Short Story Examples in First Person: Two Complete Stories With Notes on Voice
Quick answer: Two original first-person short stories with distinct narrators, one guarded and one talkative, and a breakdown of how voice does the work of plot.
First person is a voice before it is a point of view. The narrator's word choices, what they notice, what they refuse to say, all of it is character, and in a short story that voice can carry more weight than the events. The two original stories below have very different narrators: one is a woman clearing out a van and saying as little as possible, the other is a man who cannot stop talking to his dentist.
Inventory
I did the van on the Sunday because nobody else would. My brother said he couldn't face it, which is what he says about most things. Dad's van. Ford Transit, white, 140,000 miles, the passenger seat rubbed through to the foam where his tool bag had sat for twenty years. I made a list because a list is a way of not thinking. Two spirit levels. A box of screws sorted by size into old margarine tubs, each one labelled in marker. A flask. Three pairs of reading glasses, all cheap, all with one arm bent from being pushed up onto his head. A packet of the mints he pretended he didn't eat. A paperback about the Battle of Britain with a receipt for a bookmark, from a garage in Carlisle, dated the week I told him I was leaving Tom. Under the seat, a child's hair bobble, purple, glittery. I don't have children. My brother doesn't. It had been there long enough to go stiff. I sat in the driver's seat with it in my palm for a while, and then I put it in my pocket, and wrote it down on the list under 'flask' because I didn't know what else to do with it.
Open Wide
I always talk at the dentist, which is the one place you're not supposed to, and Dr Mensah has learned to time her questions for when I've got a mouth full of her fingers. So I'm telling her about my mother's hip, and the parking, and how the new bin schedule makes no sense, and she's nodding and doing the thing with the little mirror, and I say, through cotton wool, that my mother's been asking for my dad. Dr Mensah stops. Just for a second. Then carries on. My dad's been dead eleven years, I say, which she knows, because I've told her that too, probably every six months. My mother asks where he is and I say he's at work. That's what I've landed on. He's at work. She accepts it. She's happy for about an hour. Dr Mensah takes her fingers out and says, 'Rinse,' and I rinse, and she says, very quietly, looking at the chart and not at me, 'My father was at work for two years at the end. It's a good place for them to be.' Then she says my molar's fine and she'll see me in six months, and I go and pay at the desk, and I don't talk to the receptionist at all, which she probably notices.
How each voice is built
Inventory's narrator refuses feeling and hands you objects instead. The list is her method and the story's method: every item is specific enough to be evidence, and the receipt from Carlisle tells you when her father was worried about her without her ever saying so. The hair bobble breaks the list because it cannot be explained. A different narrator would guess; this one writes it down under 'flask', and that refusal is the whole portrait.
Open Wide is the opposite technique. The narrator talks to avoid something, and the story lets the important sentence slip out sideways, buried in a run of complaints about bins. The dentist's pause is the reader's pause. Her reply is the only line in the story spoken in a different register, and it works because the narrator has been so relentlessly chatty that quiet lands like a hand on the shoulder. The ending shows change through behaviour: for once, he does not talk.
Choosing your narrator's silence
Every first-person narrator has one thing they will not say directly. Decide what it is before you draft and let the story circle it. The guarded narrator circles with objects; the talkative one circles with noise.
What writers can take from this
- Decide what your narrator will not say, then write everything else.
- Let word choice do the characterising; cut adjectives that describe the narrator directly.
- Give the narrator a method, a list, a ramble, a countdown, and let it fail once.
- Use a second character's small reaction as the reader's cue.
- End on a change in the narrator's behaviour, not their thoughts.
Try it yourself
Write a first-person story of under 400 words in which the narrator describes a place in detail while avoiding one fact about it. The fact must become clear to the reader before the narrator admits it.
Questions
Is first person easier than third person for short stories?
It is easier to start and harder to finish. Voice comes quickly in first person, but the narrator's limits mean you cannot show anything they do not see or admit, and endings often require exactly that. Choose it when the voice is the point.
Can a first-person narrator be unreliable in a short story?
Yes, and short fiction suits it, because the gap between what they say and what the reader sees can be held for a few pages without exhausting anyone. Both stories above have narrators who are honest about facts and evasive about feelings, which is a mild form of it.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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