Mike, it's ages since I read The Master of Ballantrae, but I remember thinking it wonderful. I'll have to read it again now.

Enjoy!

M

This should not be a complex problem but it must be a creative challenge, whether we choose to write in the first person or as a Narrator putting words into the mouths of our characters... in so many cases we do both!

I think one can pontificate, give advice, quote examples by the dozen but when it all boils down it is the writer and the imagination.

If people assume your work is autobiographical when you write in the first person, then enjoy it! Make your plots larger than life. Give them something to think about... make their day! The more you write the easier it will be for you to make decisions... just don't worry about it.

The single and most important factor is that if YOU think that what you have written in the first person is likely to bore your readers, you are probably dead right. So, you alter it until YOU know it won't bore anyone!


Len

This thread has been incredibly useful to me, thanks to all the contributors! I am basically a stage writer, in part, I think, because I'm avoiding the issue of 1st/3rd person story-telling. Which is fine until you have some compelling material which does not fit the medium (my current dilemma), and I'm struggling to find the right POV.

But it increasingly strikes me it isn't a strict either/or decision (1st or 3rd person), it really is a finely shaded range (as someone here has noted, reliability of a 1st person narrator is one variable; degree of omniscence/co-operation with the reader of a 3rd person narrator is another). A favourite--but ancient and not at all popular--example would be Sterne's 'Tristram Shandy.' The eponymous subject of this 'autobiography', who bluntly addresses us throughout (even testing us on our understanding of the narrative so far, and directing us to re-read previous chapters if we fail the test!), largely narrates events of which he has no direct knowledge (and a fair chunk of the book elapses between the span of his conception and birth!); he isn't at all the real subject, but develops an exquisitely detailed portrait of his father Walter, uncle Toby, and a range of other Yorkshire locals while purporting to speak autobiographically.

Oops, I'm waffling now (or as Sterne would have, I'm on my hobby horse). 'Tristram Shandy' is very far outside the modern taste, no doubt, though I cling to my idiosyncratic belief that it is a masterpiece!

An afterthought, haveing just read Julie's Please Welcome - Chapter 1 and the lively comments it attracted. There seems to me a vital distinction to be made between 'liking' a character, and 'caring' about a character. Perhaps in drama, it's easier to 'care' about a character one doesn't necessarily 'like', but it's a different issue in 1st person narration. As an example, imagine Hamlet writing his autobiography: wouldn't it be an unbearable thing, full of self-pity and dithering? Maybe I'm wrong. But I'm offering this as an exercise: write the opening paragraphs of Hamlet's autobiography, To Me, or Not to Me :-)


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Arrrggghhhh....that should have been "having just read"

Oh, you beast, Tim, you serpent, throwing down an iresistible challenge like that when I have so much to do!

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irresistible!

Here goes - I'm not a patch on The Bard though.

Now where to start? And with my birth of King and Queen of Denmark? No. For that was past my remembering. Not so long ago that Yorick hath forgot mind you, he tells of how I almost tore the Queen in two. I wonder, did they plan my birth? With temperatures and charts the like of which mere man nor yet the natural creatures know? Or did I come as gift of God unsought, like some small naked monkey squalling in a rage of passion, expelled from that safe all-enclosing night, and hurled henceforth into the blinding light?

Oh Mother! To rudely thrust me forth into this world of wicked wights my way to find, and by a scullion suckled – mind, how could I forswear her generous gift, that grew this blood, this body, loathsome as it is? I have her picture in my head, I keep her likeness even though she’s dead.

And Yorick, he who bore me on his back, and made jest for my amusement. For me, a hearty tot, a playmate like no other, yet the curse of melancholy did suffuse my bones oft times, and could not be dispersed nor with his rhymes. Merry they were, their skipping rhythms like an apple falling from a bower to bounce upon the ground, yet by their very jollity seeming passing sad, like creatures in the circus – am I mad – or just depressed? And ought I to continue or desist?




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Oh dear. I got carried away and forgot it was meant to be first person narrative! Subtract a few hundred WW points...:)

Hi everyone,

Bringing this thread back, it has been useful to me, may help other new members.

Dawn,

To shift perspective a little, currently reading Money by Martin Amis and this is in the first person (narrated by John Self). Now the shift is that Marin Amis introduces himself as a character in a novel he's writing as John Self! Does that make sense? So Martin Amis is writing through the eyes of one of his characters about himself as a character in his own novel.

Try that one on for size! Currently it is strange and am not sure if it's 1. clever or 2. pretentious

That makes my brain hurt, James!

Didn't Paul Auster use a similar trick in one of the 'The New York Trilogy'. At one point the narrator in the story turns up at the authors flat, in a one of a series of bizarre coincidences, and has a rather strange conversation with him. Thats how i remember it anyway. My brain is now hurting too, and it's my fault.

Anyway, even though i'm a fan of Mr Auster, and it was an interesting twist it was probably more 2 than 1

Sam

Okay, it turns out that Martin Amis is a pretty major character in MOney. THis isn't Alfred Hitchcock, this is more Woody Allen!