First person point-of-view is, however, limiting. It makes the writer stick very closely inside the protagonist’s perspective, unless one resorts to omniscient or employs a less conventional method of mixing first and either second or third points-of-view. Omniscient, however, is a tool only for the most adroit; the use of second and third POV’s requires a book with a large scope and unconventional plot. Unfortunately, my first person book’s scope does not permit this latter method of irregular construction.
Creating a work in first person, however, runs the danger of main character self-indulgence, which renders the read B-O-R-I-N-G. And that’s the huge pitfall of ‘first’.
Happily, every one of my other books is nicely set in third person, whether a single or a multiple point-of-view is employed by, respectively, a single main character, or several main and secondary characters. So I am content to allow one novel to deviate from my own self-imposed traditions, traditions which I feel best serve putting story above everything else, and especially above author intrusion and, worst, self-indulgence.
By its very nature, the ‘I’ perspective, first person point-of-view, is laden with hazards of self-emoting and self-indulgence. It is too easy for an author to begin to wallow in a character’s inner narratives and flounder in that character’s angst, especially since the character springs from the author’s subconscious. And self-indulgence and emotive wallowing is where ‘boring’ starts for a reader — at least this reader. It is where ‘tedium’ lives when I run my eye down any book shop’s shelf containing a majority of works written in first person. Sadly, that majority starts and ends in ‘I’, not with plot. Predictably, these ‘I’s’ (so favored, I understand, by angsty tween and teen crowd readers) are self-saturated with cloyingly emotive crud. Sadly, these stories, were they done from third, might have some glimmer and gleam of worthiness. Instead, they reek of self-infatuated flatulence.
In short, except in the hands of an author in complete control of his or her creation, the I’s don’t have it.
Recently:
- Writing Pedagogues
- They Work Very Hard
- Treading the Dangers of Fiction
- Infighting About Grammar & Punctuation
- Scary Writers
- New Novel, Chapter Two
- To the Book Store
- New Novel Amid Chaos
- Raw Gore, Explicit Cruelty, Debased Sex in Novels
- Back from Summer Hiatus
