History Main / AllFirstPersonNarratorsWriteLikeNovelists

* ''Literature/TheCuriousIncidentOfTheDogInTheNightTime'' is narrated by a teenager with an autistic spectrum disorder, thereby averting the tendency of first-person narrators to write in a polished, literary style, while also justifying the level of detail.

There's several reasons for this. For one, a first-person narrative allows readers to get into the main character's head in a way that a third-person narrative might not. It allows TheProtagonist to describe things bluntly or colorfully in a way that might look strange coming from a third-person narrator. (Although the LemonyNarrator, by definition, does so all the time.) It allows for a story that feels more "human", but at the same time, due to this trope, still reads like a novel and contains the same level of excitement.

It also allows for a more exciting story. When's the last time you heard someone describe an experience in as much detail as your favorite book? If they did, it would probably be a more exciting story... but also a much longer one. This way, you get the best of both worlds: a story with the depth of storytelling of a novel, but the humanness of its protagonist infused into the narrative itself.

Sometimes this is justified in-story, when the story claims to be [[DirectLineToTheAuthor a book written by the character who is the narrator]].

Compare RealisticDictionIsUnrealistic, FirstPersonSmartass, MostWritersAreWriters and InfallibleNarrator.

* Downplayed in the ''WesternAnimation/InsideOut'' {{Novelization}} ''Driven by Emotions'', in which each of Riley's five emotions recounts the plot of the film as they experienced it in turn. Because the emotions have vastly different personalities and focus on certain issues above others by nature, they write rather casually, speeding through certain events and lingering on others (occasionally explaining why they do what they do), and are light on elaborate descriptions. (This keeps the book from becoming tediously repetitious.)

![[OmnipresentTropes Owing to the ubiquity of this trope]], only unusual variants or subversions will be listed:

* In Tosca Lee’s ''Demon: A Memoir'' it is justified because the narrator is both an editor and a novelist; the story is both his larger story and implied to be the book he is writing in-universe.

* Another justified example would be in ''Literature/WutheringHeights'', where Lockwood, the initial narrator, is a bit of a prat and the kind of guy who would be prone to this sort of thing. Then when Nelly tells most of the story, he specifically requests it be told like this.
* The first-person narrator in the novel ''The Lacuna'' writes like a novelist because he actually is a novelist.
* In ''Literature/TheCatcherInTheRye'', the narrator, Holden Caulfield, accurately represented the colloquial teenage dialect of the era.
* ''Literature/AsILayDying'' by Creator/WilliamFaulkner features stream-of-consciousness narration from people that include children, the dying and the insane.
* ''Literature/{{Room}}'', by Emma Donoghue, is told from the perspective of a five-year-old boy, Jack; while it's not exactly the way a five-year-old would speak and write (possibly justified, given Jack's upbringing), it's immediately very clear from the writing and syntax that it's a child speaking.

* Tom from ''Literature/KingDork'', being a modern-day ''Catcher'', also avoids the "King's English" style of narration.
* ''Literature/RiddleyWalker'' by Russell Hoban is a post-apocalyptic novel set in what used to be the English county of Kent. Riddley narrates the entire book in something like a phonetic transliteration of a Kentish accent. Example: "We ben the Puter Leat we had the woal worl in our mynd and we had worls beyont this in our mynd we programmit pas the sarvering gallack seas."
* ''Literature/ThePerksOfBeingAWallflower'' is another aversion of this.
* Creator/MarkGatiss' Lucifer Box novels play with this trope. The narrator comes across as a bit of a rambling hack, seemingly trying to play this trope and failing miserably, ending up with a style something like a very eloquent man relating his life story orally in his SmokyGentlemensClub (which he does indeed like doing at every opportunity). Occasionally overlaps with FirstPersonSmartass.
* ''Literature/FlowersForAlgernon'', about a man with learning difficulties who undergoes a medical procedure to turn himself into a genius, plays with this. The first-person writing starts off poorly spelled and simplistic but dramatically improves as the procedure begins to show effects.
* ''Literature/TheCuriousIncidentOfTheDogInTheNightTime'' is narrated by a teenager with an autistic spectrum disorder, thereby averting the tendency of first-person narrators to write in a polished, literary style, while also justifying the level of detail.

* Mark Twain's ''Literature/AdventuresOfHuckleberryFinn'' was criticized for (among other things) the hero narrating the way an uneducated 14-year-old from the DeepSouth in the 1860s would talk. But that don't matter none.
* Creator/ChuckPalahniuk says his bare, stripped down SignatureStyle comes from trying to emulate how people naturally tell stories.

* ''Series/HowIMetYourMother'': Ted's narration often displays a rather haphazard style (especially in the first three seasons), occasionally dropping random spoilers and explanations into the story instead of working them into the plot properly (e.g., pausing the action in "Okay Awesome" to say "Oh I forgot! This is important: your Uncle Marshall just had a temporary filling put in that afternoon" right before it plays a part in the story.) He also tends to meander around at random: for example, in "Showdown", in the middle of Past Ted's best man speech at Marshall and Lily's wedding, Future!Ted suddenly interjects with "Oh wait! [[WhatHappenedToTheMouse I forgot to tell you guys what happened to Uncle Barney!]]" and spends the rest of the episode showing a completely unrelated scene from a different storyline, and doesn't come around to telling the wedding story until the next episode.
* In Tosca Lee’s ''Demon: A Memoir'' it is justified because the narrator is both an editor and a novelist; the story is both his larger story and implied to be the book he is writing in-universe.
* Oddly, both justified and averted in the first book of Megan Whalen Turner's ''[[Literature/TheQueensThief Queen's Thief]]'' series in which the story turns out to be a book written by the scholarly and book-obsessed narrator in a much less scholarly style. Possibly justified or unjustified when the same thing occurs in the fourth book. (The narrator, who is not the same as in the first book, is telling the story verbally, not writing it down, but he's a rather sensitive and detail-oriented guy).

* J.M. Coetzee's ''Age of Iron'' is supposedly a single letter from a dying woman to her daughter.
* A novel by Mariama Ba, which is supposedly a letter from a woman to her friend, is actually titled ''Une si longue lettre'' ("Such a Long Letter").
* Most of the stories in ''Literature/TheThirteenProblems'' by Creator/AgathaChristie, which are supposedly being told by different members of Literature/MissMarple's circle. The [[AvertedTrope exceptions]] are the last three: one is narrated by Mrs Bantry (see page quote), and mostly consists of the others asking questions in order to get any detail at all; one is narrated by a BrainlessBeauty who needs a lot of help to get the story straight; and the last simply doesn't maintain the framing device.

* ''Literature/DangerousLiaisons'' is an epistolary novel where the characters show markedly distinct styles and much of its literary worth comes from that fact. Marquise de Merteuil is florid and exuberant in her writing, often addressing her reader directly, while vicomte de Valmont is drier and more procedural, with a tendency to ExactWords. Both the young people repeat themselves a great deal and have a poor vocabulary, while Madame de Tourvel writes convoluted, rambling sentences. When Valmont starts to dictate Cecile's letters the difference is obvious.

* ''Money'' by Martin Amis is narrated by an ignorant, boorish, drunken (and sometimes amnesiac) slob, John Self, apparently as a suicide note. It's a very long suicide note, and for someone supposedly near illiterate, full of beautiful, if slightly strained, imagery.

* Creator/DanSimmons has a fondness of writing parts of his books as journal entries from people who are going insane or dying. It happens part way through ''Literature/{{Hyperion}}'' and near the end of ''Literature/TheTerror''.
* The novel ''Literature/ConfessionsOfFelixKrull'' is a rather extreme case, as the narcissistic narrator is also very much in love with his own writing (in the very first sentence of the book he notes that he is penning his memoirs "in clean and pleasant handwriting") and often takes pain to speak as if he was writing. For instance when recording his first conversation with Professor Kuckuck he says that he chose a certain word out of pure excitement and because he wished to discuss the subject formally and in "book German".
* Downplayed in the ''WesternAnimation/InsideOut'' {{Novelization}} ''Driven by Emotions'', in which each of Riley's five emotions recounts the plot of the film as they experienced it in turn. Because the emotions have vastly different personalities and focus on certain issues above others by nature, they write rather casually, speeding through certain events and lingering on others (occasionally explaining why they do what they do), and are light on elaborate descriptions. (This keeps the book from becoming tediously repetitious.)
* ''Literature/TheKingkillerChronicle'' is {{fram|ingDevice}}ed as Kvothe's extremely articulate dictation to the Chronicler, which he forbids him from revising or condensing. Lampshaded when he takes a night to collect his thoughts before beginning, because "A real story takes time to prepare," after all.
* ''Literature/TheHungerGames'' is for the most part a subversion. Lots of jokes have been made about how it's written largely in sentence fragments due to its BeigeProse style. The story is told in first person present narration through the eyes of a sixteen-year-old girl being put through all kinds of trauma.

** J.M. Coetzee's ''Age of Iron'' is also supposedly a single letter from a dying woman to her daughter.

* The ''Literature/CiaphasCain'' series is a straight example, however it contains a rather appropriate justification: We're not reading the raw autobiography, but rather an editing of it to make it more readable. And even then, the original's... unique perspective still shines through in that the text is rather self centered and requires the editor to interstice it with other texts, each with their own characteristics and levels of readability.

* Mark Twain's ''Literature/AdventuresOfHuckleberryFinn'' was criticized for (among other things) the hero narrating the way an uneducated 14 year old from the DeepSouth in the 1860s would talk. But that don't matter none.

* ''Literature/TheHungerGames'' is for the most part a subversion. Lots of jokes have been made about how it's written largely in sentence fragments due to its BeigeProse style. The story is told in first person present narration through the eyes of a sixteen year old girl being put through all kinds of trauma.

* ''Series/HowIMetYourMother'': Fred's narration often displays a rather haphazard style (especially in the first three seasons), occasionally dropping random spoilers and explanations into the story instead of working them into the plot properly (e.g., pausing the action in "Okay Awesome" to say "Oh I forgot! This is important: your Uncle Marshall just had a temporary filling put in that afternoon" right before it plays a part in the story.) He also tends to meander around at random: for example, in "Showdown", in the middle of Past Ted's best man speech at Marshall and Lily's wedding, Future!Ted suddenly interjects with "Oh wait! [[WhatHappenedToTheMouse I forgot to tell you guys what happened to Uncle Barney!]]" and spends the rest of the episode showing a completely unrelated scene from a different storyline, and doesn't come around to telling the wedding story until the next episode.