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Topic : What's better in fiction: to make personal statements or universal statements? Here's an example from my own writing: Watching the ceiling fan stir my thoughts, I said, “His favorite thing - selfpublishingguru.com

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Here's an example from my own writing:

Watching the ceiling fan stir my thoughts, I said, “His favorite thing
was to tell me about his day.”

Mrs. Saeki gawked at me behind her square glasses. “Unusual from a
husband.”

I nodded. “And they were all about little things. You know, how he
picked his polka tie instead of the stripped one. What mobile games he
played on his way to work. Why he called me at four and not at five.”

“You didn’t feel bored?”

I shook my head. “When you love someone, nothing that person does is boring.”

I could have written the bolded part as: "Because I loved him, nothing he did was boring to me."

What's usually better* in fiction? The original version of the passage or the second one? (a personal statement or an universal one?)

`* By better I mean which one touches the reader more deeply? Which one is considered better writing?


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It depends on what you want to accomplish with the scene, and the character.

Neither one is better writing per se. They do have slightly different tones, and slightly different meanings.

"When you love someone" is your first-person narrator speaking in second person to make his/her sentiment universal. S/he is saying "when any person loves someone, nothing the beloved person does is boring to the lover." It's casual and doesn't portend anything — it's descriptive. It's also in the present tense, so the implication is that the description applies right now, at the moment the story is taking place.

"Because I loved him" is your first-person narrator talking very specifically about his/her emotions towards his/her husband. While I realize we're seeing this snippet out of context, the past tense makes me wonder if the husband is dead or if the couple is separated/divorced. I loved him, not I love him. There's a wee bit of negative foreshadowing here, which intrigues me.

If you want to "touch" your reader, again, it depends on what you want the reader to feel. If the narrator still loves his/her husband, and this is part of showing that sentiment, I'd go with the universal wording. If they are not together for whatever reason, then you'd need the specific phrasing, because the experience of love not being boring is in the past for these two.


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