It started with a rejection. The literary magazine couldn’t use her story at the moment. It was not a new sentiment to her. A disappointment, yes, but in reality it was expected; it was only in her dreams that it didn’t seem possible. It was age-old process of growing a writing callous over her ego, a healthy experience in most circumstances.
The disappointment was not so severe as to warrant deleting the e-rejection right away, so she clicked on the link to the magazine’s website for a quick overview of the stories that were accepted. What did they know that she didn’t? What did they write about that she hadn’t?
A swift perusal of the stories left her with no concrete answers. The winning entries had somehow found the key that matched the magazine editors' magical locks. On purpose or accident, these writers wrote in a fashion that was to taste of the people who chose the stories. But one non-magical thing made itself known to her. It was "I". Most, if not all the stories were written in the first person.
She had not really understood point of view and “person” in English grammar until she took her first year of French in the ninth grade, where she learned to conjugate verbs. Her teacher, one Monsieur Croft, had his students write the following form on an daily basis the first year:
Être (to be)
1st person: Je sais (I am) 1st plural: Nous sommes (we are)
2nd person: Tu es (you are) 2nd plural: Vous ȇtes (You are)
3rd person: Il/Elle est (he/she is) 3rd plural: Ils sont (they are)
…. something like that. It's not about the French, it's about how the words create a picture. First person uses the ‘I’ voice, a view from the inside out. The second person, the ‘you’ voice sounds more instructive and observational than creative, and third person uses the ‘he/she’ voice to paint a more outside-in picture.
First person, huh. She then went to a half-dozen other literary journal websites, some from whom she’d received beautifully unimaginative rejection letters, and looked through the authors they smiled upon. Roughly calculated, 90% of the stories were written in the first person.
Later that week, when trying to chase down inspiration and a few hours of uninterrupted time, she went to the library and had another chance to study the phenomena. The books for the summer reading discussion groups were were all lined up on the shelf near her nest, dozens of copies in neat, plastic bins.
As she moved through the row, flipping through the pulpy paper-back pages, two things jumped up and bit her literarily rejected mind. The first was that 99% were “New York Times Best Sellers,” which made her smile as she remembered what Flannery O’Connor had said about best seller lists, “There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”* The other thing she noticed was that roughly (with no careful tallying), 90%+ of the books were written in the first person.
The trend was even evident in her measly writing life. Out of a dozen short stories she had been sending out to literary magazines for the past five years, the only one that had garnered any formal recognition had been written in the first person.
She thought back to all the writing tips and tricks and advice she had read over the years, particularly those pertaining to the subject of Point Of View (POV). Time after time, the sentiment was that first person POV was narrow and difficult to write in, especially if it were fiction, and that it was an only-to-be-left-to-the-professionals sort of thing.
Not all the summer book discussion novels were written by seasoned professionals, and the literary magazine authors were relative nobodies in the mainstream publishing world. Why the discrepancy? Was the trend so new as make writing advice out of date? Were the “powers that bless authors with recognition” aware of this trend and subsequently looked on anything written outside the first person POV as inferior? Or had it slipped by them unnoticed?
Whatever it was, she knew what she had to do.
Write exclusively in the first person, you say? You don’t know the author very well, do you? (Well, really that’s the point of this introductory post, isn’t it? Good for you, you might know her better after you suffer through this narrative.)
Trends fascinated her, in an inverse sort of way. Once a trend was recognized (and it often was the case that she noticed trends only when they were dying), she treated them in one of three ways.
1) Buck the Trend. Most often, she would “buck the trend” (it's an idiom), by doing the opposite, even if it caused her some disadvantage. It was a symptom of her weakly rebellious side, an experiment, like trying to walk into the wind, rather than with it, just to feel the resistance.
2) Wade into the Trend. Some trends were too big to ignore, and though she would try to resist, she often was blown over by them. The me, myself and iphones, fell into this category. Reluctant and cautious, she waded into them a little at a time and always viewed them with a certain amount of suspicion.
3) Embrace the Trend. This often happened with things unquestionably good for her. They usually included food trends, like quinoa (though, she picked that up a bit late), ancient grains and eating more fish.
Writing in the first person fell into the first category. If writing in the first person POV was the prevalent trend, then she would write a blog (a web log), in the third person, while fully aware that logs or journals lend themselves naturally and quite smoothly to the first person POV for a very good reason; they are meant to record, first hand, the authors’ actions, experiences, thoughts and feelings. But when it came to writing, she liked a challenge.
She’s doing it wrong to see what will happen.
*Mystery and Manners by Flannery O’Connor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pgs 84-85.
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