use. But if you want some more options and thoughts about perspective, take a look at these posts for more writing tips:

Mastering Third Person Limited Point of View: Four Options and Four Examples – If you’re trying to decide between first and third person POV, you might want to give this post a read, too. It explores different ways you can handle a third person narrative.

Choosing the Right Viewpoint and Tense for Your Fiction [With Examples] – This post gives an overview of first person, third person, and second person perspectives, with examples of each. It also digs into whether to use present vs past tense.

Choosing Viewpoint Characters: What’s Right for Your Story? – Which characters should be point of view characters in your story? It’s not always an easy decision, and this post explores some key considerations – and what to do if you feel your viewpoint isn’t quite working.