I enjoy first person for longer works and third person for shorter works. Although I have done both for everything. It really depends on what I think will work best for the story.
When I wrote my first novel I decided to use first person because it was really the tale of one person on a year long adventure. And I wanted the reader to be inside his mind for the experience.
This led to issues when I decided to tell a necessary related side story my main character wasn’t in. Since I was a complete rookie at writing, I decided to have multiple first person accounts in the novel. Each character narrating their part of the story if the main character wasn’t present. It is probably not a great idea, but it seemed to work. And it was fun for me getting to write different characters.
I had a very similar issue with A Day of Faces, which was the 1st person book I wrote. I ended up inserting 3rd person 'interlude' chapters, having one every 5-10 regular chapters. It was a cheat and probably not very elegant, but I tried to make the most of it by making it deliberately mysterious and intrusive. The idea was that the reader would feel 'interrupted' by this other viewpoint. By keeping those interludes to 3rd person I think it maintains Kay's 1st person POV as the primary narrative.
I considered having the main character “tell” (3rd person) the events he wasn’t present but I decided it would be more interesting to have the other characters do the narration. When someone took over, my main character would insert a note like, Snoffduffle will tell this portion of the tale as I was in Spain at the time.
I love third person and multiple POVs because I find that other perspectives help us get to know our main character in a new way. What I really love is a trio with one member being the focus and the other two having their own little subplots. This then allows me to reveal information to the audience and sometimes poke fun at the main character.
I enjoy first person for longer works and third person for shorter works. Although I have done both for everything. It really depends on what I think will work best for the story.
When I wrote my first novel I decided to use first person because it was really the tale of one person on a year long adventure. And I wanted the reader to be inside his mind for the experience.
This led to issues when I decided to tell a necessary related side story my main character wasn’t in. Since I was a complete rookie at writing, I decided to have multiple first person accounts in the novel. Each character narrating their part of the story if the main character wasn’t present. It is probably not a great idea, but it seemed to work. And it was fun for me getting to write different characters.
I had a very similar issue with A Day of Faces, which was the 1st person book I wrote. I ended up inserting 3rd person 'interlude' chapters, having one every 5-10 regular chapters. It was a cheat and probably not very elegant, but I tried to make the most of it by making it deliberately mysterious and intrusive. The idea was that the reader would feel 'interrupted' by this other viewpoint. By keeping those interludes to 3rd person I think it maintains Kay's 1st person POV as the primary narrative.
I considered having the main character “tell” (3rd person) the events he wasn’t present but I decided it would be more interesting to have the other characters do the narration. When someone took over, my main character would insert a note like, Snoffduffle will tell this portion of the tale as I was in Spain at the time.
I love third person and multiple POVs because I find that other perspectives help us get to know our main character in a new way. What I really love is a trio with one member being the focus and the other two having their own little subplots. This then allows me to reveal information to the audience and sometimes poke fun at the main character.