An Easy Way to Write Instantly Credible Story

An easy method to make your story believable is to write it in the first person. When you tell your story in the first person, you grab and button-hole your audience. You are telling them “Listen to my true story” right from the start.

To tell your story in the first person is to write using “I” instead of “he” or “she” for the main character. You write: “I did this” instead of the third person narrative where your story is told by an outside observer – “They did that”.

Ignore Criticism of First Person Point of View

Don’t be discouraged by writers and teachers who will tell you that the first person is a limiting point of view. That the narrator must tell only what he or she knows, experiences or thinks about. They will tell you there is no way of reporting, for example, the thoughts of others or something that is happening out of sight of the narrator.

Dismiss those who will tell you that in a first person narrative, you risk becoming autobiographical and therefore, trite. Or tell you that being accused of pushing your own agenda through the narrator.

And finally, ignore people who tell you that in the first person narrative, the end is known at the start. If the story involves danger, they will tell you, we know that the narrator must have survived since he is telling the story.

Here Are the Benefits

Instead gear up to create instant rapport and credibility with your readers by using the first person narrative. These are some of the reasons you will find writing in the first person exciting:

1. In the first person narrative, the reader must believe the story. The narrator is telling his own story. He knows all the details because he was there when it happened. Because he was a participant. It happened to him! My novel, The Surface Beneath, would probably never have been published if it wasn’t written in the first person.
2. A great advantage of the first person narrative is the freedom to “disclose” the narrator’s thoughts and observations. It creates warmth of feeling that only a writer of first person narrative can understand. In my first novel, Whispers – written in the third person point of view – I felt detached from my characters. I felt there were things that, as a writer, I could not reveal about my characters without sounding awkward and unbelievable. I guess this feeling is what at times leads to writers injecting their own thoughts and foreshadowing in the third person narratives: “My dear reader, pity this poor character for as you will learn, he will soon be in a great predicament”! This practice has thankfully become less frequent.
3. In the first person narrative, there in a natural bonding between the writer and his main character. Feelings and emotions tend to come out much more naturally.

A bonus

Creative writing teachers identify seven ingredients of a good story – an interesting, absorbing plot, characters that are likeable and true-to-life, natural sounding dialogue, emotion, suspense, reader identification and a satisfactory ending. A first person narrative writer is pleased to realize that he naturally covers most of them in his narrative.