Benefits of a 3rd person narrator include
- can switch between characters
- can reveal information to readers before it is revealed to protagonist
- the piece is already written (okay, that's not normally an advantage)
Benefits of a 1st person narrator include
- gets deep inside characters head
- allows personality to permeate every aspect of story
- I like it
It's a difficult choice.
I'm interested to know what everyone else prefers to write in.
I don't like reading or writing first person. It feels unnatural and limited. In reality, you don't go around inside other people's heads, you see them from various external distances, so that's how I write, in third person.
ReplyDeleteI'm personally a fan of third-person. My main problem with first-person is that it's more prone to telling rather than showing. It also tends to feel a bit more overwrought and self-conscious. I have more thoughts on this here.
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