McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
The I'm Writing Thread.... Celebrate your pages written etc
drewavera:
also, im not sure if this has been brought up or not, but what do yall think of books written in 3rd person, past tense? thats how i started this book and its flowing pretty good, but most of the books ive read recently are in first person, present tense...
Snowleopard:
It's whatever works for you.
Every writer is different and comes at their story in a different fashion and voice.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: drewavera on September 11, 2012, 07:15:32 PM ---also, im not sure if this has been brought up or not, but what do yall think of books written in 3rd person, past tense? thats how i started this book and its flowing pretty good, but most of the books ive read recently are in first person, present tense...
--- End quote ---
Some stories naturally want to be in first person and some in third, and many authors use widely varying viewpoint techniques depending on the story they are telling. What sort of books are you finding lots of first-person-present in ? I'm not thinking of any other than Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim books I've read recently.
The thing about first-person that's not necessarily the case with even a fairly tight third-person is that everything you get in it is through the perspective of the narrator, and you can do fun characterisation things with what the narrator notices, what they miss, what sort of prejudices or preferences they have and so on. You also have to figure out exactly when the story is being told, because a headlong braindump as it's acually happening, and a journal "written" later by the narrator with room for them to pause and reflect on what they later learned and see things differently from how they did at the time, are quite different things. Third can give you one character's thoughts, or can just be like having a camera-eye follow the action around, or you can have some sort of omniscient narrative voice in, though this is very hard to do well and not sloppily. For myself, when a story comes to me, there's very rarely any doubt what viewpoint it's in, but I am beginning to think first-person may be where I am naturally stronger.
LizW65:
A lot of recent YA fiction is first person, present tense; supposedly this is meant to appeal to teens who tend to think and write this way themselves. I have no issue with first person--I probably wouldn't be on this site if I did :)--but I find the present tense to be generally pretentious and annoying, the literary equivalent of being over-caffeinated. Instead of creating a sense of immediacy, I find it makes me jittery and anxious, and I've turned down quite a few well-reviewed books because they're written in present tense. The exceptions are the aforementioned Sandman Slim and the works of Damon Runyon, neither of which bother me for some reason.
Paynesgrey:
I've not read those, but I'll have to put them on my list. Present tense is often used as a Tension Generating or Look I'm Artsy gimmick, and it takes some good writing to convince me to overlook my prejudice against the tense.
On my own stuff, I'm up to 46K. And a good bit of that will get filled out later when I go through and take the "I told him make me sammich!" scenes and replace them with full conversations.
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