This is my favorite pov to write because the reader does not know what is going to happen or what the other person is thinking about them and it also feels more connected because that is what happens in real life: you don't know what the other person is thinking and you fill up the gaps with assumptions which makes it so interesting and more human-like
@johnhaggerty43962 жыл бұрын
First person POV also entails the active reader having to fill in gaps, or question the reliability of the voice, as Shaelin said. Georges Simenon's *Act of Passion* takes the form of a letter, from a man who has murdered his wife, to the judge at the trial. There is a summary of the novel (Lettre a mon juge) on Wikipedia: no one is better at getting inside a man's head than Simenon. Nicolas Freeling, an English novelist who settled in Holland then France, killed off his detective, Commissaris Van der Valk in 1972. *A Long Silence* describes the Commissaris being shot, his last thoughts, then Freeling takes over the narrative. Metafiction indeed ! Paul Theroux's *My Secret History* takes us on the inside track of a brilliant storyteller's brain, moving from Boston to Africa. For tone and nuance Hemingway's memoirs *A Moveable Feast* like Scott Fitzgerald's *The Crack-up* shows what first person can do. For a supernatural tale in first person, read Friedrich von Schiller's *The Man Who Sees Ghosts* Pushkin Press first published in 1789.
@soullessmin2 жыл бұрын
Good point!
@trinaq2 жыл бұрын
First POV has always been my favourite perspective, since it enables you to get into the character's mindset, and delve more deeply into their innermost hopes and dreams, as though you're their confidant.
@apollomoon12 жыл бұрын
This was a big help. I started a novel in first person and after a few thousand words thought perhaps it would be better in third person. This convinced me I need to stay in first to maintain the narrator’s intimacy of the story. These videos are always helpful. Thanks for posting them.
@AbeNoSeirei2 жыл бұрын
My go-to is 3rd pers. limited, as I'm a fantasy reader. Recently, I've been experimenting with 1st pers. past and present tense. Especially the later is very hard, I find myself slipping into 3rd pers. past tense almost subconsciously.
@yara9182 жыл бұрын
A first POV isn’t my favorite; it’s so strange to me that the character would sometimes describe and notice things about themselves in ways that regular people don’t. A first POV feels like someone is talking to you and telling you their story, if they start saying things like “I smiled a that didn’t reach my eyes” for example, it pulls me out of the story, because of how unnatural it sounds. Plus it could sound “cocky” sometimes. Thanks for the video 😊 they’re always helpful!
@ScottyDMcom2 жыл бұрын
“I smiled a that didn’t reach my eyes” Did you copy/paste from your MS, then delete a bit to clean it up, but accidentally got how much to delete wrong? Because your quote makes no sense, and I don't think you wrote it that way.
@johnhaggerty43962 жыл бұрын
@@ScottyDMcom Finis Farr wrote the first biography of John O'Hara (one of the great short story writers) and the first page of the preface warns us about men whose smile never reaches their eyes. Do not trust such men, said O'Hara. He was right. It is a challenge to describe the unfinished smile in a specific way. A smile may be cold for many reasons: a girl creeped out by a guy. Artists in Life Class walk around the model, so that they can see the figure from every angle, in every possible light. So it is with character creation. Flaubert told De Maupassant to describe a man so that Flaubert would recognise him in a crowd. O'Hara rarely describes his characters and somehow he gets away with it. His stories read like radio plays: you must fill in the gaps. If Dickens is master of the surreal, Capote is le petit maitre; from the lost children of *The Grass Harp* to the damaged childhood of the killers of *In Cold Blood*. I like Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty for their visual powers: Ladies from the Deep South. Elizabeth Taylor, Alice Thomas Ellis, Beryl Bainbridge and Penelope Fitzgerald all created unforgettable English eccentrics.
@Smooshiegirl22 жыл бұрын
I love first person past tense - it’s my favorite to write in as well. I really struggle staying engaged with present tense for some reason. Unless the writing is extremely strong I just can’t engage. It always feels like it’s trying too hard for some reason. I think it’s a “me” thing, to quote my teenager lol.
@ScottyDMcom2 жыл бұрын
For first-person past-tense, I consider there are 2 first-person characters: The character who is experiencing the story now (dialog). And the same character who had experienced the story and has had time to reflect on things. This character-as-narrator presents a "filtered" version of the story (narration). As for character thoughts you may write thoughts as they happen (I call them "internal monologue" and write them the same as dialog, but without the quotes), or you can let the character-as-narrator filter their thoughts through the lens of time and present them as part of the narration. I tried internal monologue (present tense) without the italics, which works--until you get quite a lot of it. Then it just seems like you (the author) flunked verb tense 101. In first-person present-tense there is no filtering of past events. The character/narrator is living the events as they unfold. Everything is in present tense and internal monologue (which all thoughts must now be) are not italicized. This can easily slip into stream-of-consciousness style. When reading well-written first-person, I love both present and past tense. And in this case present-tense pulls me a little closer to the character. Unfortunately, every third-person present-tense story I've read--even those professionally edited/published--fall flat, and push me further from the character.
@TrueGritProductions2 жыл бұрын
Books in first person present lose my attention in about 10 seconds. I keep wondering "where am I?"
@daina36282 жыл бұрын
I believe first person present tense is mostly favoured by inexperienced writers who try to solve the "problem" Scott above mentioned of having two characters, the one who's telling the story after the fact, and the one who's experiencing it in the moment. The thing is, present tense is not usually meant to represent something happening now, but action that happens habitually. For example, what does "I go to the store" mean? Are you on your way to the store, or are you the one doing the shopping in your household, so you go to the store every day, instead of someone else from your household? Do you go to *this* store, and not some other store? Most of the time, this means that "I *habitually* go to the store." But when you say "I went to the store", you know this is a one time thing. It might not be clear if the character came back from the store, or he went and is still at the store, but it's clearly a one time event that happened and there's no confusion about that. But when it's present tense, if you're not EXTREMELY careful, I won't be able to tell if you're coming or going.
@ScottyDMcom2 жыл бұрын
@@daina3628, to understand what I meant, we need to back up a moment. *The whole POV thing is really about, who is telling the story?* In a *third-person* narration the storyteller is assumed to be some unseen godlike being, typically the author. You can do other things. For example the storyteller might be a god gazing down on humanity from their perch on Mount Olympus, and they stay out of the action. They watch and comment. In *first-person* the storyteller is one (or more) of the characters participating in the story. Choice of pronouns almost always matches first, third, or even second, but there can be the (rare) exception. In _Willow,_ Julia Hoban's debut novel, she chose to write a single POV, very tight psychic distance, present-tense narration, and the storyteller uses third-person pronouns for the POV character. The story drove me nuts, and IMO would have be far better if written in first-person. Odd thing is, it _feels_ like Willow is the storyteller. It's just that Willow is one of those slightly off balance people who always refers to themselves in the third-person. Jane Gardam's short story _The Great Grand Soap-Water Kick_ uses the protagonist as the storyteller, but he shifts between first and third throughout the telling, and even starts in second. This was deliberate on the part of the author. That story is a fascinating example where psychic distance is so tight the narrator (almost) vanishes. It's all about the character. Not the character as narrator, but simply the character being the character. *That brings us to the character as storyteller (first-person).* There are moments when the character is the character, and moments when the character is telling the story. A description is a moment when the character is the narrator. Is the narration in past-tense or present? If the character/storyteller is thinking back on events and telling the story from that perspective, then the character has had time to reflect on what happened and is giving a filtered (or perfected) version of what happened. Present-tense works best (IMO) if the character is giving a running commentary of events as they unfold in real-time. Describing past events in present-tense is one of those writer's tricks than seldom works. At least I've never seen it work. I've also seen future-tense narration, but clearly that was a mistake. The reason I don't like third-person present-tense is, where is this unseen storyteller? (Assuming it's not a crazy POV character named Willow.) To me it _feels_ like a teenage kid in a movie theater with a cell phone, describing the movie to their sick buddy stuck at home. It really pushes me away from the character. Present-tense is supposed to pull the reader in closer. Another fun observation is that (IMO) second-person only works in present-tense. *This whole POV thing is really to answer two questions:* Who is telling the story? And where are they in both time and place in relation to the POV character(s)? The choice you make as an author has a radical effect on how the reader experiences your story. If you can make it work, then there is no wrong choice (despite my "IMO" moments).
@johnhaggerty43962 жыл бұрын
@@ScottyDMcom You ask 'where is the unseen storyteller'? Does it really matter, Scott? It is whether the convention of third-person present-tense works to your strength as writer. Anthony Powell said realistic novels are artificial in their construction but give the appearance of seamless reality. Who is telling the story in third-person narrative? Flaubert said the unseen narrator is present everywhere and nowhere. Alain Robbe Grillet looked critically at these narrative problems in his long essay Pour un Nouveau Roman (translated into English). Deirdre Madden's 2013 novel *Time Present and Time Past* plays agreeably with T.S. Eliot's concept of time from Burnt Norton. *As Fintan is crossing the landing that evening Niall calls out from his room. 'Dad? Is that you?' 'It is,' he says, and puts his head around the bedroom door.* The reader is watching the scene as Fintan and his son Niall talk to each other before retiring for the night. The reader will forget about the unseen storyteller unless the storyteller draws attention to himself as John Fowles does in his novel *The French Lieutenant's Woman*. Harold Pinter retained the idea in his film script of the Fowles novel - we see that we are watching a film being made of a Victorian story and then we hear all about the actors in the film principally Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. Dana's problem about going to the store can be resolved by precision of detail. Let us say that her character had no intention of going to the store that Sunday evening in winter until she realised she had run out of milk. She only goes to the store that one night in real time. A friend of mine was knocked down by a car on a dark wet night precisely because he went out for milk for his coffee. He survived to tell the tale, but gets headaches from his brain injury. Narrative (Time present and past) occurs in real life too, sometimes disastrously as in my friend's case. The fiction writer gets the messiness of life into the work, but looks for form and shapeliness as well - everything Robbe-Grillet abhorred.
@u_t_d_s_h-1_a2 жыл бұрын
First person narrative is very intimate, ---works best in travel/adventure / shipwreck novels. It is the genre with the best imagery.
@TrueGritProductions2 жыл бұрын
Wolf Larsen, is that you?
@arthurgomesdamata17912 жыл бұрын
Thanks a lot for the video! I'm literally writing a multi POV fanfic right now so it was really helpful. I think Hunger Games did the first person narrator really well
@AndreGarzia2 жыл бұрын
As someone who is trying first persong for the first time, thank you.
@FairyNya Жыл бұрын
this video genuinely helped me catch some faults with my work, thanks
@gamewriteeye769 Жыл бұрын
That last pitfall is just...yeah, it can become easy to overdescribe. I've switched from first person past tense to first person present tense, and I do find the change takes a lot of restructuring, however it feels and reads more naturally to me. Not just a play-by-play, but the pacing can really add up to an almost smooth line.
@Teckno722 жыл бұрын
Your timing is impeccable. I’m revising a first person novel right now. I think I may have a way to fix a scene I was having a little trouble with, because the novel’s in first person. Thanks!
@ScottyDMcom2 жыл бұрын
I'm pushing to finish a novel, which is in first-person past-tense. As the project went along things shifted and I ended up with _seven_ POV characters, The story had become too big to be known by only hero and heroine. I don't like the mechanics of adding an epigraph at the beginning of each scene to name the POV character, so that solution is out. After some experimentation I decided to leave the hero and heroine in first-person, but change the other five POV characters to third-person. We'll see how agents and editors respond. This neatly solves the problem of who has POV because I can just name them (if not hero or heroine). It also solves the problem of character description. As for the description of hero and heroine: Chapter 1, scene 1 is the hero's POV--he calls himself a wolf, and describes the heroine in some detail. Scene 2 is the heroine's turn--her BFF has just arrived on horseback (transition between scenes) and together they discuss the hero (fur color, overall size, his "crazy" eyes, etc). I'll be at the Pikes Peak Writers Conference 2022, April 29 - May 1. So I'm rushing to not only finish the first draft (I'm close), but also get well into a major edit--I'll be over word count and must cut. Even if it's done by the end of April, it won't actually be done. I'll need a "sensitivity" editing pass (I call it getting the facts straight), as half my characters are Blackfeet Indians. I'll head up to Montana this summer with a few printed copies of my MS, reconnect with old friends, and recruit a few beta readers.
@AD-tr7sx6 ай бұрын
I'm having a similar problem. How did your journey go? Did you get feedback from editors?
@TrueGritProductions2 жыл бұрын
I prefer 3rd person omniscient unreliable. Mainly just a personal issue.
@jessicaparkerillustration2 жыл бұрын
Awesome video! You always explain things so well :)
@johnhaggerty43962 жыл бұрын
As always you survey the field as Henry James would say (and James was master of the unreliable narrative). Samuel Beckett's first person narratives are essential reading - First Love and Other Novellas and The Unnamable. Nabokov's Lolita: Humbert Humbert's narrative is unreliable at times; could Clare Quilty be a mere spectre in Humbert's mind? An autobiography employs first person by necessity. Do not miss John Gale's memoir, *Clean Young Englishman* now an e-Book. *One night this year, on the walk home from the Underground in the falling snow, I had to lean against the wall of the crematorium where my father went up in smoke,* Gale begins: a lucid account of his years on The Observer (London) when it was owned by Lord Astor, and his descent into mental illness. Gale's prose is as sharp and clean as a bleached bone on the beach. He wrote a novel, The Family Man, and a book on Africa, Travels With My Son, dying by his own hand in 1974, a terrible loss to literature.
@johnhaggerty43962 жыл бұрын
Online: Clean Young Englishman, by John Gale. *The Age of Uncertainty*. My Comment is headed Anonymous but my name Jack Haggerty is at the bottom. I spoke to John Gale, a journalist with his own idiosyncratic writing voice, several times on the telephone. He died before we could meet.
@motivationalmauricio20612 жыл бұрын
Literally needed this! Thank u!
@tomlewis47482 жыл бұрын
There is a very powerful tool that can be used in first-person when the narrator is telling us about events that they were not present for, which is the frame story. In other words, they know what happened because some other character told them what happened (which of course must be mentioned briefly). Then they can turn around and tell that to the reader, even though they were not there to witness what happened. When this happens, the first-person pronouns disappear, of course, and so it feels like third-person summary. It's still legitimately first person because the narrator is still the same character and still the one telling us the story, but it feels almost like a limited omniscient point of view, because the narrator knows what happened, but that's all that they know. This allows a story told in first-person to have a greater scope, and intimacy between reader and protagonist remains strong. The first-person narrator is still limited to their own thoughts and inferences, just the same way that the person who told them the story is limited to their own thoughts and inferences. It's very similar to a flashback. The only difference is the narrator was not present for the events. But it can support an unbroken fictive dream just as well as the rest of the story can, and if handled properly, it will be no more intrusive than a well-told flashback.
@Esmeralda2diamon2 жыл бұрын
I love Virginia Andrews books. I think that She handled the first person past sense very well because as a reader I felt very connected to the main character.
@perrywarren87432 жыл бұрын
Good stuff! Thank you 😊
@ThatsJustMyBabyDaddy2 жыл бұрын
Points of view.
@basharmubarak1162 жыл бұрын
I just started writing my novel and first person is really hard!!!!!! My pace is currently writing 500 words in 2 hrs or more. Building the character is very hard. Thanks for the video, this will probably make my job harder but the ends justifies the means.
@JimVassilakos5 ай бұрын
Flowers for Algernon, The Sun Also Rises, and The Stranger were all first person. I personally prefer it as a reader, and now that I've tried writing in it, I find it preferable to third. Third person just seems too disconnected. I suppose with the right voice and level of omniscience, third person can work well, such as in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but for me, at least, it's a harder sell. It's the the difference between watching a movie vs. being in it. First person, I feel, is just naturally more immersive.
@mgxflick60342 жыл бұрын
Thanks for sharing ❤️
@lakeshagadson357 Жыл бұрын
this pov can help me with my story how to write it
@billyalarie9292 жыл бұрын
absolutely excellent video, yet again, from Shaelin. pitch perfect advice. thank you for this.
@ABDULLAH379172 жыл бұрын
Poe's "Black Cat" is good first person POV. Does anyone have "Head Hopping" stories.
@rachelthompson93242 жыл бұрын
first person makes it easy to confuse future and past tense and do pov shifts into third person qualities. First person can't let on the result although FP knows the end in advance.
@Animalsarebetterthanyou16 күн бұрын
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
@newharlemrenaissanceproduc943 Жыл бұрын
Shirley Jackson - We Have Always Lived In the Castle
@inToddWeTrust Жыл бұрын
Good input : it’s not easy :
@mikefinley43672 жыл бұрын
So what POV is it if the narrator is the author but all characters can have a voice Omniscient?
@TheSimpleRomantic2 жыл бұрын
I like Jodi Taylor St Mary’s Series She and. I both write time travel Like her funny bits She does not take herself too seriously no matter the challenge
@breamontiel4405 Жыл бұрын
My favorite book written in 1st person is restart written by Gordon korman
@JoleCannon Жыл бұрын
I have a question. I have 40k of my manuscript written and it's in 3rd person limited. I'm writing a contemporary m/m romance. I like my POV, but I feel 1st person might bring out more. The issue is my background is in History (finishing up my masters), so I've never written in first person. I feel it might strengthen my novel, but I'm not sure how to switch. Descriptors will be slightly different, like their surrounding and what they see and feel will be I, me, my, etc., but I also describe their physicality. I can say "I felt out of place. I was just under six feet tall and pushing three hundred pounds. My belly hit the bar every time I tried to adjust myself on the small bar stool, which they'd bolted to the floor." I will have dual POV, so each character can describe the other in their own POV. I don't want the mirror cliché.
@bakhitaadoko8847 Жыл бұрын
Please what is POV?
@hamzawasunavailable2 ай бұрын
POV means point of view
@rachelthompson93242 жыл бұрын
New writers think first person is natural and easy, but it is not. It is trickery to work with. It's hard to keep your natural voice out of it.
@johnhaggerty43962 жыл бұрын
Martin Amis said that all writing is performance, indeed impersonation. It is hard to keep your 'natural voice' out of any first-person narrative. One way is to hear the 'other voice' talking in your head. Read online: *Women and Violence in the Stories of Raymond Carver* Sandra Lee Kleppe. Open Edition Journals. *Through the Eyes of the Blind in Cathedral by Raymond Carver*. *Point of View of the Lady With the Dog by Raymond Carver*. Another way into other people's voices is to read books of interviews whether oral history or journalism. *Demon Barber - Interviews by Lynn Barber* in paperback, a London journalists who asks celebrities very direct questions Tony Parker's books of interviews (Wiki) make great reading - he interviewed violent men in prison, wives of soldiers etc. Reading plays trains the ear for speech cadence - A Streetcar Named Desire (Williams) All My Sons (Miller) Arcadia (Tom Stoppard).
@rachelthompson93242 жыл бұрын
@@johnhaggerty4396 Experienced writers do use first person well. New writers often don't. It looks to them like the easy way but it really isn't. It's easy to do badly.
@quit311811 ай бұрын
I did first person before and it was fun but difficult Lol-
@kit8882 ай бұрын
I see more problems with third person. Writers switch between omniscient and limited without realizing it, use clunky ways to indicate inner monologue, head hop in limited, infodump excessively. 3rd person limited has the same problem of having to keep the author's natural voice out.
@mborok2 жыл бұрын
I don’t like most 1st person stories. Unless the narrator’s voice and point of view is really distinctive. The writer only needs to have as much of a grasp of the English language as the narrator does, meaning they can get away with lackluster prose, lack of details, and lack of vivid description. And if the book is in both first person AND present tense, I put it down without a second thought. Present tense is a way to make the writing feel immediate without needing any writing skill.