>i agree that both work, but it would seem to
me
>that first person would be a far greater
challenge
>to a writer. iirc, hemingway avoided first
person
>(most of the time) because of the
difficulties.
>miker
This seems counterintuitive to me. First person is a more
natural way to write, because it's the way we talk and write
every day; life is first person, (provided that you're sane,
anyway, and not Bob Dole or a professional athlete -). Also,
if you're writing in 1st person, there are a ton of key
choices that are already made for you; in 3rd person you have
to decide who is observing any given scene, from what
distance, etc.
the problems involved in first person seem relatively
miniscule in comparison; granted, some stories won't work in
first person but it seems that should be fairly obvious early
on.
I have to differ with Al's suggestion that you can use a
phrase like "the man with the scar" instead of he or the
character's name. I find this infinitely more annoying than
simply repeating the name - at best, it seems like an obvious
effort to keep from repeating the name; at worst it creates
confusion about who's doing what. I've read scenes that have
2 characters in them and gotten halfway through the scene
thinking that there were 5 or 6 characters (instead of Jim
Smith and Bob Jones, I thought you had Smith, Jones, Bob,
Jim, the old man, the young man, the blonde man, and the man
with the scar all sitting at the bar together). If I wanted
to deal with that kind of confusion, I'd read a Russian
novel, or the Iliad ;). my pet peeve is when you've got two
cops in the car and suddenly a quote is attributed to "the
older man"; now maybe I happened to take notice of who was
older, but half the time I'm flipping back to where the
characters were introduced to figure out what was going
on.
carrie
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