ARGH! Okay, background. A while back i bought the graphic novel "Identity Crisis" which was written by a guy I had never noticed before named Brad Meltzer who is, apparently, a bit of a rising star. So, a month later while stting death watch for my g'pa at the hospital I come across a novel written by Meltzer caled "The Zero Game" and, being he only remotely appealing thing at this particular Kroger, I decided to try it out. The whole bloody thing was written in the first person! Was the most anoying device I've seen in years - does he write all his novels like that? The one thing I took away from that book - be VERY wary of the temptation to write in the first person!
I like first person and tend to write in it a lot. Three reasons: - Allows for more emotions as it's not a third party report of events. - Allows for extremely energetic writing that's still believable. - Allows the reader to understand the storyteller much better as they are in his/her head and not watching from the outside.
I used to be really dubious about reading first-person stuff. The impression I got was always that the narrator was willingly spilling his or her guts out for inspection by a complete stranger (namely me). I don't have any great dislike of first-person nowadays, but occasionally I still have to wonder "Is it honestly all that realistic to suppose this person would be willing to sit down across from me and tell me about this embarrassing incident without blushing?"
One of my favorite writers these days is Laurell Hamilton, of Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter fame. All her stuff is first-person. Makes it much more immediate and engrossing from my perspective, and gives it a much more active "voice". And my last two short stories of any consequence were both written in first person. The drawback of first person, of course, is that the entire narrative is told from only one person's POV, so in order to follow any other character's actions away from your main character, either you include something like "I found out later that Fred was . . . " or else you do like Robert Heinlein did in The Number of the Beast and rotate the first person "voice" among your primary characters. In Heinlein's case there were four, and each chapter was told from a different one's POV.
I took a creative writing course in college as a Freshman and we had to write a story in the first person and it was hard. We then had to rewrite the same story in the second person, which was even harder.
I love RAH but "The Number of the Beast" was so chock full of STUFF that when I was done I didn't even remember what all happened. but, on point, maybe it was just that Meltzer didn't bring it off well but the complaint I had was that the descriptive language you might use ABOUT something or someone in the third person doesn't ring true when the person is thinking it of himself. or it didn't to me. I do like the first person when the obejct is character study, when there's things that the third person view can't describe as intemately, but for something that is esseltnially a thrill ride (at least in intent) it doesn't work for me It seems to me that in the first person, you are hearing a sory as a person would tell it to you of himself, and when your character says something like.... "As I swung the heavy metal pipe baseball bat style, I steeled myself for the jolt that would come when it connected with his skull, but I was not prepared for the sound of flesh and bone collapsing under the impact of the unforgiving metal." I'm not sure why but that just sounds like to clinical an analysis. As I said, maybe Meltzer was just using a third person descriptive style while speaking in the first person and it didn't jive....but I definatey was making some mental noates about what NOT to do.
It's not really a natural way of telling a story. First person is most natural (this story happened to me), followed closely by third person (this story happened to somebody else). "This story happened to you" doesn't come up all that often. It can be used in brief passages for effect, as Hemingway and others have done, but I'm not sure that's second person at all. Americans use "you" in much the same way the British use "one," so it might be better called third person impersonal.
The only way I've ever felt comfortable in FP - and i swear I was taught this in some comp calls too - is if the story is always though the eyes of a single character, he's in every scene and every event plays off him. The TP comes easyier to me when I'm converging various threads that start off in different locations. The only time I can recall writing anything in some semblence of Second person is that sort of weird little story in which you are trying to imese the reader in a situation as if it's happening to them. That only works for a very short story, in my opinion. Usually one that's a thriller or erotic.
