Your First Person Characters

[RetroFan]

I write stories in both first and third person, and thought it would be interesting to look back and see who 'I' have been over the years. What are your first person characters like? Do they vary much in age, gender, occupation, nationality etc. like mine, or are they all very similar? The bios of my first person characters are listed below, along with the years the stories take place.

Ian from Banging Cousin Becky In Blackpool (1955) - Apprentice carpenter from Liverpool UK, born 1936. Loves his cousin Becky.

Donny from Donny & Karen's Giant Leap (1969) - Vietnam veteran and now bank clerk, born 1949 from Philadelphia USA.

Janelle from Janelle & the Janitor (2001) - High school student and theatre kid, born 1982, Virginia Beach USA.

Jamie from Mackenzie's Messy Mishap (2005) - University student and triathlete born 1986, from Brisbane, Queensland Australia.

Sean from My Best Friend's Crazy Fat Sister (2016) - Electrician born 1978, from Melbourne Victoria Australia, has fat fetish.

Tara from My Brother's Friend Deflowered Me (1985) - Paraplegic high school student, born 1967, from New York USA.

Sophie from My Gay Friend's Hot Mum (1996) - Bisexual high school student born 1978 from Melbourne Victoria Australia.

Emily from My Nephew Got Into My Knickers (2019) - Accountant, divorced mother of teenagers, previously a child/teenage star on TV, born 1975, Melbourne Victoria Australia

Justin from Perving On Natalie's Knickers (1990) - University student, born 1971, Melbourne Australia

Sally from Sally and the Sailor (1943) - Factory hand and tomboy, born 1925, from Norfolk Virginia USA.

Robert from Secret Sex With My Stepdaughter (2001) - Dentist born 1959, Sydney New South Wales Australia.

Jeff from Seduced by My Sister's Best Friend (1986) - University student born 1968, from Perth Western Australia.

Steve from Spying On A Spoiled Brat (2019) - Painter & Decorator born 1976, married with two kids, from Melbourne Australia

Tessa from Tessa's Toilet Troubles (2019) - Office worker born 1992, has a fag-hag type dynamic with her gay father and his boyfriend, definitely some daddy issues, from Melbourne Australia

Tim from The Cop in the Bathroom Closet (2019) - Police Officer from Auckland New Zealand, married with two young adult kids, born 1971.

Scotty from The Day Scotty Saw Too Much (1955) -High school student/diner attendant from St. Petersburg Florida USA, born 1937, definite beta male.

Brett from The Ghosts Made Us Do It (1992) - Student from London England, born 1974.

Nathan from The Mystery of Melissa (2018) - High school teacher from Gold Coast Queensland Australia, born 1982.

Colin from The Pervert Ghost (2001) - University student (deceased), born 1982, died 2001, from Adelaide South Australia.

Abbey from Virginity Lost On Vacation (1999) - Accountant, overweight virgin, Jewish, born 1974 from Toronto Canada, loses virginity to handsome black South African man with fat fetish.

 

[AlinaX]

Many of my stories are my namesake, Ali, who is witchy & bi.

& the rest, in alphabetical order, female unless otherwise stated:
- Young, innocent & straight; female-to-futa
- Reserved, genderflux & bi; female-to-futa; Turkish descent
- Standard 18yo virgin; female-to-futa
- Young, slutty & bi; initial werewolf transformation
- Young, innocent & bi; futa
- Aroace; female-to-futa
- Young, innocent & bi; goddess transformation; Persian descent
- Married, straight; female-to-futa
- Young, innocent & straight; + lesbian sister; letter correspondence
- Young, innocent & bi
- Straight
- Genderflux, intersex & sapphic; body transformation
- Lesbian; bimbo transformation
- Male, straight, perhaps autistic
- Straight; doll transformation
- Married, slutty & bi; Nigerian descent
- Bi; futa/feline
- Male straight
- Young, slutty & straight
- Innocent & straight; gynoid transformation
- Straight
- Straight; bimbo transformation
- Bi; female-to-futa
- Male, straight
- Young, innocent & straight
- Innocent & lesbian
- Young, innocent & bi; + male, straight; series mixes two 1st person PoV (different tenses)

- and that's only half. Life calls...

 

[Omenainen]

So many you have

I've got...two

- gay truck driver, 30 years old, black
- a woman in her forties, straight

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Hmm.... too many stories to list, but...

All my men are straight and most of my women are also, yet some women are bi.

I usually write about what I know, so most of the protagonist are either Cops, Private Eyes, Computer know it alls, or just old enough to have experienced almost everything there is to in the world. All are intelligent and have been to college or are going.

My women are written to be intelligent and strong, although sometimes they don't come across that way. None of them are victims unless they choose to be. Most of the women I write about are either Doctors or Corporate Executives or because they choose to be... housewives. All have been to college or are going to be.

 

[yowser]

All over the map.

Some selections:

'Me' is aroused & confused, a college student or middle-aged married male who overthinks everything but finds he can't help himself.

Male:

A middle-aged married guy ravished by his wife's former college classmates.

Two (different) clueless but garrulous male organs.

A retired, disabled voyeur in the Berkshires.

An Argentinian intellectual who finds himself under a curse.

Female:

Suzanne, married in the midwest, is comfortable in her skin and highly experimental.

An erudite Cambridge paleograher on the verge of control.

A sweet, hyper-intellectual linguistics grad student.

College nympho recounting her adventures.

 

[KeithD]

I try to write with variety, so it's the same with my first-person characters.

 

[Pixiehoff]

Your first person characters

All mine are based on versions of me

 

[sirhugs]

All mine are based on versions of me

so true.

That's why I write both first and third person- the protagonists that are not a version of me I write in third person.

So I write first person as males. To begin with, he was married as I was. Now, not so much, though for some stories (She Tastes Like a Peach), I revisit that vibe. similarly, the protagonists have generally aged as I have, but I still will shift the age to fit a story. But whereas my incest genre stories used to feature daughters and step-daughters, now they tend to include granddaughters. Not that I have ever had a daughter, or a granddaughter. And sometimes, my narrator will be younger, like in She-Male babysitter- not young certainly, but younger than other recent narrators, who tend toward 50s or 60s. still, older than the protagonist in After Hours Adventure, written back in 2002, who was a student. Occupations vary, and are less related to my own work, chosen to suit plot or to give an excuse to be at home in the day.

But they are all fictionalized. How much is close to reality remains a mystery.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I have one autobiographical me in Memory and Loss, aged between eighteen and twenty-eight; the same era fictional me (Alex) in several story cycles, one involving a daemon woman and time travel, another wooing an English girl in England, and a third falling in love with a woman with a broken back. One or two more, including a rare foray into incest, with a sibling older sister story.

I have a cantankerous magician in The Dark Chronicles who may or may not be several centuries old - who knew Plato, Pliny, Arthur, the Lady of the Lake, and wrote his story locked up in a tree.

I then have the contemporaneous, fictional, older "me", Adam, whose story cycles generally have some truth in them somewhere, weaving in and out, but who is my fantasy outlet. I'm a lazy bastard, so my male first person characters are all loosely "me" because it makes them easier to write.

 

[vanmyers86]

All mine are based on versions of me

That's true to an extent for me too. Certainly all my protagonists, male and female, have elements of my personality or my life in them.

Most are substantially younger than I am. With two exceptions, all are within 10 years of age 30. I find that age range is a good one - old enough to have lived a little and have something to say, but young enough to still be smoking hot and open to different experiences as a matter of course.

 

[Voboy]

Too many to list; I've only done a handful of third-person stories.

Probably all of them have aspects of me, and one or two are VERY much like me. One or two of them are versions of myself that I'd like to be, or female versions of myself. That sort of thing. Most are just attempts, by me, to indulge my imagination. A few are conscious efforts to create someone who is nothing like me.

In most of my stories, the character is intended to fit the situation in which I place them. The plot comes first, then I choose a character to suit. So, from that standpoint, none of them is truly organic as written. But I do pride myself on letting them develop on their own as I write.

 

[YDB95]

The biggest surprise for me is how few first-person stories I've done! I'd never thought about it before, but they're mostly in third person.

In any event...
Anna from "The Butler Did Me": A 25 year old woman in her first job out of grad school. The time period isn't specified but I imagined it as contemporary when I wrote it in 2012. Her boss was inspired by a woman I went to college with, and with whom I once had a brief chat while she was naked in public, just like in the story.

Andy from "Old Times' Sake" - male, also recently out of college and also contemporary. Inspired by a love triangle I had the rotten luck to be involved in back in the early '90s, so it might inadvertently read like it takes place back then.

Jack from "Three Kisses, One Past" - male, 19, college student, probably also no later than the early '90s as there's no mention of social media, smartphones, etc. This one got more comments than all but one or two of my other stories and really touched a lot of people, and I meant for years to do a sequel. Maybe I still will.

Agnes from the Elizabeth series (omniscient until the last paragraph of the 3rd story, first person after that) - female, early-mid-20s, probably about a hundred years ago and in a parallel universe that's similar to ours but a bit ahead of us in certain ways.

Don from "Remembering Eighteen" - male, old enough to drink legally, nothing is clear about him beyond that except that he isn't a very happy person.

Joseph from "And I'm Pulling Out of Here to Win" - male, born in 1971, most of the story is told in flashback to 1989, and eight years later he was in grad school in California.

Edmund from "Somewhere Beyond the Lighthouse" - male, probably born around 1920 or so in London, a relatively irresponsible younger sibling and thus a favourite uncle to Lillie, whose father is Edmund's older brother. Little else is known, as the story isn't really about them for the most part.

Josh from "Skirting the Matter" - Male, contemporary, living in a conservative city somewhere that isn't the Midwest (maybe the South?). This is one of my least successful stories, but it was loads of fun to write!

The narrator of "You Can't Hurt Me No More" - Male, and that's all we learn about him except that he's "thousands of miles away" from the apartment he used to share with his ex. I envisioned my former flat in DC and the ex I shared it with as I wrote it, but there's also a mention of an elevated train like in Chicago (and of which there was no such thing anywhere near our place in DC). He's an unreliable narrator anyway.

Peggy from "Joseph's Birthday Present" - Female, probably born around 1970 (she mentions her prom dress was a garish orange that suggests late '80s). In charge at the office, and about to enter into a relationship with her former boss (who no longer works there), but not before she has some fun with his son.

Tom from "The Last Summer of its Kind" and "Our Best Friends' Exes" - Male, born around 1981 (he graduated from college in 2003) in Iowa. Moved to San Francisco after law school (2006), and quite possibly still there.

Jay from "The Night Before Graduation" - Male, definitely 18 years old on the evening the story takes place, but there's no telling when that is.

Adam from "One Night in Paris" - Male, about a decade out of grad school, so he's probably late 30s at least, American but living in Australia (like yours truly, and yes, I also went to grad school in Paris).

Tom from "American Lavender" - Male, graduate of a snooty New England college but he didn't do very well there, a millionaire in his mid-30s, he's been living in Singapore but it sounds like he might be moving back to America in the story. That's one of several things left up in the air, along with whether he ever hooks up with his newly divorced college friend, Renee, who has a crush on him. That would make an interesting sequel, actually...

James from "And In My Lady's Chamber" - male, age unclear but probably fairly young, a servant to a wealthy family somewhere whose daughters have certain demands of him. They play music on a victrola, suggesting it's the 1920s or '30s, but exactly when isn't known.

Jimmy from "Late Summer, Seneca County" - Male, probably born late 1960s. He's 20 and the style of his cousin's underwear suggests late '80s.

Christine from "City Girl in the Desert" - Female, probably born late 1980s, in some suburb she didn't like very much. No question she's still in New York and judging men entirely by their wallets. The most unlikable character I've ever written except for outright criminals, but she was a lot of fun to write.

Pete from "Eighteenth Street Intimacy" - Male, probably born mid-1980s or so. The present time isn't clear, but one mention of "the age of Facebook" means it must be 2006 or later and Pete is about 25. (It's really based on some friends I knew when I was 25 in the late '90s.)

Matthew from "The Way She Looked That Night" - Male, American but living in Paris and looking at moving to Asia when he finishes his grad degree. Since this takes place at some point in the recent past, I suspect he did end up in Asia. (Completely autobiographical, and the troubled road trip across France happened in January or February 2008.)

James from "Next Time You See Her" - Male, American and living in the US, probably somewhere in the North as there's an IHOP where he lives. Young-ish but unclear how young exactly.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I write stories in both first and third person, and thought it would be interesting to look back and see who 'I' have been over the years. What are your first person characters like? Do they vary much in age, gender, occupation, nationality etc. like mine, or are they all very similar?

Looking at mine, including a couple of third-person-close protagonists:

Six female, two male, one unspecified.
Four Australian, one American, three unspecified (two of them intended as British), one mythic Arabian.
One software engineer, one website designer, one IT jack-of-all-trades, one operations research specialist, one primary teacher, one heiress/bluestocking, one full-time fuckboy, one aged-care nurse, one calligrapher/poet/adventuress.
Six in their twenties, one early 30s, one could be anywhere between 20 and 40, one unspecified.

My default protagonist would be a 20-30-ish Australian woman working in tech, but I try to mix it up a bit.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

A few of my female protagonists are me, because I was writing up a mainly-true or even completely-true story, or because I just needed a woman and there was no reason to change much.
I've also played around writing different characters - a man who's a Northern Irish widower with history of drink problems, a man from Birmingham who left school at 16, a woman from a wealthy background who's a confident sales manager. One main character who was an Asian man (Bangladeshi background, raised in London)

I write a lot of scientists and engineers and computer types, partly because it's what I know, partly because they're underrepresented in fiction, but mainly because the scientists in particular were constantly bonking each others' brains out!

As they said, there was always an excuse to stay late in the lab - either your experiment didn't work and needed repeating, or it did work and you needed to document results. Add lots of small dark rooms with locks on the doors, and on-site bar, plus many lonely people visiting from abroad, and it was sex everywhere.

 

[Blind_Justice]

I've written a number of First-Person characters and I'd like to think they've been distinct enough.

Nikym in "Nikym's Predicament", an elven thief
Salvador Rios in "Express Delivery", space trucker
Rembrandt Sharpe in "The Rembrandt Legacy", convicted criminal and engineer with the ability to alter technology by touch
Lukas in "More Than Video Games", law student with the hots for his aunt
Declan in "Dagger & Crystal", dark elven bastard and the unluckiest archer alive
Gheeran in "The Temptation of Gheeran", blind dark elven assassin
Shilana in "Shilana's Trial", female elven mage with some anger issues
A lot of people in "Ghost in the Machine". Apart from the AI, I think I wrote most of the story from the first person. Shows how much of a rookie I was back then. If I'll ever get around to a rewrite, I'd probably write most of it in third person instead.
Lastly, the protag of "Dramatic License" IS myself, warts and all.

If my first-person characters have anything in common then it's their generally above-average snark level. They are much better in tossing barbs or cool one-liners than I am. That aside, they are their own critters. I tend to burden my characters with flaws (sometimes crippling ones) which in turn makes them stand apart from each other.

 

[KeithD]

Part of the joy of writing for me is to put myself into someone else's distinct skin and mindset. Maybe it was because I was a stage actor early on and taking on roles that weren't me. Some of my stories project me in a character's role, but many more are me sinking into a different role/character altogether and exploring and revealing a whole different persona.

 

[Hypoxia]

Sorry, I won't review all my LIT entries to note their narrative status. I may write in 3rd-omniscient to peer into various players' heads, or 3rd-limited to focus mainly on one individual, maybe with brief forays to outside experiences. 1st-person limits a tale to the narrator's sensations, knowledge, and thoughts -- mighty handy at times. Some of my series see every chapter told by a different person, sometimes two, giving us their own POVs of related events.

Some of my players, whether narrators or not, contain a bit of me, either as I am, or as I could be in another universe. Many narrators have nothing to do with me, and I've either modeled them on someone I think I know something about, or I just invented them whole-hog. I follow no formula. I do whatever feels best for any particular story.

 

[SimonDoom]

I looked at my story list and was actually surprised by the answer, because it had seemed to me that I split duties between first and third person POV. Actually, I use third person almost all the time, and if you count my 8-chapter Hot Mom series as one story I've used first person in only two stories:

Randy, the 19 year old son who narrates the Hot Mom story.

Sonny Biggs, the cynical, Mike Hammer-style detective in BTB Incorporated.

I usually prefer third person except in two cases, both applicable in these two stories:

One is where I want the narrator to experience surprise, and I think the surprise is more plausible if he is the narrator rather than me being the narrator; and

The other is where I want the narrator to have a quirky or amusing personality, and to make observations about things that I as a third person narrator could not as plausibly make.

 

[MelissaBaby]

The only first person character I've written is explicitly me.

My Fall and Rise

The character Jessica, in Mary and Alvin, is basically me as well, but not written in first person.

 

[SimonDoom]

The only first person character I've written is explicitly me.

My Fall and Rise

The character Jessica, in Mary and Alvin, is basically me as well, but not written in first person.

Definitely not true of me. I have never written myself into a story. I would say that my characters have elements of me, and I might make similar decisions some times under similar circumstances, but my characters are more fantasy projections of aspects of me than really me.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Definitely not true of me. I have never written myself into a story. I would say that my characters have elements of me, and I might make similar decisions some times under similar circumstances, but my characters are more fantasy projections of aspects of me than really me.

If Lit had a category for Memoir, I would have put MFAR there, but as it does not, I placed it under Novels and Novellas.

 

[emperor0379]

I'm working one where the narrator is pretty close to myself, a mostly straight guy.

The two stories I'very published here I'm a big bisexual slut.

In any case, so far my narrators act out my fantasies.

 

[SamScribble]

I'm sure that while none of my characters are me, several of them have touches of me. 'Write about what you know', isn't that what the masters tell us?

 

[TreskaNovell]

I have been:
Rem, the undead slayer
A nameless man with amnesia who ends up getting called zero
a dead kid
a cockroach
a werewolf
Isaiah flatstrider-military information specialist in a fantasy world
a sniper in a short story (no name)
Damn im sure im forgetting a few

 

[itsbamajack]

Interesting

I find it interesting that so many can write first person both male and female. So far all of mine have been male and some version of me. Many being at least somewhat based on some actual event from my own past.

I have lots of ideas and fantasies from what I consider a female perspective. I think I will try to write a story in first person as a female character. I’d love to be able to chat with a mature intelligent and imaginative woman about some of my ideas.

Thanks

Jack