1st or 3rd Person - Pros & Cons! 

RIGHT!!!!. LOL...I noticed that too...first Person Always uses great,detailed description and certain words that They just Dont speak like that In Reality..thats More for 3rd person.

John Watson in the Sherlock Holmes books is a great first-person pov, since he is a writer in the story. So he would naturally give detailed description to the events unfolding.

@@edwardmoreno60 absolutely. That's a fine example

They don't have to remember. They could misremember. That's where the fun comes in.

@@MAFion i see people doing this and they overdo it. i see the alure, i really do. misremembering leads to conflict. conflict leads to ...stuff happening... then there's the big reveal. but really it just frustrates ME.... and it's probably because of how i was trained to think (law studies, law enforcement, history major, forensic science, biology, psychology.... my brain is a catch-all. every detail is important. i am a nasty person to know if you're a hardcore liar or narcissist. however i am pretty handy if you are bad at keeping track of your stuff.) i don't often find too many stories where misremembering is done well. it's right up there with the person running upstairs to hide from the bad guy... after a while i'm screaming at the book right before i throw it.

You are a legend

Fave comment I’ve seen in forever 💕

Omg, this is gold!

I cannot express how much I love this comment

ahhhhh! (that's my literal reaction!)

I like your comment! I am writing a book and the character Lynne Madison is going to go through a lot of trauma and abuse and i just could NOT decide whether to write in 1st or 3rd..but when you said it provides the character's turmoils and what not to become more personal, it was like something clicked in my head. "Ah that totally makes sense!" I decided that I want the character's traumas to be personal to the reader. Anyways! Thanks for that! 😄

YES, SAME

I actually feel that third person can connect me better with the characters, and first person limits my eyes so to speak. My current story has a character going through a lot of trauma too, and it's in close third person. :P I think it can be done just as well in both POVs though. :)

@@SysterYster You have to be your character, not to connect to your character. IMO.

@@legzzzzz Well, certainly when you write the character. But not when you read about them. I don't need to *be* my friends to be able to like them. But I need to be able to connect and understand them. Same with reading for me. But when I write, I need to be in their heads and emotions 100%.

I may be wrong but fanfic writers usually are very attuned to what is poplar and what readers want so I would hazard a guess that it's just not in favor for the readers (myself included).

I mean that's true, but on the other hand as a fanfic reader I think I'm rather biased against first person in fics, since I can recall exactly one time I saw a good first person fic when the source material wasn't also a book in first person.

First person in fanfic and original fic are different beasts. In a fanfic you're usually following a character/characters from the original work, therefore it's way easier to mess up their voice if you're writing in first person. People don't want to read or write fanfic that is OOC. First person fanfic tends to be extremely OOC.

If you can get the voice right and the plot is deeply psychological, it can be fun. My favorite fic is 1st person because the humor, realizations, and inner turmoil shines so much brighter than a 3rd person story ever could.

I'm both a fanfiction writer and an original writer. There is a reason that we hate writing most of our fanfictions in first-person and that's because most fandoms were written in third-person or are movies/tv shows show a third-person point of view. Books like Twilight and The Hunger Games are written in first-person, though, and so most people don't mind writing in first-person for fanfictions of those fandoms. But writing a fanfic from the view of Harry from Harry Potter? You're just going to come across as if you're a new writer. For original stories, though, we don't have to bother with making our works sound good in a fandom that's not written in a different point-of-view. We can simply write it however we want (so long it's written well, mind).

ccbib Same. I like both and I'll read and love both, but I prefer first person, both in reading and writing.

I used to write in 3rd only but I recently realized for the genre I write, thrillers, I feel first is better for that because it feels more natural. In my current project I do first person past because my character is telling her story after the dust settles.

omg yeah that green goes so good with her hair and lipstick!!!

Oh wow, you're actually right i never thought about that, thank you for this !!!

That makes so much sense!! I like to write in 3rd POV, when my characters are solving a mystery, or going to a roadtrip, or DOING something like you said what is "happening around them"..... Because it is so much easier and fun to see how my sweet pies are solving some mysteries and enjoying their hippie-hood. It gives me "The Big Brotha" vibes and I can do whatever I want to do with them, it's like playing sims..... and to be honest, I'm realizing...sometimes I can relate more to my characters when they are written in 3rd pov, which is oddly strange, like they are somewhat far away but still in my ❤, single touch away😂..... and also, 3rd pov makes more mysterie aswell and keeps that "over-melanholic-descriptions" bottled away In 1st POV I like to write when; deep pov about love and other drugs, more like psychological monologues works best in my opinion when you are using 1st pov. Basically yeah, I tend to think that "Character-Driven" sometimes works best when using 1st POV, and "Character-is-already-driven-away-in-da-anotha-dimensia" when using 3rd POV

I hate first-person PRESENT. Past can be entertaining if done well, however.

I’m that way with third person omniscient. I hate, hate, hate it. I like first person because it’s intimate. For example Jane Eyre only works in first person. You try to put that in third person and you lose everything.

i feel you. when i read books that are first person my brain automatically “””corrects””” it to third lol. i just don’t like it.

Have you read gone girl? It's an example of a book in first person and I feel that's what makes it so engaging

Loc Honey Gone Girl was one of the few first person novels I enjoyed. Most novels in FP are not as engaging and I personally feel waste words. 3rd person limited seems to not waste words as much based on books I’ve read.

Isn't that what's called 3rd person limited/close? You see more than one character's inner thoughts and feelings, but each scene or chapter is limited to this one character. Unless if you use "me and I" instead of their names of course? Would that be called something else? 1st person omniscient perhaps?

@@SysterYster you're talking about a couple different things here--there's multiple first person narrators, which is I think what OP was talking about. The difference between that and multi-PoV third person is whether they're written in first or third person, as the name implies. I'm pretty sure you'd just call that first person multi or something like that. If you told me about something called "first person omniscient" I would assume it to be something like a Snicket narrator, where most of the story is functionally third-omniscient but there's a first person narrator telling that story in the text itself. Also, third close doesn't require multiple PoVs to work; Harry Potter, excluding the prologues, is third limited with one PoV while A Song of Ice and Fire has a rotation of characters telling the story, all in third limited.

@@sarcomeresarecool Yeah, first person multi sounds legit. Is that the term that's used? I kinda don't write in first person so I don't know about them as much. XD Yeah, omniscient wasn't right. I just didn't know what to call it. :P Yeah, I know that. There are many third person stories with only one POV. Though generally, I prefer more than one POV. It's more interesting to me. But I have never read a story with multiple first person POVs. They must be super rare!

RoseKindred same

Hop to another one.

Jamaica Kincaid's Girl, Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller..., and more. I'm on submission with my agent with my book that's heavy use of second person!

that's rude lol

@@midnightcreature7583 +-+ It is... But it's true. I really wish it weren't though. ;-; It's been so long since I've read a good book.

Exactly why first isn't so interesting to me.

Well, we live in a first point of view. But, maybe it wasn't done right.

@@sharonefee1426 Very, very often, it's not done right. Living in a first POV doesn't mean we have to only be thinking about ourselves. Many of us think about others more. If my daughter is sad, then she's sad. But often, it would be, "I feel a pain in my heart that my daughter is sad." Feeling bad for someone you love who is sad shouldn't need to be explicitly said if it's established that you love that person. If my daughter glances over at our dogs, then she glances at them. But "I saw her glance at the dogs" is along the lines of what I so often see. All that I, I, I is very self-absorbed. "I feel a pain in my heart that my daughter is sad. I saw her glance at the dogs." "My daughter is sad. She glances at the dogs." Both are first POV, but one of them is clearly all about the narrator, whereas the second shows the narrator focused on someone else instead of herself (using female pronouns since the "I" in this case is me).

@@authoralysmarchand4737 So the problem is not the point of view, the problem is how it's written. I don't know, we say: I feel, i see, I think... But again, it's all about doses. You can write "my daughter is sad." but unlike what many authors online say, I think filter words can be used sometimes. For example "I noticed her arrival" is a bit different from "she arrived (suddenly)."

@@sharonefee1426 The vast majority of the time, though, it IS written in a very self-centered manner. It's very easy to do that, and it's uncommon to find someone who doesn't. So you're going to have many people, like myself, who aren't going to bother dropping $20 on the hope that a first-person book will fall in the minority. "I noticed" Tell us what she did that made you notice she'd arrived. "I noticed her arrival" vs. "she arrived (suddenly)": She walked through the door. That's both not self-centered AND shows what happened that made you notice. Telling vs. showing.

I would argue that reader-insert fic (which I think is what you're referring to?) is a different subject from using 2nd person POV as a storytelling technique. Both are valid points of discussion though! I think reader-insert style fiction would be an interesting direction for wish fulfillment genres like romance, which is mostly where I would expect to see it used in fic. 2nd person used similarly to 3rd limited works well for shifting POV from the character themself to their inner voice. Great for exploring cognitive dissonance! Also fun in sci-fi contexts where AI and AR come into play. 😀

What are you going to call your book?

@@donovanjones4170 The Betrayer's Wrath.

@@katrinaglover5367 That's cool. I'm working on mines too. There's nothing like books that can make u time travel and once u return back to Earth, it feels like time ran.

I like first person for factions. That is, real life events that happened to you that you write about as though they were fiction.

@@katrinaglover5367 Skme advice, you probably shouldn't disclose the name of your book or too many details especially in its early stages. Your book is like a seed, if you say to quickly, the birds can easily steal.

In FF, first feels a bit Mary/Gary Stu.

Interesting, she just said the opposite. I think it depends if you add a new main character or not. I wrote a story where I added a new main character (which actually became more main than the original), and it was written in first point of view. But, as I didn't add any new main characters, it was in 3rd person (wrote three fanfictions in my life, one of them with a second person, but oh well)

This is a pet peeve but i've seen so many ff writers who do not know the difference between 3rd limited and 3rd omniscient.

@@anarchsnark I've seen many FF writers who don't know how to use punctuation. :D I try hard to see FF as a young writer starting out writing and using pre-established characters and worlds to dip their toes in. But when I was in school, by the age of 13, we were expected to have a firm grasp on punctuation, their/there/they're, etc. Unfortunately, most schools these days place no emphasis on spelling or anything, and the "correct" answers are usually copied verbatim from the text instead of your own words.

Sometimes, first point of view can feel distanced, and so the other way around. There are some character you feel far from as they are in first point of view, and you can't get connected to them anyway..

A good technique that Robert Jordan used was: The story is in third person (mainly limited) but whenever he wanted to obtain an extra level in intimacy he switched in first person mid-paragraph but emphasized (in italics) and then switched back to the third without italics. This technique works and worked in the Wheel of Time really well BUT the switches to first person/italics had to be used sparingly and just for small amounts of text, usually one to two sentences.

Hi, I have been researching omniscient pov for a while. I am trying to learn about omniscient pov/perspective. I am confused because I read that if your story is written in omniscient, then the omniscient narrator cannot be a character in the story. Is that true? I am learning all I can about third person limited and third person omniscient in order to decide on which I should use for a story I'd love to write. In my research, I am getting confused about a few things regarding omniscient, which is the style I am actually leaning towards using: 1) So, in omniscient, the perspective is from the narrator, not a character, so, how does the story include the perspective of the characters? Should it? 2) In omniscient, can the characters wince, raise an eyebrow, clench fists, (show) thoughts and emotions through body language, facial expressions and sensations, or, should the omniscient narrator tell the thought or feelings, because the omniscient knows everything. When and why should an author/narrator show instead of tell, when writing in omniscient? Why would an omniscient narrator write Sally clenched her fists, instead of telling the reader she was angry? 3) Which is correct for omniscient? Sally blushed or Sally turned red or Sally felt her cheeks get hot? Because it's the narrator's pov and perspective and knows all, I'd think the narrator can describe Sally using any of the examples. But I'm not sure and cannot find info on correct use of these types of things. Any insight, or rules of thumb I can follow? I understand that in third person limited where the pov and perspective are from a single main character at a time, one should probably write Sally's cheeks got hot because she is experiencing it and cannot see the redness. Not sure what the rules are for omniscient. 4) Lastly, because the omniscient narrator knows all, why do I read instructions that it's still best to stick with one main character per scene or chapter, instead of switching to another character? I understand that rule with third person limited / multiple, but with a narrator being omniscient, I'd think it'd be ok say what a different character was thinking and feeling as long as it's clear to the reader. I am probably wrong but all I can find on the subject is warnings about head hopping, and I'm not sure if a narrator who tells or shows the thoughts or feelings of different characters is head hopping, since the narrator is not using the voice or perspective of the character (because the narrator is using his or her own pov/perspective.) Does this mean you can't write Sally was hot with anger. John could see Sally was fuming, but ignored her? 5) One more thing that I'm not sure of, you know how there is internalization / inner thoughts in third person limited? Can you do that in omniscient? Sally's face turned bright red. What were the boys doing making such a mess in the kitchen? where the thoughts are part of the narration? Can also be done in italics with a thought tag? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I usually write in first person. I’m the opposite of you. I usually end up liking a character more in first person.

...good to hear I can probably still use a lot of it.

ill read ur book