Avoiding Claustrophobia on the Page: Letting Some air into a First-Person Narrative
I’d like to say that I deliberately chose first-person narration for my new novel In the Lonely Backwater, that this was a craft decision made with writerly forethought. After all, the book is both a psychological exploration and a mystery, in which clues are unfolded and the reader moves toward knowledge step by step alongside the narrator. It’s a natural for the first-person POV.
The truth is that Maggie’s voice was so clear and distinctive from the moment she opened her mouth that I couldn’t imagine the story being told by any other person, or in any other way: “There wasn’t anything wrong between Charisse Swicegood and me except that she was her and I was me, and with the family history and all it was just natural.” That was the opening of the book from the get-go.
As the police investigation into Charisse’s disappearance and death unfolds, Maggie will prove to be an incredibly candid narrator of her own experiences and opinions, but also an unreliable one. I’m bothered by that familiar term “unreliable narrator,” because it posits the existence of a reliable one, and when are humans absolutely factual and dispassionate in the telling of their own stories, or anyone else’s? Can even computers be trusted (see: HAL 9000)? We see what we see, remember what we remember, and shade the truth for profit or kindness or survival all the time.
So the writer chooses to have one person tell the story. The reader is caught in that awareness for the length of a novel, looking out through those eyes. It might get a touch claustrophobic.
“The benefit of telling a story in first person is that readers discover the voice and psychology of a character as expressed directly by the character. This gives immediacy, the sense of ‘being there’. … On the minus side, first person narration can restrict your readers’ access to the inner worlds of your other characters.” Now Novel
The intimacy with the character (and often therefore with the writer) makes this the most powerful of forms, to my mind: the concentration, the “single effect,” of one voice. Of course a writer can always choose to use third-person or second-person or omniscience or multiple narrators, but whatever the decision, point of view is fundamental to the tone and structure of the work that will emerge.
Claustrophobia may be exactly what is needed, a narrow window on the world.
Some of the great books have depended on this: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, Jane Eyre, Gulliver’s Travels…the list goes on. And Edgar Allen Poe (whose quote introduces the novel) was a master at letting the reader fully inhabit another consciousness. Within the first-person form, writers may employ techniques such as stream of consciousness, interior monologue, letters (epistolary novels), frame stories, or even set up the whole thing as a recounted tale or a recovered document.
While maintaining the close focus, I opened up the story of In the Lonely Backwater through the use of “found” elements that reflect on the mystery and on Maggie herself, including heartbroken letters written by her father to his absconded wife, either never sent or returned. Also rumors, overheard conversations, newspaper editorials, and selections from the Tour in Lapland journal of noted botanist Carl Linnaeus, a book that becomes critical to Maggie’s explorations both internal and external. Following the lead of her science crush, she makes observations of the natural and human world, such as this one:
Observation: The Kill
I saw a young hawk on its kill today.
I think it was a young one. I didn’t have my book to check for plumage, but it seemed to be having trouble finishing the job. It hopped on the prey and dragged it along the ground, and then pecked at it. I could see the gray body moving on its own. The hawk waited, then pecked some more.
Finally the hawk lifted the creature up onto a log, and sat there a while as though it was getting its breath. It took off and began to fly, low and heavy, carrying its kill across the road and into the trees on the other side. The squirrel dangled by its neck, the body limp and swinging like a kite tail.
In the writing, as it often happens, another character or characters develops such force and immediacy that it seems their voice must be heard, must break through. Drexel Vann, a detective for the sheriff’s department in rural London County, NC, has been tasked with solving the case. His relationship with Maggie develops and deepens, page by page, and the temptation is to allow a peek into his thoughts. Just a peek—but no, that removes another layer of mystery. What is he really thinking as he interrogates this brilliant and troubled young woman? Better that we see him through Maggie’s eyes, sometimes as antagonist, sometimes as hero, sometimes as a substitute father.
This being a mystery, I can’t say much about how the story develops, except that it is centered on her perceptions of a world both more wondrous and more dangerous than she might have expected. Only Maggie herself could tell this tale.
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BIO:
Valerie Nieman‘s In the Lonely Backwater is being called “not only a page-turning thriller but also a complex psychological portrait of a young woman dealing with guilt, betrayal, and secrecy.” To the Bones, her folk horror/mystery, was a finalist for the 2020 Manly Wade Wellman Award, joining three earlier novels, a short fiction collection, and three poetry books, the most recent being Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse. A graduate of West Virginia University and Queens University of Charlotte, she has held state and NEA fellowships and is professor emeritus of creative writing at NC A&T State University. Her activities include hiking and city-walking from San Francisco to the Great Glen of Scotland, fly fishing, gardening, and working on her 100-year-old bungalow.
IN THE LONELY BACKWATER
All seventeen-year-old Maggie Warshauer wants is to leave her stifled life in Filliyaw Creek behind and head to college. An outsider at school and uncertain of her own sexual identity, Maggie longs to start again somewhere new. Inspired by a long-dead biologist’s journals, scientific-minded Maggie spends her days sailing, exploring, and categorizing life around her. But when her beautiful cousin Charisse disappears on prom night and is found dead at the marina where Maggie lives, Maggie’s plans begin to unravel. A mysterious stranger begins stalking her and a local detective on the case leaves her struggling to hold on to her secrets—her father’s alcoholism, her mother’s abandonment, a boyfriend who may or may not exist, and her own actions on prom night. As the detective gets closer to finding the truth, and Maggie’s stalker is closing in, she is forced to comes to terms with the one person who might hold the answers—herself.
available for pre-order at Regal House/Fitzroy Books and https://bookshop.org/
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Hi Valerie, I enjoyed reading this piece on why you used first-person narration for your novel’s narration. ‘Concentration’ is a good word for the power of first-person. Thank you for mentioning our blog over at Now Novel, too.