wait do people read first person stories and think they're the ones in the story???
Saw people talking about not liking first person, which is fair, but their reasoning was like "I would not do that" and I don't understand that mindset.
First person stories are still about a character. A character making their own decisions. First person isn't about you???? At least I thought it wasn't. What am I missing? I've always seen first person as just a more in-depth look into a character's mind and stricter POV. Not as a reader stand-in.
I see first person stories like I'm sitting down across from the narrator getting the wildest tea imaginable
Most accurate way to read a first person story
If someone doesn't have good media literacy, they interpret first person narration as being the same as the voice in their head. I used to love first-person because it really lets you into the character's psyche, and found it hard to get into third-person because it felt more detached. Now I prefer third-person, mostly because good quality adult first-person is so hard to find (I cannot recommend The Tarot Sequence enough, it's amazing, go read it, it's first-person adult fantasy & adventure, I love it). But a lot of people (with poor literacy skills & poor levels of media comprehension) read first-person as a daydream account of themselves, rather than as a separate character. They have trouble distinguishing between "I" as in themselves, and "I" as in a separate character referring to themselves.
Third-person is you, sitting opposite the author, as they tell you the wildest shit imaginable about these people they know. First-person is you, sitting opposite the author, and getting all of the Tea from their verbal shitpost about That One Weird Thing They Never Told You About.
Or, alternatively: third-person is how Beauty and the Beast is done, with the narrator being separate from the story, & first-person is how Emperor's New Groove is done (the way Kuzco narrates it? The way we see him break The Wall in order to remind us he's the main character in his movie? The way he talks at himself? The way he's got a running commentary in some parts? That's first-person. When it switches to Yzma & Kronk, they both have their first-person perspectives.)
"Third-person is you, sitting opposite the author, as they tell you the wildest shit imaginable about these people they know. First-person is you, sitting opposite the author, and getting all of the Tea from their verbal shitpost about That One Weird Thing They Never Told You About."
@i-want-delfeur This clarification is gold, for one.
But also as a writer who spends So Much Goddamn Time debating which perspective a story needs to be told in and has used both first- and third-person narration in the same universe - the same book even - I want to chime in here.
I dislike first-person narration for the exact reasons I used it for a good portion of my first two books. I find it limiting in that you not only see what the narrator sees, but you are limited to what the narrator observes (until you analyse further, of course, and begin to see what that narrator cannot). And sometimes they're dumb as rocks. I also am not the biggest fan of (reading) the close-up, nitty-gritty, everything-is-all-encompassing-ness of first-person-narrated drama.
But because of these factors and more, I found first-person to be the most wildly effective way to tell the story of a bunch of teenagers stumbling their way through the most fucked-up shit of their lives. When you're fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, you don't understand how limited your worldview is. That first-person limited perspective is Everything. When you're in your teens, everything is The Worst Ever, and in your face, and too big to handle. To read, I find it a little much, and sometimes a bit cringe (even my own writing) but every single one of us ever, in our teens, was also a little much, and a bit cringe. First-person narration conveyed this experience exactly the way I needed it to.
Narrative perspective, like every other facet of writing, is a tool used to tell a story effectively. The "I" is not you, it's the narrator crashing into the room and stumbling over their words because they need to tell you all the wild shit that's happened because seriously, you're not even going to believe this.
