Why I Write in the First-Person Voice
Performing myself may be artificial, but it's also an act of self-creation. AI can't — and shouldn't — do that for us.
When I talk about why writers need to find their own voices, I’m in earnest. I assume my journalism students see my earnestness. They take in my wide eyes and smile, but when I’m confined to a Zoom rectangle, what they’re taking in most is my speaking voice. I am explaining, persuading, summarizing, describing. I’m citing key facts or work by other authors as well as telling anecdotes from my personal life as a writer, magazine editor, and mother. I’m doing what writers do, especially those who claim to be writing nonfiction.
This is what I’m also doing: for online class sessions, I select a virtual background. It’s often a photo I’ve snapped with my iPhone — an empty Cape Cod beach; brilliant green lily pads on a local pond; a city park I filter as vintage black-and-white.
I am there when I take the photos. But what I capture with the little machine in my hand is a digital version of the experience. It’s been mediated and it’s already a form of artifice. In a workshop of students, or in meeting with a colleague, I project that digitally processed image behind the real person my web cam frames. I mask where I’m sitting: at a desk in my home office, books and papers scattered everywhere.
Am I the meaning or the mess? Who am I beyond the book piles, the virtual background, my face within a rectangle on a computer screen, that Martha projecting as much liveliness as possible? More rhetorical questions, and they quickly turn uncomfortable. Much of social life involves performance, as everyone from William Shakespeare to sociologist Erving Goffman to philosopher Judith Butler to drag impresario RuPaul Charles to the contestants of Survivor have observed. Developing a convincing writing voice also draws on our human tendency to perform for others, which is inevitable, creative, occasionally destabilizing, and often dishonest.
During the pandemic lockdown, it was so common for academics and media commentators to have artfully arranged shelves of books behind them as a Zoom background that it became a meme. I remember thinking that the well-coiffed expert of the hour must have been nervous enough to decide on which book titles to display (Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club) or had at least hired somebody to place a daisy in a vase beside the copy of their latest book. Now, the bookshelves can be virtual, such as the “Credibility Bookshelf” backgrounds you download from Penguin Random House.1
Or consider artists who are performers, especially pop musicians with stylized personas or a series of personas: David Bowie, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift (she refers to them as “eras”), Prince, Bob Dylan, and so on. Their actual voices are on display and amplified for effect. Recently, I happened to listen to Hunky Dory, a 1971 Bowie album I’ve long loved but hadn’t heard for awhile. I still love it, but I was amused by how performative it is, with tart riffs on Warhol and Dylan — but also on Bowie’s evolving self-creation as an artist. In “Quicksand,” a stew of self-doubt and high-flown thoughts, the warbled chorus made me laugh out loud:
Don’t believe in yourself
Don’t deceive with belief
Knowledge comes with death’s release
Ah-ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah-ah-ah
I must have taken this in as a teenager in the 1970s, obsessed as I was with Bowie.2 Don’t believe in yourself. Here I also want to nod to Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley, a 2025 novel about millennial musicians and music writers circa 2000, that took me back to Hunky Dory. Brickley’s wonderful novel got me thinking about the way young creatives struggle to craft themselves in words, especially when tasked with being both authentic and charismatic. It’s a seemingly hopeless proposition if you believe your “self” stays the same or that authenticity should be anti-performance.
With several failed attempts to write a zine review of “Surf’s Up” by the Beach Boys, for instance, Percy the narrator castigates herself with “How personal was too personal? What did I want to say?” (and she decides she’ll look uncool writing about a truly oddball art-pop song recommended by her mother). I thoroughly enjoyed Percy’s failed attempts, along with the irony of a writing-workshop participant later suggesting she should get more personal.
I also like the notion of crafting your own playlist of “deep cuts” as self-curation that has not been handed off to AI. The music we sing to, the books and authors we read — words and ideas voiced in many forms — can all be claimed as part of our identities. In Deep Cuts, it’s clear David Bowie has been a guiding light for a certain kind of indie musician; his song “Kooks” gets a sweet callout.3 It’s also clear that, derivative and theatrical as he was, nobody else could be Bowie.
Just as nobody else can be me or you. I believe learning to write in the first-person voice extends beyond creative self-expression. You can feel far less bohemian than an indie musician yet benefit from thinking about who you are. We incorporate many selves as we grow older, but think of the irrepressible self of childhood, whether spilling out in jokes or questions. Think about how often that gets damped down.
Insisting on facts is another kind of rabbit hole, one that doesn’t necessarily get at the truthfulness of human experience. Of all the ironies I’m assailed with in the AI era, the literalness of chatbots, the way they mimic a desire to present reality, gets under my skin in both hilarious and dangerous ways. They fabricate any sources they can’t retrieve, but they do so with “objective” authority — or worse, faux earnestness that resembles what I’m telling you here. They do earnestness extremely well. They can sound like an influencer or a thought leader. If you ask them to be, they know how to sound like a journalist who’s supposedly stating facts, even if the facts are wrong. They can change voices on a dime. They are Bowies without the wit or wink.
While I’m performing as a teacher or first-person writer, there’s a crucial difference between me and a chatbot simulating what humans do. There’s intention behind my performance, a desire to connect with people and to get them talking.
I may laugh a little harder in an online class than during my “real Martha” quiet days, but I amplify myself when I teach in person as well. I revel in holding the attention of those who listen. I’ve never been a fashion plate, but I dress up when I’m in front of an audience. Teaching well is always a performance, but performing up to the best expectations of what I think my words should mean is not bad.
It’s a version of myself that is true, because I have goals focused on ethical interaction and honest communication. It’s one of many ways I tap my personal voice. It reflects my aesthetic preferences, the colors I like, my cultural references, my individual history. In deciding how to present myself, I’m transforming reality, but I call this creative rather than fabricated. I haven’t outsourced it to an interior decorator, a PR assistant, canned backgrounds, or a machine.
Instead of presenting a “credibility” office, I swap my Zoom backgrounds every week. I snap photos when I walk around Fresh Pond Reservoir the same day as a class session. They show changes over time and the New England seasons — leaves burning orange and yellow; a scrim of skeletal branches against banks of gray cloud. They reveal the details, I tell students, that I noticed at a particular moment, the kind that make an anecdote in a story come alive.
I don’t assume readers or listeners are passively consuming what I say, either. Yet I worry that passive consumption is what younger students are learning to do with generative AI, as if a personal essay is the equivalent of a Wikipedia entry. Writing in the first-person voice undercuts conventional academic omniscience, the stuff that bots mimic too well. When you use “I,” you present yourself as an individual human: biased, flawed, connected to a personal world others may not share except through your words. The more effort you put into connecting with other humans — with acknowledging what they need to know about you — the more credible you’ll seem.
Using “I” isn’t just a rhetorical strategy. If you really are writing from your own perspective rather than asking ChatGPT to fake it, it’s hard to avoid thinking about why you believe what you do. At the very least, it starts the process of attributing sources for your ideas, something bots do very poorly. It can lead to surprising discoveries and changes of mind, which makes this writing approach so human. I still stumble across authors and musicians who influenced me at a younger age, such as Bowie and Hunky Dory. Now I hear these voices inside myself in new ways.
Even more than photos, my words are abstractions, reflections of reality, not the thing itself. But they’re mine. They come through my hands when I write notes or pound on my laptop keys. They flow into me from the reading I do, the voices of my family and friends, other authors and musicians, whom I name here as often as I can, trying not to forget. The words originate in me, in what I say to other people, whether in person or on a screen. They enter the world with my breath — my voice.
“Download These ‘Credibility Bookshelf’ Backgrounds for Zoom,” Penguin Random House Canada (including “The Trend Finder,” “The Literary Heavyweight,” and “The Adventure Seeker”).
See my Talking Writing review from way back in 2011: “Don’t Take Away My David Bowie.” (I may update this as a post here soon, in another round of self-creation.)
As a warm contrast with “Don’t believe in yourself,” Bowie’s ode to his new baby at the time in “Kooks” has him singing “we believe in you.” An early live version is authentically folky, but it’s the produced album cut that’s irresistible, complete with his stagey British phrasing and a tinkling piano in the following verse. I also think Bowie meant it:
And if you ever have to go to school,
remember how they messed up this old fool.
Don’t pick fights with the bullies or the cads
’cause I’m not much cop and punching other people’s dads.
And if the homework brings you down
then we’ll throw it on the fire and take the car downtown
Martha, you take my breath every time I read you. I nod enthusiastically as if you knew my most intimate thoughts. And here is the weird thing: I didn't even see you on a small computer screen with your personalized zoom background. All I have are your words. And they are as real as it gets!!
You’ve raised some provocative questions. I’ve been thinking recently about how, over time, that writers of both nonfiction and fiction have been moving toward a kind of internalization of the creative process, so that rather than writing as observers of the world around them they’re observing themselves as the center of their worlds. This is a broad generalization of course, but I can’t help thinking of great writers of nonfiction like Virginia Woolf and James Baldwin and how they examined their own lives to create an indelible sense, in Woolf’s case, of the lives of women, and in Baldwin’s, of Black people. I guess what I’m fumbling for here is the idea that universality might be endangered by autofiction and non-fiction where everything revolves around an “I.”