All First-Person Narrators Write Like Novelists. It's such an ubiquitous trope that we're used to it, even though it doesn't make sense.
First person seems to be a Scrappy Format among people I know, but I like it. I don't so much care who's being spoken to (I just call Literary Agent Hypothesis on their stream of consciousness most of the time), but there are a couple things that I've seen done in first person that do bug me. Like when the narrator chooses a point (usually late on) to reveal something to us they've known all along. That just makes me cry "BS" most of the time.
"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~MadrugadaThe only author I've seen do first person well is Karin Lowachee. For example, if the narrator doesn't want to think about some past trauma, he's not going to think about it. He's not going to mention it. There's no "I didn't want to think about it", there's nothing at all in the actual narrative prose, but there will be hints that can be gleaned from behavior. In one book she also had an unreliable narrator who seemed to be trying to give his life story in a way that put him in the best light possible, which, since he's kind of a sleeze, didn't entirely work.
That was pretty interesting.
I'm going to join the "character looking into a mirror and describing what they look like" group. God I hate that. It's so incredibly cheap. I don't look into the mirror and go "my speckled, hazel eyes glistened in the morning light", and I really hope no one else does similar. I go "aw fuck, I think there's a zit on my nose".
edited 28th Mar '11 6:39:31 AM by Bur
Like when the narrator chooses a point (usually late on) to reveal something to us they've known all along. That just makes me cry "BS" most of the time.
I hear you; but read The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd if you want to see that trope pulled off really well (plus it's a good Agatha Christie yarn, who can resist?)
Re: Looking into a mirror — how else is a first-person narrator supposed to describe their appearance? Unless it's, like, in relation to other people (Describing my mom, oh, everyone says I look like my mom, etc.)? See, I am very fond of physical description of characters. And a first-person narrator in a book I read lately never described what she looked like — not even hair color. I changed her hair color like three times throughout my reading, and only at the 3/4s mark did she mention offhandedly that she had red hair. It drove me nuts!
Maybe People of the Book handled it well - the first few pages are focused on what teh main character and narrator is doing as she's restoring an ancient book, so she's describing putting her shoulder-length, dark hair out of her face, and how her hands look, and adjusting her glasses, etc. It shows character as well as appearance.
The narrator doesn't have to be the one giving the description—other characters can describe the main character aloud if it makes sense in context (such as an antagonistic character tearing the narrator apart verbally).
Alternatively, the description can be given indirectly (such as getting annoyed at the strands of brown hair left on the pillow as she gets up, but never explicitly saying that her hair is brown) or as part of a character's internal monologue about another character (such as being impressed by another man's suit and regretting that he is too scrawny to properly fill out a suit himself). The disadvantage of these and similar methods is that the character description is given out in little pieces (not that I mind, though I know some people do), but it's very hard to have a character give a full description of themselves without it feeling contrived.
edited 28th Mar '11 3:41:27 PM by Ironeye
I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.That brings up the main thing about first-person narration. The character is telling the story to someone. But who? You, the reader? Some do address the reader directly, which I mostly just accepted. But it does bring up the question of why? And why is the narrator telling the story with the level of detail an author might use, as opposed to an actual person conversing with the reader?
As noted, first person is divisive.
"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~MadrugadaI don't think there's a reasonable explanation for that. I've just seen it as an Acceptable Breaks from Reality kind of thing.
no one will notice that I changed thisTo me, it's kinda awkward to read someone in the first person describe someone's features in too much detail during a moment where they're supposed to be in danger.
Like if, when a woman comes in out of nowhere, the main character takes a paragraph to describe how sexy her outfit is in a scene where she's obviously planning on killing him or at least take him hostage.
To me it's a wee bit awkward to read something and goes from "she suddenly pulled out an .8 mm, aiming it directly at my chest as she beckoned me to follow." to "When the mysterious woman finally stepped forth from the shadows, I noticed that she wore a black, skin tight jumpsuit that showed off all her delicious curves and a red shade of lipstick that made her lips stand out seductively in contrast to her pale skin."
I mean don't get me wrong, I don't necessarily expect a story to be realistic (especially if I'm reading a story like the dresden files or something similar) but it just doesn't seem right for a character to describe someone's features while they're in such a dangerous situation.
You know what I mean?
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Funny thing about that: when I read a book, I too imagine it happening and picture the events (or try to), but if a character isn't described, I imagine a generic stand-in. Once they're described, sometimes I'm annoyed not because I didn't know what to imagine the whole time, but because my stand-in now suddenly has to look different.
If a character's appearance isn't described, I tend to imagine them based on the voice I assign to them. So if a character is described simply as "large and strong," I picture them sounding like Patrick Warburton. So then I picture them as looking like either Kronk or The Tick in setting-appropriate attire.
I also have generic appearances for Child Male and Child Female protagonists; Child Males tend to be scrawny, dark-haired (frequently brown or black), with pointy chins and blue eyes. Child Female has wavy brown or mid-blonde hair, brown eyes, a round little nose, and fashion sense stuck in the 80's.
"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~MadrugadaI do not like last minute cliff-hangers, exposition speeches, lengthy Purple Prose and Red Herring. I also don't think that the bad-guys need to explain every detail of their evil plans to the heroes in every book, it is eye-roll worthy and cheesy because it gives the heroes an opportunity to stop the villain's plans before they come into fruition, also lengthy erotica cuts it for me.
In an anime, I'll be the Tsundere Dark Magical Girl who likes purple MY own profile is actually HERE!Overuse of Contrived Coincidence. I can allow a small number per book.
Purple Prose, although I like certain books that use it. In a certain time period it was almost inevitable.
Rambling on and on about how bad the Big Bad is, only to have him doing elementary mistakes, losing his composure too easily and talking like a whiny kid (cough-Voldemort-cough). If he is so horrible at least make him something of a challenge.
edited 2nd Apr '11 2:43:28 PM by StrangeDwarf
"Why don't you write books people can read?"-Nora Joyce, to her husband James
Oh, I do hate it when antagonists are clearly not a threat.
Even some of Terry Pratchett's later books suffer from that. I'm thinking particularly of Cosmo Lavish in Making Money. He was a great and original concept for a villain, but his mental illness went beyond "scary psychotic" and straight into "not all there". He wasn't even capable of self-preservation, let alone threatening Moist and Lord Vetinari.
"Informed evil" is the worst of all Informed Attribute sins, in my mind. If your villain isn't a credible threat, then you suddenly have no central conflict.
"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~MadrugadaExcept not all villains are meant to provide the central Conflict of the story. Sometimes the main conflict is between the protagonists, or it might not even be a Person vs. Person conflict at all. Some villains are just there as plot devices in order to enable a different conflict to take place.

Most of the time, it's sort of an imaginary audience that is just never addressed. Which is weird.
Now that I think about it, it's actually the same with third person narration. Who's talking to whom? Is it really the author who's telling the story to his audience, or is the third person narrator just another character who's fictional inside the fictional universe of the real life narration? Maybe the author himself is fictional because we're fictional too. Maybe we're all just part of this consciousness and every story ever told is set inside the same universe, just on different layers of the spectrum. It's just that we're inside a story too, and it's just stories all the way down (or all the way inside?) and there is no reality except that nothing is real (which is real).
Maybe I'm just overthinking this.