On Fri, 7 Nov 1997, Chris Davies wrote:

On Fri, 7 Nov 1997, Andrew Huang wrote:

	Yep. As has been analyzed by several others here, first person is
just very difficult to do.

	Speaking for myself, I have never found this to be the case.  It is
actually easier, on the whole, for me to write from the perspective of a
single character than from the perspective of an omniscient narrator.  If I
didn't have an absolute loathing of "special editions", I'd go back and
rewrite "None of Your Business" as a first person story to make it match its
two sequels.

The biggest challenge for first person that I've found is that it makes it
harder to insert events which happen off stage, so to speak.  Some events
may be important for the story, but the nararrator can't witness them.  If
the event is complex enough, it may be tricky to present it to the
narrarator and thus the reader's attention without it looking blatantly
like a plot device.

	Also, telling a story from one character's perspective allows you to
twist what is happening according to his/her biases.  (In other words, lie.)

Heh.  Quite :)  My Summer People series relies on this to some extent,
although I've cheated in that tale by having two different first person
nararrators who alternate, and a 3rd person prologue (Showing events that
happened before the Story starts) and epilogue (Showing 'off stage'
events).


John Walter Biles :  MA-History, Ph.D Wannabe at U. Kansas         
ranma@falcon.cc.ukans.edu       
rhea@tass.org              http://www.tass.org/~rhea/falcon.html
rhea@maison-otaku.net      http://www.maison-otaku.net/~rhea/

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