Many people have problems with starting too many sentences with I in first person stories. The same happens with he and she in third person stories. When everything is filtered through your character’s eyes, it’s hard not to have them start two out of every five sentences. You’ve been told not to start two sentences in a row with the same word, so if you’re using third person, the sentences that begin with he or she might alternate with the ones that start with the character’s name, which is hardly any better. You can’t just rearrange the word placement in these sentences without it sounding awkward.
The usual problem lies in sentences like “I looked at the tree, noticing that the fruit was plumper than usual.”
That is not the best way of conveying that information. Don’t beat people over the head with the fact that the story from your protagonist’s perspective. “I looked” is almost never needed. A better way to word that earlier sentence would be “The tree’s fruit was plumper than usual.” The character noticing said plumpness is implied.
The same principle can be extended to other sentences. If a character is driving a car through a red light, you can make your sentences about either the character or the car. If you’re running into the I problem, you probably need to make more of them about the car.
This is one of those things I always fix in the revision phase. To really get the most out of first person and third person limited, you want to efface the reader’s sense of self and let them fully immerse themselves in the POV of the character they’re reading.
You want to try not to do things that separate them from the head of the character you’re writing. Any time you insert an extraneous ‘he looked’ or ‘she thought’ or ‘I heard,’ you are pointing a finger at the character and drawing attention to the fact that the reader and the character are two different people. I even try to cut down on the ‘he said/she said/I said’ for the POV character (not the other characters), where I can find another way to distinguish who is speaking.
Basically, I try to have the POV character’s patterns of thought and perception mirror the way we think inside our own heads. We rarely think our own names to ourselves, for example. We rarely factor in the fact that WE are the ones seeing, hearing, or thinking something, because obviously. Rather than registering that it is our fingers that are feeling the texture of a blanket, we simply note the texture of the blanket. That way, the reader can easily slip into the POV character’s shoes and experience the story, rather than simply observing it.