Do you prefer first person perspective or third person perspective in literature? What is your reason? Are there any particular reoccurring themes, tropes, quirks, or styles you dislike in these points of view?
I personally don't like using contractions in third person PoV because it makes prose look strange to me, especially if it's the writing is dealing with serious topics.
Pic unrelated.
Jeremiah Gutierrez
God I love that cat.
Aiden James
primo pic op
as for the q, depends of course ;^)
Jonathan Nguyen
I prefer third person past tense for "serious" literature and first person present tense for "plebeian" literature. If I'm reading a serious work, I want to focus on character development/ideas explored by the book and not the plot, so I don't want an unreliable narrator getting in the way, while if I read pleb fiction it's going to be for the emotional impact, which first person present tense is easier to resonate with.
William Wood
I'd argue they're mostly the same. Everything you can do in 1st person you could do in 3rd, and it's easy to use both 1st and 3rd in the same story. 3rd person seems like it would be easier since you are not limited to the perspective of one person but also have a higher skill limit since intertwining multiple character perspectives brilliantly is very difficult, but when pulled off can be utterly amazing and intrinsically much more diverse and immersive than a 1st person story could ever be, but this only applies to the highest level of writing.
I guess it comes down to subjective preference.
Liam Stewart
OP brought up contractions, so I'll go with that. I can't stand dialogue which doesn't use contractions when they would realistically be used. "I am out of money," something like that. It reads like a machine is talking.
Angel Lewis
Unreliable 3rd person narrator is the patrician choice.
Oliver Price
I don't read anything written in first person anymore unless it's old and equate the style with childishness on the author's part. First person is for kids.
Michael Cox
dismissing an entire narrative perspective is childish
Caleb Barnes
Defending juvenile literary styles is more childish.
Gabriel Price
It's exactly the opposite. When you're a child you read shitty fantasy and YA novels always written in third person. Third person is for normies, first person is for the thinking man. Third person is standard, first person is avant-garde. It's always been like this. >inb4 b-but muh Pynchon muh DFW Simple exceptions. Dante's masterpiece is a masterpiece precisely because, amongst other reason, it's written in first person. If you don't rappel down into the narrative, you're just pretentious, lying or comforming with the market.
Jaxson Hughes
The truly patrician choice is to switch between both tenses and PoVs routinely to make your prose as jarringly inconsistent as possible. And yes, I've read a book that does this.
As for my actual answer. 3rd person, but with very clear distinctions for whose head your in at the time. It bugs me when a single passage tells you what multiple people are thinking on a serious plot point, rather than taking the time to explore their motivations individually.
Lincoln Brown
>The truly patrician choice is to switch between both tenses and PoVs routinely to make your prose as jarringly inconsistent as possible.
Don't forget to write in an unclear way so that the reader can't always tell which POV you're writing from and when the switches happen.
Jacob Lewis
Prosefags --> Third person Patrician sensitive artist --> First person
Jace Flores
Sorry, but you're wrong. No one serious about literary endeavors should be writing in first person after grade school unless their goal is to appeal to children. There are few exceptions to this rule.
Ethan Young
>DUDE I'M SO POSTMODERN LMAO
Nicholas Torres
If it's not unnecessarily difficult to read, it's not a good novel.
Adrian Cox
2nd person. I only read adventure books and cult recruiting literature.
Christian Kelly
YOU are wrong, my dude. Explain to me why Dante and Proust wrote in first person while adventure books, YA novels, detective stories, fantasy novels and your shitty novella are written in third person. I'll wait.
Blake Scott
That argument is reductive, seeing as plenty of YA novels also use first person. See the entirety of the Zombie Survival genre for examples.
I won't pretend to know whether YA/trash is a majority of one or the other, but I'd wager neither had a clear, overwhelming majority.
Brandon Scott
Reading visual novels made me prefer first person; most are written in that perspective.
John Baker
Proust? Pft.
Now, try to listen, bud. I said I there's an exception for older books, and nowhere did I indicate that if ___-style book is written in third person that automatically makes it *less* childish. I said first person is for kids, which it is.
Not paying attention and making inapt assumptions would appear to be proof that you represent the aforementioned childishness and are butthurt about the truth of the juvenile literary style you're attempting to defend itt.
Thomas Reed
DELET THIS
Hunter Cook
Pathetic. You're the first one acting like a child, since you clearly aspire to write a novel along the lines of your favorite authors, all of which wrote in third person, so you also want to write in third person. Reductive perspective, I'd say. On the contrary, I don't aim to write a novel, so I can give an impartial opinion, which is that first person is more effective and throws you into the narrative, so that you get involved and exposed to the author's thought (but the other way around is valid too, since the author exposes the true himself to your thought). Third person is most of the time a fireplace-tier storytelling, as if the writer was my grandfather. No, thanks.
Well, anyway, if you're a pomofag fanatic and you enjoy stuff like (dude unreliability lmao) just for the sake of it we're done, don't even bother replying.
Jackson Hill
>Do you prefer first person perspective or third person perspective in literature?
doesn't matter.
Austin Hughes
i don't care for first person. much more difficult to immerse myself.
John Davis
You've been cucked hard
Jayden Nguyen
I say: >stop making assumptions He says: >you clearly aspire... >your favorite authors... >you also want to write...
No, I said people who write in first person after grade school are innately childish because first person is a literary style for children.
And I think you've proved my point. First person is an introductory method to writing and the go-to for selfish, immature, and emotionally underdeveloped authors whose readers tend to exhibit the same qualities.
Brandon Gonzalez
First person makes it easier for me.
Andrew Miller
Sure are mature the pseuds who read pomo novels because muh unreliability!
Kayden Allen
Almost all YA novels are written in 1st person and they have been for like two decades now.