: Re: What is the difference between writing in the first and the third person? What kind of story is better suited for each point of view? Are there advantages or disadvantages inherent to them?

@Dunderdale623

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I actually disagree about as heartily with the marked answer to this question as it is possible to. First person does not, in fact, make you emotionally closer to the narrator. A lesson I learned the hard way when I wrote an entire novel in the first person only to have the chief criticism come back at me that the main character seemed whiny and self-obsessed; when I was looking for cool and distant but ultimately virtuous and heroic.

It was at that point that the room (for the criticism was delivered in an eight-person writer's circle and the one thing seven people could agree upon was that my heroine was a whiner) dissected the uses of first person perspective. We discovered the following things:

Men cannot, in general, write female first-person. One of the few examples of success is Stephen King's "Dolores Claiborne". Most other attempts have failed. Draw your own conclusions as to why this might be.
The main purpose of first-person is to tell stories in a technique known as "the unreliable witness". "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time" is an example where the viewpoint character is understood by the reader to have a high-level of autism and the author attempts to relay the experience as the narrator experiences it. The reader can then interpret what is "really" happening for themselves. In third person it is presumed that, even if the author is not using third person omniscient, there is some objective truth to reported thoughts, actions and events. In "third person limited" sentences like "Bob would not even admit to himself..." may be used to tell the reader about things that even the viewpoint character does not know about their own state of mind. The unreliable witness, on the other hand, expects the author to write in a voice as if they are the viewpoint character. The reader must infer the things Bob doesn't want to admit to himself by reading between the lines.
Some would argue that there is a neutral form of first-person in which the viewpoint character is a witness, but not an unreliable one. In fact, the most powerful way to utilise first-person in this mode is when the viewpoint character is a "rube" someone who is naive and does not understand the full implications of the situation in which they find themselves. Pulp thrillers of the 30s, 40s and 50s often used this technique because limiting story to one viewpoint allows for punchy efficiency. The main characters in pulp stories are often rubes who are being played for fools by their clients and the antagonists. This tends to creep in to any first-person narrative that isn't explicitly intended to utilise an unreliable witness. Note that the narrator remains an unreliable witness if only because they are never privy to all the information necessary to inject the situation with any measure of objectivity. For example, other characters the viewpoint character meets can have their descriptions coloured by the supposed mood of the viewpoint character.

For these reasons it tends to be the case that reading a novel in third person limited becomes a more intimate experience for readers in which they can more easily become attached to the characters and hence feel more positively about them.

In first person the reader is encouraged to form an opinion about the narrator as a very distinct and separate person from them. In a pulp thriller the side-effects of this are minimal because people really mostly care about what is happening to the hero as opposed to being encouraged to care about the hero themselves for purely emotional reasons.

In fact if a viewpoint character in first person keeps referencing how they feel it tends to come across as whining. Thus it is encouraged to keep first-person novels on a lighter less personal basis. For this reason we have to work out a viewpoint character's motivations, feelings, shortcomings that they are unaware of etc for ourselves. This additional burden on the reader to recontextualise the story subtracting the viewpoint character's personal quirks is a distancing experience absent from third-person limited.

Ever since that writer's circle session I have been very careful about employing first-person perspective and would now only do it if I had a very specific reason to convey an unreliable witness or a rube perspective. Generally speaking heroes of genre do not come across as sympathetically in first-person as third. I would not use the first-person to portray a heroic character because nothing takes the shine off a hero like getting deep inside their internal monologue. In third person limited it is much easier to excuse a hero's shortcomings as "features of their personality". In third person it is easier to root for a deeply flawed hero. First person viewpoint characters tend to seem more flawed no matter how much they are outwardly a paragon of virtue.

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