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Random thought from random post on FFL.

I don't get why people dislike first person narrative voice. For this I credit reading Mary Renault at an early age. Her first person narratives are wonderful and her third person narratives suck. (No, I did *not* like Fire from Heaven at all at all at all, nor Funeral Games, nor any of the modern ones.) Third person is fine-- it's the workhorse narrative voice, these days generally (but not always) undistinguished, doing its job OK, nothing to write home about. First person is the strawberries and whipped cream topping on the cake.

Also I have an unprovable suspicion that it's easier to write 500 page bloat in third person than in first.

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If it's the same post I read, she was talking about urban fantasy, which nowadays is a genre where one easily gets stuck listening to the voices of awful people.

I guess? Don't read UF these days and what I have was all third-person twee-- Delint, Huff, Borderlands. Why is it different from err whatever Brust is, whose work would feel quite different, and I suspect much more same old, if not narrated by Vlad.

ETA: it's not just that post, actually. A number of people, at rants at ffrants and elsewhere, have said how claustrophobic first person is to read and how annoying they find it.

Edited 2010-08-05 11:38 (UTC)

I think there's a tendency to read first person as Self... that is, people get sucked into reading it in such a way that the "I" becomes the Reader (or vice versa) and so it becomes ... falsely personal, maybe?

I know I worried about it when submitting my last published story, which was in first person; I've read many rants against it as well.

Truly, I can't see how that works at all. The I-voice is usually so very different from my own there's no room for confusion.

I ... I LOVE first person! But I am a bit odd - or so I've been told.

Hey you how're you ... we are having weird weather over here and it is driving me insane! *sigh* BUT still we plod along. ^_^ happily for the most part!

*hugs*

I plod too, waiting for summer to be over and the return of autumnal rationality.

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