: Re: What are the advantages and disadvantages of writing in first person? A lot of people are either on the side of first person or the side of third person. But what are the advantages and disadvantages

@Pierce369

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The biggest difference between first person and third person limited is that with the former you are directly telling the story in the voice of the character. If you want to have a character tell a story themselves, with all that implies (i.e. you're fully able to make the narrator unreliable here), then first person is really great for that. There are quite a few hardboiled detective novels which use this; in fact, it's almost a cliche in that genre.

On the other hand, don't completely discount third person limited, which still allows you to tell the story from the POV of one character but which also allows you as the author to have just a little bit of distance. So for instance if you want to tell the story from the POV of a 4 year old girl, you'd probably want to end up using third person limited or even a little more than limited so that the audience can understand her (kids that age, while fascinating, are horrible storytellers because they don't understand which details to include and which to leave out). Basically, it allows you to kind of straddle the line between actually making up a separate, coherent voice for a character and still being able to tell a (relatively) neutral narrative.

The other deal with first person which can be really off-putting for some readers comes from the idea that few if any people really think they are villains. Imagine the Game of Thrones series told from the POV of... well, most of the characters, really. You'd have people constantly making excuses and justifications for some really nasty actions, you'd probably confuse the audience a little bit with their insistence that the "other side" is just as two-faced and mean spirited (when that's not always clear), and why should they ever be assumed to be reliable when they lie, cheat, and steal everyone else on a daily basis? That's exactly the kind of character a reader is liable to not want to feel too close to.

Of course, if you're looking for something cool and experimental, all the things I just listed as "flaws" are rather the opposite of that. Consider Irvine Welsh's novel Trainspotting (and if you've just seen the movie, I highly recommend the book). The dialect used is strange and the narrator is not always the nicest of people, but that's also kind of why it works. Faulkner had a real penchant for writing stream of consciousness style writing that really got into the heads of his characters. See also: pretty much all of Chuck Pahlianuk's novels, especially Fight Club ("I am Jack's whiskey-soaked liver"). See also: the brogue and not-always-completely-reliable narrators employed by Irish author Roddy Doyle in books like The Commitments or The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. First person can be a joy to read but it can also be one of the hardest things to get right.

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