First-Person Narration - A Good Option?
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Re: First-Person Narration - A Good Option?
- Amanda Nicole Newton
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To be quite honest i'm not a big fan of first person writing, and this is among the reasons why. If it ain't carefully handled it has the risk of turning the narrative messy and hard-to-read, not to mention that it has to display different describing styles in order to show different point of views, which in general, is not easy to achieve for most. In this particular case, i would have gone for third person; but it wasn't a deal-breaker for me, either.AntonelaMaria wrote: ↑16 Feb 2020, 13:43 First-person narration is all fine and dandy when you can make a difference between the characters. Otherwise... I don't know it is not about first or third person narration it is more of what kind of book it is. Maybe for fantasy, I wouldn't choose the first person.
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esp1975 wrote: ↑18 Feb 2020, 13:13 This wasn't first-person narration. First-person narration would have meant Adam or Carly was telling the story. Instead of "Adam felt....", it would have been "I felt...".
This was third-person omniscient. Someone else, who could see inside everyone's heads, was telling the story.
What you are talking about here is the switching of point-of-view characters. I am not a huge fan of third-person omniscient to begin with. I hate it even more when it is used to flip back and forth between point-of-view characters, sometimes only a sentence at a time. So that actually drove me crazy.
I don't mind point-of-view shifts, but they need to be obvious (section breaks if nothing else) so that I am not left trying to figure out why Adam thought "X", only to go back and re-read and realize that we switched into Carly's POV for one sentence only. It makes things very confusing for the reader.
It's also kind of lazy, writing-wise, as the author then never has to show what one character is thinking by their reactions and actions. They instead just flip over into their head for a moment and then flip back.
And all of this was made worse by writing in present-tense. Very few authors can pull that off. And Leigh-Reign isn't quite that talented. (Or, her editor wasn't.)
I was just reading through all the comments and wondering why people were saying this was in the first-person narrative. However, I think that this was more third-person limited not omniscient. Third-person omniscient is when the narrator knows what's going on in everyone's head at all times, but I will say there were definitely several times that the author slipped up and went to third-person omniscient narrative If she had just stuck with one of POV in a scene at a time I think that would have made the present tense style less jerky to read.
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I didn't have a problem with the alternating narratives, but perhaps the points at which they changed from one character to another should have been indicated in a more obvious way.
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There are a couple of stories (movies included) with first-person narration alternating between characters. It can work really well if the author is good. For books, I like first-person narration coming from one character only, like in Code Name: Dodger by Eric Auxier. Regarding the element of first-person narration, this book is amazingcristinaro wrote: ↑15 Feb 2020, 07:49 Do you think that it was a good idea for the author to alternate between Adam's and Carly's first-person narration? As far as I am concerned, I found Adam's passages more interesting and believable than Carly's. Would a third-person narration have worked better?
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