Five Outstanding Tips for Writing in Shifting First Person

Point of view is the most important tool in a writer’s toolbox, but shifting first person is tricky.

One of my favorite writers is William Faulkner. Not only was he a great writer but an interesting person. He was a man who was fired from his job as a postal inspector because he kept throwing people’s mail away. He often walked with a limp because he claimed he had a war wound but never served in battle (and the limp changed legs on occasion).

Even though Faulkner was truly the “mountain of the South”, what draws me to him as a writer is his innovative style. Faulkner was not one to write in a conventional manner. He broke boundaries not necessarily with subject matter but with the way he wrote his short stories and novels. Sure, everyone at the time from James Joyce to Katherine Anne Porter was using stream of consciousness, but Faulkner took the forms of his own generation and reworked them into a point of view called shifting first person. An example of this use is found in his classic novel As I Lay Dying

Shifting first person is a point of view narrative where various characters in a story all speak in first person, giving the reader a glimpse inside the head of some or all of the characters in the story. At first glance this might seem like the most confusing point of view to use, but it has several advantages that I feel outweigh the disadvantages. I have studied As I Lay Dying for years, have written my own…