"Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself"
About this Quote
Burke frames first-person narration as less a craft choice than a bodily sensation: you "hear" it, like a radio frequency you either pick up or you don't. That phrasing is doing quiet polemical work. It strips away workshop pieties about technique and replaces them with something older and more intimate - the writer as listener, the story as a voice already speaking. For a crime novelist known for mood, moral abrasion, and lyrical grit, the claim fits: first person isn’t a clever camera angle, it’s a confession booth with the door left open.
The intent is partly liberating, partly authoritarian. Liberating because it tells anxious writers to stop performing literary ventriloquism and attend to the timbre that feels inevitable. Authoritarian because it implies a kind of authenticity test: if you can’t "hear" it, you shouldn’t force it. Burke is smuggling in a belief that voice precedes plotting, that character isn’t assembled from traits but arrives as cadence and pressure. That’s why the word "simply" matters - it dismisses overthinking, but it also dares you to trust the messy interior monologue you’ve been censoring.
Subtextually, Burke is staking a claim against the increasingly managerial approach to writing (beats, arcs, marketable POV decisions). First person, in his view, isn’t a branding move; it’s proximity. You accept its limitations, its bias, its shame, because the whole point is the human grain of the telling. Contextually, it’s advice from a writer whose best work depends on interior weather: guilt, memory, dread, tenderness - not observed from afar, but spoken from inside the skull.
The intent is partly liberating, partly authoritarian. Liberating because it tells anxious writers to stop performing literary ventriloquism and attend to the timbre that feels inevitable. Authoritarian because it implies a kind of authenticity test: if you can’t "hear" it, you shouldn’t force it. Burke is smuggling in a belief that voice precedes plotting, that character isn’t assembled from traits but arrives as cadence and pressure. That’s why the word "simply" matters - it dismisses overthinking, but it also dares you to trust the messy interior monologue you’ve been censoring.
Subtextually, Burke is staking a claim against the increasingly managerial approach to writing (beats, arcs, marketable POV decisions). First person, in his view, isn’t a branding move; it’s proximity. You accept its limitations, its bias, its shame, because the whole point is the human grain of the telling. Contextually, it’s advice from a writer whose best work depends on interior weather: guilt, memory, dread, tenderness - not observed from afar, but spoken from inside the skull.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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