McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Him or me? First vs third person

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Mickey Finn:
I meant does he have the talent to do so. ;) It's a difficult art to master.

Abstruse:
Oh, it would work with each person telling their own story.  Say Molly turns out to be the main character.  It would go something like  Book 1: Thomas, Book 2: Murphy, Book 3: Harry Book 4 and on: Molly for example.  My question is would that work for a series?  Would people lose interest if it turns out the little girl with pigtails who turns into a goth ends up the main character?  Would people stop reading if they realize that Thomas isn't going to tell another story after the first and just be a sidekick character?

The Abstruse One
Darryl Mott Jr.

Tersa:
I don't think it has to be first person.  I think it's fun to read it that way, but from an author's perspective... I'm currently writing an urban fantasy-ish story, and I'm trying to write in first person and it is HARD.  It's great and flows so well for my main character's style of talking, but it's hard to find my way around when I've read so little fiction written that way.

fjeastman:
I'll say this:

My wife has been reading a 1st Person POV series ... Kushiel's somethingorother.  Not my bag, so I haven't read any of them.

Apparently the first book or two were from the POV of an adult female character, first person.  She thought they were well done and quite interesting and she liked the character.

The most recent book, the POV character is apparently a young male child.  But, she says, the author voices the character like he's ... an adult female ... she literally put the book aside and said it was unreadable.  She didn't like the character, she didn't like the change of viewpoint, and the author went into something that she may not have been able to pull off.

I would have put the Dresden books down if Murphy had been the POV for book three and Thomas book six.  I'm not as interested in those characters, as main characters, as I am Harry.  If I pick up a book of the Dresden Files, I expect it to be from Harry's POV.  When I pick up the first book of a series, it's just me, but if it is in first person ... when I go to the next book, I'll be expecting the same main. 

Now, a great author might be able to pull me back in, but I don't even like it in 3rd person narratives.  When I'm reading about Main Character 1, and I get into his story, if the next chapter is Main Character 3 ... I want to skip the chapter and look for the next one with the other guy.  All of my favorite authors stick with one character for a whole book, if not a whole series.

--fje

Abstruse:
The story I'm writing doesn't work that way though.  The events that the child who grows up is the key to start before he's even born.  It wouldn't work in flashbacks, so I'm not sure what to do.

Imagine this for a moment...Harry and Susan have a child and their son is the key to protecting the world and all that when we get to the end of the Dresden series...since Jim says he's going to end the series somewhere in the 20s, say that by book 15 or so, their child is a teenager and he starts taking the center stage from Harry.  By book 20, Harry is no longer in the story at all, and the last 5 or so books are about his son.  That would be a pretty good analogy of how the series would work.

Any suggestions?

The Abstruse One
Darryl Mott Jr.

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