I’ve been reading this series and really enjoying the books. Then last night I finished up the third book and my head exploded and not in a good way.

These books are written in first person and I like first person when it’s done well and this was done very well. However, there are some hard and fast rules about first person that make it challenging. A lot of beginning writers start writing in first thinking it will be easier. It’s not. Here are some of the limitations to first person.

You can’t show an event unless your main character is directly involved.

You can’t skip to a different location without arranging to have your main character travel to that location. Sometimes the quick Hollywood cut can work in prose where you jump from New York and then the next scene starts in London, but it can also give a reader whiplash if it’s not handled well, and have them wondering about logistics — “Isn’t it a six week to two month voyage from England to America?” and that kind of rumination can bump them out of the story.

And here is the really, really big, really, really cardinal rule. The ultimate Thou Shalt Not. You don’t get to cheat. You don’t get to never have the main character think about the plan that they concocted and are now putting into motion.

You can’t have your first person narrator agonizing over the death of a friend when they know damn good and well that that person isn’t dead and it’s all part of your Cunning Plan (to quote Baldrick) to reach the secret lair of the Big Bad. You can’t have your character never touch the an ampule of medicine that will resuscitate the supposedly dead friend that is sitting in your hero’s pocket!

I do this for a living so it was only a few pages into the final climax of the book before I realized this was all a set up and a Cunning Plan. So every time our hero started mentally wailing about the death of his best friend and how this other character had betrayed him (Spoiler alert, he hadn’t. He was in on the con) it irritated the hell out me.

Unless your story has a race of telepaths and you are trying to mask your thought from them this kind of lying to the reader just can’t fly if you are in first person.

As writers we love putting something over on our readers. Have them go “Wow, I did not see that coming. That was cool.” Caveat to that — you have to have laid in clues for that to work so it doesn’t seem to just come out of nowhere. If it does come out of nowhere and blindsides a reader and there is no foundation for the twist it won’t work.

But you can’t sell the twist if you are in the head of the person who designed the twist. There was a way around this. The author could have had somebody else have concocted the cunning plan and not told our hero so his reactions would be completely natural. Allow the character to be as surprised as the reader.
But they didn’t and that makes it a cheat.

Don’t cheat. And don’t tackle first person until you really have a handle on your craft. Like so many things in life it looks alluring and easy and then you find out it’s actually literary quicksand.