That’s often, you know, a suggestion for writers starting out is to try writing in first person because they can give you the voice of the character nice and clearly.
Yes, the first person does give one a nice, cushy seat directly in the mind of their character... however, that's not all it does. It also limits you to describing things that the character can perceive, or at least reasonably know about. For example, in first person, you cannot describe the facial expression of someone your character is dramatically facing away from.
New writers tend to forget about this, and what comes out is a third person omniscient narrative with the wrong pronouns. See Twilight for an inexplicably-published example.
There are, of course, ways to get around this. If a character is explicitly retelling the story from some later point in the future, for example, you can have them say something along the lines of "I didn't know it at the time, but X" or "He told me later that he felt X, but in the moment he hid it well" or "Something felt off, but I couldn't place it; later, I realized that X was missing." Unfortunately, this too can be botched if one tries to use similar tactics in a more "in the moment" narrative, such as with constant "I imagined X" when a character is describing something they cannot reasonably perceive. You might be able to get away with that a little bit if your character is established as creative and imaginative, but do it too much, and too accurately, and you're drifting into third person omniscient again.
First person is a lot harder than it looks and I would not recommend it for beginners.
It’s always fascinating to turn Paolini’s writing advice and questions back on his own work, to see how he practices what he preaches. Spoiler, if you’re new here: he doesn’t.
Because he's never truly engaged with the advice he's gotten, and thus ends up parroting it to people who ask while not following any of it in his own writing.
For one thing, what the hell did Eragon “want”, and what did he “need”?
He wanted... uhh... to avenge Garrow, I guess, that was a thing. For like half a book. I don't know if we can really say that defeating Galbatorix was something Eragon wanted to do, since he was kind of funneled into it by everyone around him. But to do all that he needed to become super mega powerful!
So as an example, Eragon wants in the first book to avenge something that’s happened to his family and go out into the world to achieve this. But what he needs is to grow up, to become a fully functioning adult. Those are two separate things!
PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
Well, I was spot on with the avenging Garrow bit!
I can forgive Maddie a bit, because she’s (a) a teen without much experience, and (b) hosting him on her show, so she has to play nice regardless.
Yeah... I honestly feel sorry for Maddie. She seems a bit... out of her depth? It's her podcast, she should make the rules! But she's also a teenager, and her guest star is like 40 and at least somewhat famous. The power dynamic here is really skewed, and she doesn't seem particularly well-equipped to deal with that.
He also doesn’t use the sandwich technique, which I thought was interesting - he doesn’t open with a few niceties about things the writer did well, or strengths of the piece, or anything like that. It’s like he had an idea in his head already of the writing advice he was going to say, regardless of what piece of writing was going to be presented to him, and he was so busy rehearsing that in his head that he didn’t really listen to the story being read, and so couldn’t say anything specific about it.
When has Paolini ever demonstrated an ability to actually engage with a piece of writing?
I pointed out in Part 2 that he apparently missed all the depth in The Lord of the Rings, and in Part 3 that he seems only to have skimmed Strunk & White. Plus, back in this post I did a whole deep dive on how he imitates poetic devices without actually understanding their cultural context and significance and how that does (or doesn't) mesh with the details of his world.
All evidence suggests that Paolini is, at least primarily, a surface-level reader. He reads because he likes to experience fun stories, and doesn't really engage with much in the way of deeper meanings and messages. And that's not a bad thing; sometimes deep reading just isn't as fun as letting the author take you for a ride. It is, however, dishonest to engage in surface-level reading and then pretend to have gone deeper.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2022-01-01 12:53 pm (UTC)Yes, the first person does give one a nice, cushy seat directly in the mind of their character... however, that's not all it does. It also limits you to describing things that the character can perceive, or at least reasonably know about. For example, in first person, you cannot describe the facial expression of someone your character is dramatically facing away from.
New writers tend to forget about this, and what comes out is a third person omniscient narrative with the wrong pronouns. See Twilight for an inexplicably-published example.
There are, of course, ways to get around this. If a character is explicitly retelling the story from some later point in the future, for example, you can have them say something along the lines of "I didn't know it at the time, but X" or "He told me later that he felt X, but in the moment he hid it well" or "Something felt off, but I couldn't place it; later, I realized that X was missing." Unfortunately, this too can be botched if one tries to use similar tactics in a more "in the moment" narrative, such as with constant "I imagined X" when a character is describing something they cannot reasonably perceive. You might be able to get away with that a little bit if your character is established as creative and imaginative, but do it too much, and too accurately, and you're drifting into third person omniscient again.
First person is a lot harder than it looks and I would not recommend it for beginners.
It’s always fascinating to turn Paolini’s writing advice and questions back on his own work, to see how he practices what he preaches. Spoiler, if you’re new here: he doesn’t.
Because he's never truly engaged with the advice he's gotten, and thus ends up parroting it to people who ask while not following any of it in his own writing.
For one thing, what the hell did Eragon “want”, and what did he “need”?
He wanted... uhh... to avenge Garrow, I guess, that was a thing. For like half a book. I don't know if we can really say that defeating Galbatorix was something Eragon wanted to do, since he was kind of funneled into it by everyone around him. But to do all that he needed to become super mega powerful!
So as an example, Eragon wants in the first book to avenge something that’s happened to his family and go out into the world to achieve this. But what he needs is to grow up, to become a fully functioning adult. Those are two separate things!
PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
Well, I was spot on with the avenging Garrow bit!
I can forgive Maddie a bit, because she’s (a) a teen without much experience, and (b) hosting him on her show, so she has to play nice regardless.
Yeah... I honestly feel sorry for Maddie. She seems a bit... out of her depth? It's her podcast, she should make the rules! But she's also a teenager, and her guest star is like 40 and at least somewhat famous. The power dynamic here is really skewed, and she doesn't seem particularly well-equipped to deal with that.
He also doesn’t use the sandwich technique, which I thought was interesting - he doesn’t open with a few niceties about things the writer did well, or strengths of the piece, or anything like that. It’s like he had an idea in his head already of the writing advice he was going to say, regardless of what piece of writing was going to be presented to him, and he was so busy rehearsing that in his head that he didn’t really listen to the story being read, and so couldn’t say anything specific about it.
When has Paolini ever demonstrated an ability to actually engage with a piece of writing?
I pointed out in Part 2 that he apparently missed all the depth in The Lord of the Rings, and in Part 3 that he seems only to have skimmed Strunk & White. Plus, back in this post I did a whole deep dive on how he imitates poetic devices without actually understanding their cultural context and significance and how that does (or doesn't) mesh with the details of his world.
All evidence suggests that Paolini is, at least primarily, a surface-level reader. He reads because he likes to experience fun stories, and doesn't really engage with much in the way of deeper meanings and messages. And that's not a bad thing; sometimes deep reading just isn't as fun as letting the author take you for a ride. It is, however, dishonest to engage in surface-level reading and then pretend to have gone deeper.