When writing a story in 1st person, we tend to use “I” a lot… and it can get annoying for readers.
Let’s go over ways to avoid “I,” look at some examples from books, then practice “submerging the I” together!
During the last stream, a subscriber requested that we go over how to “submerge the I.”
Watch what we did here, or scroll down for highlights.
How to Not Overuse “I” in Writing
- When writing a story in the first person, you have to use the word “I” a lot
- However, if you use it too much, then it can come off sounding repetitive and egotistical
- For example: I went to the pet shop yesterday and I bought a turtle. I named him Chex, and I feed him every day when I come home from school. I actually don’t like turtles very much, but I like Chex, because he listens when I tell him how I buried Mom’s body.
- Even though the above sentences are interesting, using the word “I” so many times can be draining for the reader, especially if it continues on like that
- In order to write a good 1st person story, you typically want to “submerge the I,” a phrase coined by Chuck Palahniuk, meaning get rid of as many I’s as possible
- Let’s go over 3 ways to submerge the I, then practice together!
#1. Switch to 2nd/3rd person
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
As soon as I’m in the trees, I retrieve a bow and sheath of arrows from a hollow log. Electrified or not, the fence has been successful at keeping the flesh-eaters out of District 12. Inside the woods they roam freely, and there are added concerns like venomous snakes, rabid animals, and no real paths to follow. But there’s also food if you know how to find it. My father knew and he taught me some before he was blown to bits in a mine explosion. I was eleven then. Five years later, I still wake up screaming for him to run.
Guts by Chuck Palahniuk
Inhale. Take in as much air as you can. This story should last about as long as you can hold your breath, and then just a little bit longer. So listen as fast as you can. A friend of mine, when he was thirteen years old he heard about “pegging.” This is when a guy gets [redacted]
- Changing to 2nd/3rd person makes the voice of the character sound more realistic, as if they’re directly talking to you, or telling a story of their own about someone
#2. Make nonliving things the subjects of sentences
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
My eyes flipped open at exactly six a.m. This was no avian fluttering of the lashes, no gentle blink toward consciousness. The awakening was mechanical. A spooky ventriloquist-dummy click of the lids: The world is black and then, showtime! 6-0-0 the clock said — in my face, first thing I saw. 6-0-0. It felt different. I rarely woke at such a rounded time. I was a man of jagged risings: 8:43, 11:51, 9:26. My life was alarmless.
At that exact moment, 6-0-0, the sun climbed over the skyline of oaks, revealing its full summer angry-god self. Its reflection flared across the river toward our house, a long, blaring finger aimed at me through our frail bedroom windows. Accusing: You have been seen. You will be seen.
- Making nonliving things the subject of sentences makes the writing more vivid
- It gets rid of a layer between the reader and narrator, making the reader experience things more directly (instead of “I saw the sun rising” it’s “the sun climbed”)
#3. Change the “I” to me/my/mine or we/us/our
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain. Classic thinking teaches us of the four doors of the mind, which everyone moves through according to their need.
First is the door of sleep. Sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain. Sleep marks passing time, giving us distance from the things that have hurt us.
Second is the door of forgetting. Some wounds are too deep to heal, or too deep to heal quickly. In addition, many memories are simply painful, and there is no healing to be done.
Third is the door of madness. There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity.
Last is the door of death. The final resort. Nothing can hurt us after we are dead, or so we have been told.
After my family was killed, I wandered deep into the forest and slept. My body demanded it, and my mind used the first door to dull the pain. The wound was covered until the proper time for healing could come. In self-defense, a good portion of my mind simply stopped working — went to sleep if you will. And slowly the wound began to grow numb.
- Using “we/us/our” includes the reader, combining the storytelling feel of using “you” from #1 with the intimateness from #2
- Using “me/my/mine” always requires something else besides just the narrator, making it feel less egotistical (ie: she gave it to me, he is my friend, this carrot is mine)
After that, chat voted that we practice submerging the “I” by writing this prompt:
“A single plant, kept alive in a temple for thousands and thousands of years. Until one day, the guard on duty noticed it has dried and shriveled completely, cutting off the society’s source of magic.”
Here’s what we came up with:
Suffocation. That’s what it felt like when the Plant died. Not noxious gas, nor thick like water, a wave of nothingness that rippled across the world from her sacred ground. Where once was oxygen and life was now hollow, stale air. Breathable, but what was the point?
My body went cold when it happened: a strange, foreign feeling. The Plant provided a constant warmth to all of us, a malleable blanket we could weave into any nourishment or material or pleasure.
But at that moment, sitting in my home, the soft blanket crumbled to ashes. My fingers were empty, heavy with holding themselves up by their own strength for the first time. All around me, the gold and emerald walls crafted from the Plant’s magic hissed as they evaporated to dust in the sky.
Screams started erupting from my neighbors, whose homes were dissipating as quickly as mine. Some of them stood alone, clasping their heads and gasping for breath, choking on this new magic-less air; others stood silent, simply watching their eternal homes fading from sight.
We had lived with the Plant for as long as we knew. Forever, probably. At some point we had to have been created by something, but after living for a thousand years, those memories were barren. Our days were for entertaining one another, discovering new ways to push magic to another level.
We lived symbiotically with the Plant: she was magic, which we used to make her world more beautiful; and we were life, the only thing she was incapable of making. If she died, then we would follow shortly after.
I wasn’t going to allow that to happen.
My feet moved on their own accord. Usually, floating through the air was the typical mode of travel for us immortals, but right now that option wasn’t available.
Surrounding the dust walls that used to be my house was a prickly jungle of winding vines and thick tree brush. They were the extensions of the Mother Plant, her millions of fingers all over the world that we could whisper our wants to, and spool them out one magic thread at a time. No matter how much my fingers reeled and moved, not a single strand came from the jungle this time.
The trip through the dense foliage was… painful. An unfamiliar word suddenly given meaning from the countless scrapes, rashes, and tripping on roots and holes. As it turned out, walking on two feet was much more dangerous than floating on them.
But eventually the tangle of wilderness came to an end. My eyes stung and my skin burned all over, but it was no matter because the sacred temple stood before me. Built of white limestone, it towered above the canopy of the woods, coated in moss and ivy. The head of the Great Plant peeked out of the top, like a verdant volcano sending out plumes of foliage.
Only now, she was blackened all over. Just small splotches of green remained on her once glorious leafy body. The air, which usually tasted of sweet spice so close to the source of magic, was just humid and wet and full of small buzzing insects.
My arms and legs were in no condition to try and climb to the top and peer at her head. The main entrance, a door at the base of the temple, was the only opening that welcomed me. Struggling toward it, strange thoughts dribbled through my mind, coalescing down into another foreign feeling: nervousness.
The front entrance was covered with thick vines, overgrown since the last person had gone in there, possibly hundreds of years ago. My hands were little more than wet fish against them, unable to pull down even the thinnest ones. It appeared as though my journey had come to an end.
Until the ax caught my eye. It was lodged into a thick vine off to the side, its blade biting down deep with only a few thin weeds surrounding it. Despite the mansions and everything else having vanished to dust, this ax was still material; it wasn’t made of magic — it was real.
Gripping the axe with my sweaty, swollen hands sent another new feeling through me: invigoration!
Crack. Crunch. Fump. The vines plopped to the ground in chunks, and with a swift kick from my itchy foot, the door screeched open for the first time in centuries.
It was dark inside, but the axe in my hands gave me strength. One step at a time, my footsteps clacked over the stone floor, until the Plant towered before me. Her bark stomach, the midpoint between leafy head and root feet. She was still, no longer breathing, her wooden flesh more gray than brown.
So I bit into her with the sharp end of the ax.
There was no cry, no fighting back. The metal pierced her smoothly, as if it was always meant to be there. Piece by piece, my ax hacked away at her, spraying her bark onto the floor in puddles. No sounds came from her besides the echo of the ax and my own exhausted grunts. It was as if she was silently begging me to do this.
After an eternity of hacking away, her insides were visible to the world. A chunk of her inner skin, yellowed with tinges of earthy oranges, was gaping open, dribbling wood pus beneath. A quick brush of my hand sent the wet bits to the ground, leaving the small section of the tree’s insides open to view.
What I saw there made me gasp. The oranges and browns inside the tree were in a shape together. A single ring of orange, followed by a white, then yellow… then black. It continued deep and deep into the tree, back further than I had even dug into her. The same pattern repeated, a black ring encircling every few rainbows of browns. A black the same color as her bark now was.
This death was merely another ring in her evergrowing cycle. She would be back, eventually, bringing her magic again to the world.
I looked down at the ax in my hands. This had not been created by magic. It had been created by people, back during the previous black-ring. Perhaps they’d used it to discover what had happened to the Plant too?
But no. There were no other bite-marks on her skin. What else could the tool be used for?
Perhaps it could cut through a different kind of flesh.
I prepared to head back to the others, to tell them what I’d learned. Just a few steps out of the temple and back toward home, the screams of fear and yells of insanity popped through the jungle.
I gripped the ax tight. The Plant would be back, eventually. That was for certain. The only question was whether we would still be here too.
Be sure to check out the video for the details on why we used “I” a few times in the story, and a dramatic reading of the tale!
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you join us on Twitch.
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Featured image: Pakutaso