First Person POV: How Many Are Too Many “I”s?

You decide to write your story in first-person and run the text through an application such as ProWritingAid or Grammarly. Or maybe you submit it to a weekly critique session. You receive feedback that you have X number of successive “I” references in your story.

You fret: “This is first-person! I can’t avoid using ‘I.’ But maybe I used too many or too few.”

You go to sleep, mind churning, convinced you’re a bad writer.

How Do I Compare?

Cheer up. There’s one objective yardstick to determine if you’re within tolerance: the density of “I”s in successful, first-person novels. Here are a few such novels where I’ve estimated the percentage of “I” within samples from opening chapters:

How Do I Avoid “I”s?

A couple of different “low-I” and low personal pronoun strategies emerge from the data:

In Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut’s narrator John tells the story retrospectively with a detached, observational style. While first-person, Vonnegut’s prose focuses heavily on dialogue and external events rather than internal monologue, keeping “I” usage moderate. The same is true of crime fiction/noir.

Heinlein’s straightforward narrative style in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress focuses on action and technical details, which also results in a lower usage of “I.”

I Get It!

Hopefully, when you bump your personal pronoun metrics against the above benchmarks you can sleep better at night. Happy writing!

John Morrison

John Morrison is a former intelligence officer and expert in cybersecurity who published his first novel, The Perfection of Fish, in 2020. His manuscript for The Pieces of My Self won the 2023 Claymore Award for Best Sci-fi/Fantasy. The Digital Dreams of Henri Knightly is a work in progress, long-listed for the Yeovil International Literary Prize. He belongs to an astrophysics society and lives near Annapolis, MD, USA.