Great article, but understanding and recognizing the various narrative POVs resident within first person is just as important as understanding limited vs. omniscient when writing in third. Simply choosing "first person" is not remotely sufficient. In fact, it's often a recipe for disaster.
There are at least six first-person POVs that I can think of. (If you know of more, please add them.)
Subjective narration. This is the most common first-person POV in fiction. This is a narrator interjecting their own commentary while telling the reader about something that happened to them. There are angles and shades to this, including the Unreliable Narrator, which is exactly what it sounds like. Mr. Lockwood in Wuthering Heights is an unreliable narrator.
Interior monologue. This is less common, and there’s a trick to it: the audience for the interior monologue is the narrator themselves. The narrator doesn’t speak to the reader; the reader is looking into the narrator’s mind. If this sounds confusing, it’s because it is. But it’s powerful when it’s done well.
Interior monologue with stream of consciousness. Less common still. This is interior monologue, but the writing flows as if it’s just words going through the narrator’s mind–there’s no way that this is possibly happening holy crap this thing totally happened and yet the words keep flowing OMG make it stop. There can be lots of run-on sentences, but there don't have to be. Again, this is spectacular when it’s done well. The Catcher in the Rye is interior monologue with stream of consciousness.
Memoir. This feels a lot like subjective narration, and reads similarly on its face. And more confusingly, “memoirs” are often written in first-person subjective. However, “memoir” as a voice tends to be more emotionally and temporally distant, and generally more factual, than first-person subjective. It’s more of a stylistic consideration than a point of view in and of itself. It’s a feel thing, and it’s hard to dial in except that you’ll know it when you see it after you’ve read enough of it. Memoir voice is typically done in past tense, but often jumps around in time, as well, interjecting current considerations and follow-on effects into the narrative. The scenes in Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain where the main character (the dog) is narrating about his family–the scenes where he is NOT the main character, but a peripheral character–are told in memoir. The scenes where the dog is central to the story are told in subjective narration. The Art of Racing in the Rain is one of the best recent examples of different voices inside one POV. It should be on every author’s bookshelf. It’s practically a textbook on first-person voice.
Detached. Memoir voice from even further away, emotionally and temporally. A narrator telling a story about something that happened to them either long ago, or far away. Rarely enters present-day, and rarely refers to follow-on effects. Detached often has a clinical feel. I don’t know of any examples off the top of my head where detached first person is used for the entire book, but I can see it being used, say, in a murder mystery where the narrator is a medical examiner and is writing clinically about a case. Maybe a really gritty detective novel could pull this off, but it might get hokey and gimmicky pretty quick. It could work really well for a framed first-person narrative. (I'll discuss framed narratives if we do a thread on third person voice.)
Cinematic. This is a relatively new one on me, but I’ve certainly seen enough of it in genre fiction and especially among fledgling authors. As I understand it, cinematic first person describes a writing style that is almost entirely action and/or description oriented, with minimal emotional or intellectual focus. No real deep dives into why things are happening or what they’re doing to the narrator emotionally, just a bunch of stuff popping off for three hundred pages, typically in present tense. I don’t know if this kind of fiction is written as a conscious choice, or if the term “cinematic first person” developed as a way to politely describe the writing style of people who watch a lot of movies and don’t like to read.
The problem with all of this is that you can only choose one of these. If you wobble between them, your writing will feel clunky, even if the reader doesn't know why; switching between, say, Memoir and Detached in first person can be just as jarring as "head-hopping" in close third. It can be done, but it's very, very tricky. Some authors have a gift for this. Most don't.
Your reader will never realize, "Oh, this author moved between subjective and detached first-person, here; I hate this book." This is mostly because 99% of people don't know subjective first from detached, but also because 99.9% of people don't punctuate their thoughts with semicolons.
Anyway. The reader will just know that the writing felt clumsy, and they'll look side-eyed at some passages even if they don't know why.
This is why.
Further, choosing one--and only one--of the above is key to delivering your story, because each voice conveys unique information to the reader. Therefore, your choice of POV determines how the reader is going to reach, and interpret, the point of the story.
Each narrative POV tells the story differently. You need to understand them so that you know how your story will be read.
This is also important because, a lot of the time, when a book dies on the vine, it's because the author chose the wrong narrative POV, and the story has dead-ended. (Or, they chose no POV except for "first" or "third," which is much, much worse, because they know what they want to say but they're unsure of how to say it.) Knowing and choosing one narrative POV makes it simple to determine what your story is, and more importantly, how it's construed. Even if you're a pantser, choosing a narrative POV will determine the "feel" of the story and keep the book on the rails.
Know your resident POVs. Read and practice until you can select one and stay with it.
Lots of stuff about voice on my blog. It's all searchable.
