: Re: Is there such a thing as using too Many "I's" in a first person novel? For example, would you say this section of copy has too many "I's" or even "my's"? I woke in a daze. A drug

@Steve161

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Pronouns

According to How to use... The Pronoun Check:

When you go back and edit ... you should check your pronoun
percentage. Ideally it should fall somewhere between 4% and 15%. Any
more than this and your writing can feel dull. This is especially so
with initial pronouns – those at the start of the sentence. Your
initial pronoun percentage should be under 30%.

I don't know where you are in your editing process, but you have eleven pronouns in your ninety-five words, which gives you a percentage of around 11.7%. This should be fine according to the above.

To compare - I'm reading Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby at the moment, and here's a random paragraph from the page I'm on:

As I get older, the tyranny that football exerts over my life, and
therefore over the lives of people around me, is less reasonable and
less attractive. Family and friends know, after long years of wearying
experience, that the fixture list always has the last word in any
arrangement; they understand, or at least accept, that christenings or
weddings or any gatherings, which in other families would take
unquestioned precedence, can only be plotted after consultation. So
football is regarded as a given disability that has to be worked
around. If I were wheelchair-bound, nobody close to me would organise
anything in a top-floor flat, so why would they plan anything for a
winter Saturday afternoon?

I counted five pronouns in this piece (one 'I', one 'me', one 'my' and two instance of 'they'). The extract is 116 words long giving it a percentage of around 4.3%. The author uses four different pronouns, even though this is an autobiography, which (you would assume) is mostly about himself and should therefore (logically) consist of 'I', 'me', 'my' and 'mine' (actually it's mostly about Arsenal, but there you go), which offers the reader a little more variety. Also, this extract has more long sentences than yours, which makes a difference to the pronoun percentage.

Personally, when I read your piece, I thought it sounded fine. The pronouns didn't jump up at me like a pack of those giddy little dogs, they just sat there nicely and offered me their paws. That said, try experimenting by removing them one by one to see how that affects the piece. A few of them are amenable to that. But I suppose it all depends on the effect you want to create.

Good luck with your writing.

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