Lia Declan's Musings

And The Workshop of Poetic Flourish

Have you ever taken a creative writing workshop or training course, or spoken with authors who tell you, “You should never write in first person?” Have you ever asked, “Why?” I’m going to attempt to dispel that myth for you.

My most read book was written in first person, and it moved in and out of a close third during brief interludes. That structure comes naturally to me. It was the only way to tell that story honestly. The character at its center could not have been spoken for; he had to speak himself in order to convey the proper tone and emotion of the novel.

Yet I remember the early workshop voices that warned me off it. They said the first person was too narrow, too revealing, too amateur, too emotional. They told me that readers no longer trusted it. What they meant was that writers no longer did.

When I first started writing about twenty years ago, I took all the classes, spoke to countless authors and creative writing instructors. They all had the same things to say, and one even told me not to trust the reader to develop their own emotions. “You must show them what they are supposed to feel.” She had said to me during a private conversation.

My immediate thought was, “Wow, why would I want to do that?”

The workshop teaches you to perform distance. It rewards the detached narrator, the one who observes the world but doesn’t confess to having lived in it. Every critique circle repeats the same safety phrases: pull back here, earn this emotion, maybe filter through an image. You learn to replace heat with restraint. You learn to smooth away the noise of actual feeling until what remains is language that sounds correct and human but is neither. The ‘I’ becomes suspect, too close to sincerity, too close to risk.

Something else happens alongside this withdrawal. The language itself begins to posture. We are told to find atmosphere, to imply rather than state, to show without telling. So, writers begin to rely on metaphor, and decorative language… on the flourish that replaces presence. A woman is never lonely; she is ‘framed by the shadow of her own reflection’. A man doesn’t grieve; ‘the sea grieves for him.’ It is all very elegant, very safe. The sentence dazzles, but nothing bleeds. The reader admires the polish and feels nothing.

When I wrote my novel, I ignored those lessons. I kept the ‘I’. I refused to turn emotion into metaphor. I let the sentences say what they meant, and my readers noticed. They didn’t call it brave. They called it human and said that the story felt real.

The first person doesn’t create artifice. It holds experience in its hands and says, “Here, this is what it was like.” It doesn’t decorate pain; it acknowledges it.

What the workshop forgot is that writing is not a demonstration of craft but an act of truth-telling. The first person exposes the writer’s moral position. It leaves no place to hide behind clever syntax or distance. That is why it terrifies instructors, and that is why it still moves readers.

The Cult of “Well-made Sentences”

At some point in the past twenty years, a generation of writers began to mistake prettiness for depth. The workshop rewarded those who could describe a doorknob as though it held the secrets of the universe. A writer could spend three pages on a teacup and receive praise for restraint, nuance, precision, and descriptive excellence. Nonsense! After reading those three pages, no one could say what the scene meant or the significance of the teacup.

Every story circle has its stars. The ones whoseprose “gleams under fluorescent light.” You can hear their sentences before they speak them. The woman doesn’t walk into the fading light; she “walks through the amber dusk of a city bleeding its light onto the river.” The man doesn’t sit alone in quiet contemplation; he “sits in the hush between the heartbeats of the world.” And a character never cries; “a single tear conducts the memory of rain down their cheek.”

Now, if that’s the way you like to write, please, don’t allow me to stop you. I’m not going to say that these phrases are wrong. I’m also guilty of using, although somewhat less flashy, poetic phrases from time to time. But when I refer to poetic flourish, this is exactly what I mean.

The Moral Weight of Plain Speech

What makes the first person dangerous is not confession. It is accountability. When a writer says ‘I’, there is no curtain to hide behind. Every sentence becomes a declaration of witness. The reader doesn’t see a crafted surface; they see a mind. That is the one thing the workshop cannot bear. It wants voice without vulnerability, and style without consequence.

Plain language is not an aesthetic choice. It is an ethical one. The stripped sentence refuses to flatter the reader or the writer. It makes no performance of activity or atmosphere. It simply says what happened, and in that act of specificity, something real passes between writer and reader. The plain sentence trusts the reader to feel without instruction. It doesn’t seduce with imagery or posture; it asks for recognition.

When I read back through my own work, I can see the points where honesty took over from creativity. The rhythm changes. The excess falls away. The sentences grow almost reluctant, but they do not lie. They do not lean on metaphor to carry the burden of what I mean. The story becomes human again. In fact, one of the questions that I ask myself over and over is, “Does this sound like me, if I were speaking to someone in person?”

Every writer must decide what their prose serves: the poetry of language or the truth of experience. They are not always opposed, but they are rarely equal. The culture of the workshop has made poetry the god. It has taught writers to polish the surface until it sparkles and then to mistake that sparkle for substance. But beauty isn’t always enough. Beauty without risk is only decoration.

The reader doesn’t need a perfect sentence. They need to believe that they are standing where the words now stand. That is what first person narrative restores: the depth of living. It makes the page a space of witness, not display. When I write ‘I’, I sign the work with my breath. I accept the responsibility of having felt what I describe.

There is nothing sentimental about that. It is, in fact, the opposite of sentimentality. It is the refusal to dilute experience through metaphor or remove it through irony. It is the choice to face emotion without disguise. That is the true difficulty of using a first person point-of-view, and that is why it survives everything the workshop has tried to kill.

The Return of the ‘I’

The time has come to reclaim the first person from the hands of craft. The ‘I’ is not indulgent or immature. It’s not an obstacle to art, it’s the oldest form of storytelling we possess. Every origin begins with it. Every myth, every gospel, every testimony starts the same way: “I was there. I saw this. I survived it.”

Writers have been told for too long that intimacy cheapens prose, that direct emotion must be earned through architecture, that distance is a mark of sophistication. The result is a generation of stories that do not speak, only “hum faintly behind glass”. The reader stands outside, admiring the composition. The writer hides inside, terrified to be known.

To write in the first person is to stand in the open. It is to allow the reader to watch the mind form meaning in real time. It is a naked act that has no protection. That is its strength. The plain voice says: “Here I am. Take it or leave it, but this is the truth as I have felt it.”

The workshop will always prefer polish to risk. It will always favor the sentence that offends no one and reveals nothing. But literature was never meant to be safe. It exists to remind us that language is a moral act, that saying ‘I’ still matters in a culture that would rather we spoke in generalities.

When I teach now, I tell new writers that clarity is not the enemy of beauty. The clean sentence can hold the same weight as the ornate one if it is anchored in witness. I tell them that sincerity is not naive. The world has grown so fluent in irony that truth sounds strange when spoken plainly. That strangeness is the mark of life.

The first person endures because it cannot pretend. It forces the writer to mean what they say. It makes the act of writing personal again, and therefore moral. Every time a writer risks the ‘I’, they return literature to its human core.

That is where I will remain: in the voice that admits, the voice that does not hide. The workshop can keep its distance. I will keep the ‘I’.

The Numbness of Ornament

The danger of excess isn’t only aesthetic. It is moral and sensory. When every page glitters, nothing shines. When every emotion must be translated into metaphor, the writer begins to lose contact with the feeling itself. The image becomes a substitute for experience. The prose performs pain as an act, instead of feeling it.

I have seen writers reach for flourish the moment the truth gets too close. The hand can’t stay still on the line that matters. It has to decorate, elaborate, soften the blow. The reader, trained by the same habits, responds to the shimmer rather than the wound. Together, they learn to mistake beauty for empathy.

Over time, both grow numb. The writer stops feeling what they write; the reader stops feeling what they read. The exchange becomes technical, a display of craft rather than communion. This is how art empties itself. The language still sings, but the voice no longer trembles.

Poetic language has its place. A well-made image can open a door that plain speech cannot. But when every door is carved from gold, the eye no longer notices the brightness. The mind drifts, and the heart turns away.

A sentence must sometimes be allowed to stand unadorned, “breathing in its own silence.” Only then can both writer and reader remember that words are not ornaments. They are instruments of feeling. And feeling, left unembellished, is what keeps literature alive.