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Warning, craft threadInspired by @legroff's excellent recent New Yorker story, "The Wind," I want to talk a little bit about the use of retrospective first person, and why it's such a powerful POV to write from
To start by defining terms, retrospective first is when a first person narrator tells a story about the past from a present moment. A example of this is Stephanie Vaughn's "Dog Heaven," which begins with the famous line, "Every so often, that dead dog dreams me up again."
The narrator is telling a story that happened twenty-five years earlier. She lives in New York now, is an adult, but every now and then remembers the events of the story, when she was twelve and living on an Army base
This POV is opposed to simple past, in which a narrator simply writes about what happened to them in some ambiguously close past moment, e.g. "I walked to the store, and my ex-wife was there. She did not look happy to see me."
One advantage of retrospective first, that I discuss in this essay (again using "Dog Heaven as an example), is it gives the narrative immediate importance. One of the great challenges of fiction writing is simply convincing the reader the story matters https://themillions.com/2018/08/why-is-this-story-being-told.html
Retrospective first solves this problem in its very DNA, since the narrator is telling something that happened long ago. When people tell us, "This is something that happened to me ten years ago that I've never forgotten," we tend to perk up and listen
On a related, technical level, retrospective first situates the teller of the story in a way that almost always confers power, especially to the ending. A story about the past is being told in the present, and this must be for a reason. It must resonate, almost by nature
The other advantage of retrospective first is the space it opens for the narrator to play around with the consequences of actions taken in the past story. In "The Wind" we get the precis of one brother's life and the other brother's death, flashed forward decades
The duration of time between telling and told is a mystery, a negative space in which the lightest brushstrokes feel vivid. Good writers can use this space to sketch out a life or portion of a life in a way that is often deeply satisfying
Simple past first has become the default POV of our era, for reasons probably related to the internet and ascendancy of memoir/personal history. Some writers are really excellent at writing simple past first (I am not). But it's worth thinking about this POV as a choice
Everything in a good piece of writing is a choice, is chosen. Good writers attend to these technical issues with the same intentness they attend their characters, to details, to dialogue, and to style. But of course, POV is style; everything is
