At this point, I shouldn’t be surprised by anything on social media, but I was astonished recently to learn that a big hot take in book circles on social media is people who refuse to read books written in first-person narration because they don’t like being told what they’re doing and don’t like reading about doing things that they don’t agree with. It seems someone is confused by what first-person narration means.

I’m sure most people reading this are okay with first person, since most of my books are written that way, but I need to get this off my chest, and maybe this will give you some ammunition if you run into someone talking like that.

First-person narration is when the narrator is a character in the story, so it uses first-person pronouns like “I,” “me,” “we,” “my,” etc. This does not mean that you are the “I” in the story. It’s someone else telling you a story about what happened to them. It’s like if a friend sent you an e-mail about the crazy thing that just happened to her. You wouldn’t think those things were happening to you because it was told from the perspective of “I.” You are seeing things through that character’s perspective because they’re the one telling the story, but you, yourself, are not becoming that character. I like that conversational and confessional tone to this kind of narration, that sense that you’re sitting with a friend, hearing the story, or else reading a letter. In fact, a lot of early novels were written in first person because they were in the form of letters. I’ve joked about 19th century Inception with the layers, where the book is a letter written to someone about a story someone told that narrator, who learned the story from a letter they received.

For the stories in which you do become the narrator, that’s second-person narration, the “you” books. You see this in the “choose your own adventure” type of stories, where you’re meant to take the role of the main character and aren’t given many details about who this character is, then the story unfolds based on choices you make. It also shows up in more literary stories that are meant to immerse you in a particular setting and type of person so that you experience it as the character as you read.

Third-person narration is probably the most common style of narration in genre fiction. That’s the books that describe the action with words like “he,” “she,” and “they.” Most of the current books are in third-person limited perspective or “close third.” This is very similar to first-person, aside from the pronouns, because you’re in the head of the viewpoint character and the narration may even reflect their voice. If the perspective switches to another character, it’s usually in a different scene or chapter. It’s generally called head hopping if the story switches close perspectives within a scene because it forces the reader to rapidly move from one character’s head to another.

The main difference between first and close third, aside from the pronouns, is the narrator character’s awareness. The first-person narrator knows they’re telling a story, so they choose what to tell and how to tell it. That’s why first person is commonly used for unreliable narrator stories in which the narrator selectively leaves out or skews information so that the reader has an inaccurate view of events. The close third-person narrator doesn’t know they’re a character in a story. They’re just going through their life, and the reader is hitching a ride in their brain, so they’re privy to the character’s feelings and secrets, even if that character wouldn’t choose to tell anyone.

You may also see third-person omniscient narration, in which the narrator sees and knows all and can dip into all the characters’ heads. I think of this as “storyteller voice” because the narrator may not be an active participant in the story, but they have a viewpoint and opinions. It’s almost like first-person, except the narrator isn’t involved in the story. Jane Austen’s books are like this. They’re very much told from Jane’s perspective, so we get her views and opinions on all the characters as she tells us what’s going on in the heads of many of the characters. Terry Pratchett also used this kind of narration, even with footnotes to explain things. He was telling us this story, and he knew what was going on with everyone.

So, if you’re worried about being forced to become a main character you don’t agree with when you read “I” books, you can relax. You aren’t the main character. You’re listening to someone else’s story.