Is first person narration more trouble than it's worth? If the majority of stories are written in third person, it seems that maybe there's something trickier or more troublesome about first. What is it? Can it be minimized or avoided? _________________ Violet "Violanthe" Kane
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Last edited by Violanthe on Wed Jul 30, 2008 5:38 pm; edited 1 time in total
IMHO, writing 'First Person' offers a narrower capture range to audience. If they don't like the way the narrator thinks, you've lost readers. If they don't like the way he/she sees world, you've lost readers etc etc.
Also, the character may come across as unsympathetic....
FWIW, I was taught that 'first person' is a mark of the amateur, of a wannabe who lacks the skill to tell tale from 'outside'. Could be: I've written much less in 3rd than 1st. Several were short-shorts literally too short to tell from 'inside', another was specifically to, um, counterpoint my 1sts...
But my later Convention tales are 3rd, sort-of, with switching viewpoints...
D'uh, at the moment, I can't write at all, so I'd settle for either...
FWIW, I was taught that 'first person' is a mark of the amateur, of a wannabe who lacks the skill to tell tale from 'outside'.
I've always thought that 1st person is much harder to write because you really have to get into the skin of your character. (Assuming of course that you're not writing from your own perspective.)
I think that whoever said that is in the "I don't like it and so it must be wrong/ untalented/ nobody else can like it" -crowd.
I, as I'm sure I've said here before, am a fan of the first person. Certainly there are pitfall in it: you have to write all the time in the character's POV, you can't have crucial plot points happen to someone else (or at least you have to somehow get them to the MC) but avoiding them is half the fun!
It's a considerable challenge to write in first person, especially if you want to pull off tricks like the unreliable narrator. You're forced to show everything in first person, and that presents a challenge. If you tell - it comes across as author intrusion or infodumping.
You get into your toon's mind like nothing else in first person, and IMHO, it's arguably the best viewpoint for a highly character driven story. Eg. the Flashman books would not have worked if Fraser had've written them third person.
What it may be that you heard was that in first person narration, it's easier to spot an amateur because first person narration is a lot harder to pull off well. _________________ Violet "Violanthe" Kane
[email protected] ARWZ.com: A Magazine of Alternative Reality Fiction
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