"Carrie Pruett" said
>Personally, as a reader the repeated "I"
sounds
a lot more natural to me than the constant repetition of
"he," "she," or the character's name in 3rd person.<
Not always, but Al Guthrie said:
>But 3rd person gives you the option of
referring
to the character obliquely, if you choose. Instead of
"he" or "she" you can write, "the man with the scar" or
"Joe's sister" or whatever. First person is more limited,
therefore likely to be more repetitive.<
First person is the convention of PI fiction. There is
nothing wrong with third person, but I think third person has
to stay limited to the mind of the point of view
character--at least while the story is in that point of
view.
If you're in Joe's point of view, you should not refer to him
as "the man with the scar." Somebody else can think that or
you can say,
"he touched the scar on his left cheek," making sure the
reader understands it's his own scar he is touching. But you
can also say "I touched the scar on my left cheek" if you are
in the first person point of view.
The point is that first or third person works in PI or any
other kind of fiction. It's just a matter of using it
properly.
Jack Bludis
===== THE BIG SWITCH, by Jack Bludis http://designimagegroup.com/bigswitch.html
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