Exercise #29: The First-Person Plural
Ayşe Papatya Bucak, Seth Fried, Shirley Jackson, John Gardner, Isaac Butler, Solmaz Sharif, Melissa Febos.
Hi friends,
It’s been a busy couple of weeks here, between the launch of Refuse to Be Done and some related travel: I was in Tucson for their Festival of Books, which hasn’t been in-person again since the Before Times, and then off to NYC, Boston, and Philadelphia for events and for AWP, which I haven’t attended since the Portland gathering a few years ago. I’ve also been doing a lot of virtual events: I had a stretch a couple weeks ago where I did three of my own events and hosted two for other writers in just forty-eight hours. So an intense and interesting and mostly invigorating time, thankfully filled with good conversations and with getting to see friends I haven’t seen in a long time.
It was great to be in community again with so many people, and maybe that’s what got me thinking about writing up the joys of the first-person plural point of view for this newsletter. Feel free to skip down to the exercise below and get started, if you’d like!
In addition to all the RTBD-related busyness, this past week I published my first short story in a long time as part of the Future Tense series at Slate: titled “Empathy Hour,” it’s set in a future where the most privileged mollify their climate guilt by watching deepfaked rescues from natural disasters. The story is accompanied by a response essay from Tim Robustelli and Yuliya Panfil of New America's Future of Land and Housing Program, where they do a far better job of explaining the real-world issues I’m writing about, especially climate migration. I hope you’ll read both pieces!
As we slide into April, I still have plenty of events this month, if you’d like to join me somewhere along the way:
April 1, virtual: Refuse to Be Done craft lecture at Tin House (book included with registration)
April 2, in-person, 6pm: Refuse to Be Done craft lecture at Changing Hands, Phoenix, AZ (book included with paid registration)
April 7, virtual, 7pm ET: Norwich Bookstore, Norwich, VT, with Melanie Finn
April 8, virtual, 7:30pm ET: Refuse to be Done craft lecture at Charis Books, Atlanta, GA, co-hosted by Lostintheletters, with Scott Daughtridge (book included with registration)
April 14, virtual, 8pm ET: Mystery to Me, Madison, WI, with Michelle Wildgen
April 22, in-person: Lighthouse Writers Workshop Book Project Intensive
April 25, virtual, 6pm ET: Refuse to Be Done craft lecture at Writing Workshops Dallas (book included with registration)
April 28, virtual, 10pm ET: Refuse to Be Done craft lecture at Hugo House/Third Place Books (book included with registration)
As always, I hope your writing is going well, and that you and yours are happy and healthy. Be safe, be kind, and have fun with your reading and writing!
Yours,
Matt
What I’m Reading:
The Method by Isaac Butler. I’m about two-thirds of the way through Butler’s history of method acting, which has turned out not only to be an interesting deep dive into how movie acting came to be the way it is now, but also a fine tour of some of the big personalities that made it this way. I knew about 1% of this history going in, and I’m really enjoying learning more. I’ve also had Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares and Building a Character on my shelf forever, but never did more than dip into them. They might be up next.
Customs by Solmaz Sharif. Solmaz Sharif is one of my favorite contemporary poets, and Customs is everything I hoped it would be and more. There’s so much to admire here! Her poem “Patronage” has stuck with me the past few weeks, and I’ve found myself quoting the end of it more than once in conversation with other writers. Give it a read at The Yale Review.
Body Work by Melissa Febos. The other yellow-and-blue craft book that came out this month! I listened to this cover-to-cover on a long trail run, and it made for a great companion. The essay here about writing about other people is one of the clearest and most thoughtful examples of its type, and I haven’t stopped thinking about the way Febos approaches writing about the body and about sex since I finished her book. I’ve been recommending this one a lot already, and I’m sure I’ll continue to do so in the future.
Exercise #29: The First-Person Plural
This past week, my undergrad class at Arizona State and I read “The History of Girls” by Ayşe Papatya Bucak (from her fantastic collection The Trojan War Museum), which is narrated in the first-person plural by a “we” that is the girls left alive after a gas explosion at a school in Turkey. It begins:
While we waited we were visited by the ghosts of the girls who had already died. Those who were closest to the explosion, in the kitchen sneaking butter and bread when the gas ignited, the ones who died immediately, in a sense without injury, the girls who died explosively.
The dead girls waited with us, amidst the rubble, our heads pillowed on it, our arms and legs canopied by it, some of us punctured by it. The rubble was heavy, of course. The weight of it made us wonder what happened to the softer things. Our sheets and blankets, our letters from home, our Korans, our class notes, the slips of paper we exchanged throughout the day, expressing our affections and disaffections for each other, for our teachers, for the rituals of our contained life. What about the curtains on our windows? we thought. The stories and poems we read to each other at night or the ones we kept private, folded in our pockets? What about our pockets? Our uniforms, our gym skirts, our head scarves and stockings? The too soft pillows we always complained of? The ones the oldest girls hoarded, sleeping with three or four stacked under their cheeks even though their heads sank into the too soft centers and their necks ached in the morning. The explosion, it seemed, turned everything to stone. Except us. We were soft then, softer than we ever were.
Have you ever seen a buzzard? They are all feathers and fat, not like skeletons at all, but soft like cushions. Except for their beaks and claws.
So the first-person plural narrator of “The History of Girls” is the girls who survived the initial blast of the explosion, now trapped under the rubble, hoping for rescue. Surrounding them are the ghosts of the girls who’ve died, who the living can still hear. Eventually, the story names all the girls, dividing them into those outside the collective (the dead) and those within (the living):
There were Açelya and Seda, Samime and Hamiyet, Rabia, Türkan, and finally Fadime, the baby, seven years old on the day she’d arrived, only two months earlier. Ghosts.
And then there were Mualla, Latife, Zehra, Sahiba, Nuray, Gül, and Celine. Waiting.
But the “we” narrating the story is an unstable thing: one way the story escalates is that the six living girls do not all survive. As they pass away, they exit the “we” and become named characters for the communal narrator to interact with and talk to. Celine, for instance, plays a starring role in the story, but only after she’s died and become one of the individual dead girls.
Having left the “we”, Celine is no longer the protagonist of the story, only a character in it. What she gains in individuality she loses in control—although (if you’ve read “The History of Girls,” you know how this goes) she tells a tale within the tale, by which she perhaps temporarily wrests back some of her agency. It’s such a smart storytelling device, skillfully deployed.
Probably it’s obvious by this point how much I admire Bucak’s story, which employs the first-person plural so effectively and surprisingly. How else might we use this point of view well? To what ends is it best suited?
At Electric Literature, three editors penned a communally-written essay on the first-personal plural (so pleasantly meta!) in which the editors—their identities also initially masked by a lacking by-line and the shared critical “we”—begin with John Gardner’s take on the first-person plural:
John Gardner, author of The Art of Fiction, calls the first person plural point of view (the “we” voice) the “town POV.” Citing “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, in which the townspeople of Jefferson, Mississippi investigate the life and death of a reclusive woman. Gardner suggests that these kinds of stories often foreground a secret. There’s something or someone “we” don’t know and “we” will get to the bottom of it. In this kind of story the choral POV is both the witness and the judge. The townspeople, speaking as one body, have their own motivations, and manipulate the story to their advantage.
Here the Electric Lit editors—who are, in this case, Halimah, Brandon, and Erin, the individuals residing inside the generic byline, as revealed in a parenthetical midway through the essay—note the way that motivation and information function differently from within a collective narrator, creating both opportunities and liabilities. When the “townspeople” act as one, who can be held responsible for their actions? How do we create dramatic irony when the reader is one person and the narrator is many: is it harder to know something they don’t, to do the kind of “seeing around” the narrator that is one of the purest pleasures of reading fiction?
Of course, more minds do not necessarily make a wiser narrator. When groups act in sync, there are not automatically (or maybe even likely) to do so more nobly than individuals. Often hiding inside the desires or decisions of a group becomes a way to indulge or disguise our baser motives.
In class, one of my students made an offhand mention that the first-person plural seems like a good fit for horror stories, which seems like an interesting observation. We didn’t unpack the thought very far, but I’ve been thinking since that this is perhaps because many Americans especially think of themselves in such individualistic terms that the idea of a speaking collective is somehow abhorrent. But I think it’s also part of the inherent unstable, unsteady, untrustworthy nature of the POV: when a voice speaks for everyone, we can’t be sure who we’re hearing, and that makes us nervous.
In the novel I’m writing now, there’s a first-person plural voice that intrudes from time to time that I didn’t know who belonged to, only that it had knowledge no one person in the book seemed to have yet. It serves as a chorus, as the Electric Literature editors note that many communal narrators do, but it is also made up of individuals who appear elsewhere in the novel. When I eventually discovered the identities of this collective for myself, I was just as surprised as I hope the reader will be someday by who the members of it were: the obfuscation of identity that the first-person plural can provide is both its pleasure and it’s discomfort.
In Seth Fried’s “Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre” (from his excellent book The Great Frustration, which is, I believe, entirely made of stories in the first-person plural), the collective voice is the townspeople gathered for the titular event:
Last year, the people in charge of the picnic blew us up. Every year it gets worse. That is, more people die. The Frost Mountain Picnic has always been a matter of uncertainty in our town, and the massacre is the worst part. Even the people whose picnic blankets were not laid out directly upon the bomb line were knocked unconscious by the airborne limbs of their neighbors, or at least had the black earth at the foot of Frost Mountain driven under their eyelids and fingernails and up into their sinuses. The apple dumpling carts and cotton candy stands and guess-your-weight booths that were not obliterated in the initial blasts leaned slowly into the new-formed craters, each settling with a limp, hollow crumple. The few people along the bomb line who survived the blast were at the very least blown into the trees.
Here the communal “we” is both beneficiary and subject of the story’s violence, so that what is done on behalf of the townspeople is also done to them, another unstable, discomfiting position to be in. “Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre” reminds me a lot of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” and in class last night it occurred to me that there is a retelling of “The Lottery” that could be done in the first-person plural, perhaps even employing the final move of Bucak’s “The History of Girls,” which I’ll get to in a moment: in a first-person plural remake of “The Lottery,” when Jackson’s Tessie draws the black mark and the stones begin to fly, she could be ejected from the collective “we” of the town and made to stand alone as an I. It would be a different horror than “The Lottery” contains now, but it would still be horror.
Returning to Bucak’s story, one of the other advantages Bucak gets from the first-person plural comes from the way she uses the “we” voice to connect the story’s tragedy to a larger community, the titular “history of girls”:
We had been taught the history of girls. In Hiroshima, hundreds of schoolgirls were clearing homes and roads to make the widest of fire lanes when the bomb came. In China, in India, some girls weren’t allowed to live a day. In Russia, in Uzbekistan, in Georgia, in Ukraine, girls were sold once and shipped abroad to be sold again and again. It was how we learned our geography. The history of innocents.
The history of girls, Bucak writes, “is always told as a tragedy. Growing old is a tragedy and so is dying young.”
As the story goes on, the “we” narrating gets it gets smaller, as the living go unrescued beneath the rubble of their school until they become the dead. Eventually, in the end, there is only one girl left living, Zehra, who narrates the final section of the story as a singular I, the voices of the dead girls fading from her ears. She is alone, terribly and at last, but in her final gesture reaches out and connects her fate—this unnecessary death caused by an unfixed gas main—to that of many others. She says,
Have you ever seen a girl?
She is my history.
And so the individual once again joins a community, not as a narrative voice, but as a member of a history that Bucak has skillfully connected across time and space.
There are many qualities that might make a great short story great, but one of them, for me, is when a story is smarter than its narrator, when it escapes the inevitable tunnel vision of the individual for some wider lens. This is what Bucak does in “The History of Girls,” using the communal “we” of the first-person plural to connect the girls of one school in Turkey to the history of girls in Japan and China and Ukraine and elsewhere, then coming back down to Zehra, the last living girl in the story, who, from her own subjective “I”, makes the connection for herself that the story has already made, from her to all the other girls whose history she shares.
Zehra doesn’t miss the implications of this, and, through her revelation, neither can the reader.
For your exercise this month, write a story or a flash fiction (or even a chapter inside your novel-in-progress) in a communal first-person plural voice, narrating from the point of view of a specific community. It might be the "town POV" of a place, as John Gardner suggests; it could be the employees of a Kentucky Fried Chicken or an Abercrombie & Fitch. It could be a gaggle of geese or a murder of crows or the crew of an alien starship. Any community will do—and, as in Bucak's story, the community does not have to remain stable in its definition.
In fact, you may want to take advantage of the inherent instability of the first-person plural to allow individuals to occasionally (or permanently) step out of the communal, as the dead girls do in "The History of Girls." But be sure to make the community specific enough to give it stakes in the story, so that it’s not merely an omniscient third-person narrator masquerading as the first-person plural. As the editors at Electric Literature wrote:
A common pitfall in these stories occurs when the author constructs the “we” as an unknowable, omniscient teller. By making them anonymous, they absolve them of responsibility. Stories that pull off the narrative “we” shape the narrators as they would any other character. They engage with the limits of what the group can do and can know.
Community knowledge, community desire, community action: these are your best tools in the first-personal plural. Put them to work in interesting and revealing ways.
I haven't given you any plot or structure requirements here, as I often do, but I will make a suggestion: One way to successfully complete this exercise might be to make your story about a mystery of some kind, something that the community wants to uncover.
Maybe your “we” needs to solve a string of murders in a small town. Maybe they're trying to unmask an anonymous vigilante. Maybe a salacious bit of gossip has gotten loose and the group within the community with the most to lose needs to track it down and stop it—which they can’t do unless they figure out who in town is spreading the juicy details.
Could be anything, really. The world is full of secrets, and "we" want to know them all.
Good luck! See you next month!
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Matt Bell’s novel Appleseed was published by HarperCollins in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, is out now from Soho Press. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
Congrats on the book! Looking forward to it & for this magnificent post.