1st or 3rd Person - Pros & Cons!

hello everyone Alexa done here and today we are talking about something so basic so foundational yet complex and very very important one of the most important decisions you're going to make in your prewriting process which is are you gonna write in first person or third person there is really no right or wrong answer but it is definitely kind of a personal choice and it can differ book to book and they do do different things they come with different pros and cons and different pitfalls so I'm going to go over the basics the first person in the basics of third person and compare and contrast them a bit for you but first off I'll say this isn't a fight first person isn't better than third person and third person isn't better than first person it's really a matter of personal preference as well as kind of the appropriateness and the feel for the genre or category that you are writing certain categories and genres do certainly preference one POV over another for example in kind of mainstream adult fantasy third-person is far more common where is NY a first-person is definitely far more common but doesn't mean you can't see the other in either of those spaces and really no matter which POV you choose to use and they do have specific pros and cons as I mentioned really your job is to make it seamless for the reader a reader tripping over a POV means you're not doing something right so let's talk a bit more about first versus third and I am skipping second because no one has time for that second is its own special feast and there is a reason you rarely see in fiction the bread and butter ones are first and third so that is what we are going to focus on starting with first-person which essentially just means it's all I did this I did that you were right in the POV of the main character and thing is told through their eyes you can accomplish this in past or present tense so first person past or first person present first person past is kind of the default that you're going to find but first person present is pretty popular in Y a so that's the difference between I watch to the story versus I walk to the store if you can't tell you're definitely going to get a different immediacy level depending on the tense you choose to pair with first-person POV generally speaking that is a hallmark of first-person POV it lends a very heightened sense of immediacy and if immediacy is something you're looking to really prioritize in your writing first-person is the way to go first-person past is kind of more invisible because it is kind of more standard partly because third-person past tense has been kind of the narrative literary standard in most Chandra's for a long time but first-person present can be used very effectively for an additional layer of immediacy though I do feel that there are some definite cons to first-person present tense which we'll go over in a minute so let's just go over the general pros a first-person starting with immediacy it really is the big one and especially the way that you can use the five senses to just get a vivid sense of where a character is what it feels like to be there it's just far more seamless to describe how things smell and taste and feel and what they're hearing and so on the little asterisk I'm going to put on here and we're gonna talk about it in the third person section you can definitely make third-person feel immediate and close but more on that later I think that's a misconception about third that I love to dispel the next Pro is intimacy which is like the cousin of immediacy and this means that you're just getting that emotional closeness because you were literally in their head and in their POV and everything they see and feel you are giving directly to the reader first person is just going to feel very clothes because you are in the characters head and it tends to be the POV that makes it the easiest to engender reader empathy deep reader empathy with your character the next Pro is the technically first person is easier to write then third person easier to write in the sense that we are all our own first-person narrative so it is certainly easier to essentially go through a story as if we are the main character I walk I see I do and all of this sounds simplistic which we're gonna get to in the cons list it is technically easier but it comes with caveats that are going to make it harder as well another great Pro first-person is that it becomes very easy to keep information from the reader because you are limited by only being in the POV of that main character though of course she can't do dual or multi POV but doable tpv are easier to mess up if you're doing first-person it's almost impossible for me to talk about the pros with hinting at all of the cons but generally you are able to filter the experience of the story for the reader through this first-person POV there's a real measure of control that you have in first-person so this can be really helpful for certain narrative devices particularly the unreliable narrator okay so now the cons as I already kind of mentioned it can be tricky to differentiate voice in first-person because in the hands of a less skilled writer first-person can definitely feel a bit basic I mentioned it was easier and I mentioned that there is a flip side to that where it gets hard and that is that you have to work doubly hard to inject voice personality and tone into first-person it can be trickier to describe things because you're limited by what your character is seeing and doing and you don't want to stray too far from the action of that first-person perspective to navel gaze about things and specifically voiced this is definitely something that a lot of writers struggle I think we can all think of an example of a book that was dual POV or multi POV first-person where we couldn't tell the characters apart we'd start a chapter and go wait who is this that is definitely a pitbull of first person another con for first person is that it's very easy to default to telling rather than showing because you are telling everything that the character is doing and seeing and I think this is why we see a lot of writers you struggle with telling in their books when they are in first person you'd be amazed what can happen when you just switch to third person it can often become easier to have vivid descriptions though also to chew the scenery but generally speaking that is something I do warn people with first person that really the con is that because it feels deceptively easy to write everything III that it's really easy to end up with kind of basic plotting prose especially repetitive prose with the kind of the I structure varying your sentences and kind of making it dynamic and interesting can be a real challenge and generally I think the takeaway with first-person should be that it does require a lot of skill to pull off well and one of those cons is that people are going to think it's easy they're gonna think that you defaulted to the easier writing style but a skilled writer can make first-person work for them and the last con for first-person is kind of a flipside of one of those pros which is you are limited to the first-person experience of whomever your POV character is so you can't jump around to different places where they aren't and show things that happen elsewhere and kind of share motivations of other characters that's simply a limitation of first-person though it's also a limitation of something we're going to talk about in the third person and really this is important to stress most of the pros you get from first-person you can also accomplish from third-person and vice versa writing really does come down to this skill and care of the writer which is why I don't like the adversarial idea that one is better than the other it's about kind of knowing which POV facilitates certain things a bit more easily versus kind of the pitfalls and then course correcting your writing to make the POV work no matter which one you choose so third person third person is definitely more versatile than first person and it is as I mentioned kind of the default in literature but thus it can be quite difficult to master it also has a major con which I will front-load with which is distance as immediate as first person is third-person just by default facilitates distance because you're not in the character's head you are referring to everything in third-person it's not I walk to the store it's Tammy walk to the store so the reader is basically it's like they're watching a movie they're outside the perspective of the character and watching things unfold now of course this can be really great for certain types of stories but as I'm sure you can imagine for others might not work quite as well for example there's a reason most thrillers are in first-person I've read some great thrillers and third-person but I'm always pleasantly surprised because first person definitely facilitates that immediacy and that emotional intimacy now there are two primary kinds of third-person and that is omniscient third and close third that's it two types of third omniscient essentially it means that there is an all-knowing narrator and you as the writer as the storyteller you hover above all things in the story and all characters and you write into that all-knowing way about everything happening in the story all the characters you can jump around it's even beyond multi POV you're covering every possible angle of the story in omniscient you know and share all of the kind of intimate details and feelings that every character has in the story now this doesn't mean head hopping is okay which we're gonna go over in the cons list but it is definitely kind of the most freeing point of view in the sense that you as the narrator get to tell the reader as much or as little as you want the then there's another con there's a con to every Pro and then close and limited third this is the one where you can mine a lot of the pros a first-person if you do third-person close limited well which means you stick close to one particular character or multiple in their own defined sections so you can do dual or multi POV with close limited third where when you were in that character's perspective even though you're referring to them in third-person it's as if everything is filtered through their perspective you stay very close to their feelings and their experiences of the story so with close limited or third you can accomplish so many of the same things you can get from first-person but it does take a particular skill to land this so let's go over the pros and cons of third-person so the first pro a third-person is that it's definitely easier to write in dual or multiple POV probably one of the reasons this works so well in fantasy which tends to be a genre where you get the story from lots of different characters points of view when you go to lots of different places it's also easier to be descriptive to do all of that wonderful showing to kind of add details and description this doesn't mean that if you write in third that you can't have a problem with telling but it is definitely in many ways easier because you're not locked in by the I did this I did that kind of construction which as I mentioned kind of helps you default to telling so third can be a great way to add a lot of lushness to your description and your prose but of course third person can easily become too purple a card to every pro another pro is that third person definitely feels a bit grander it has that kind of storytelling feel like watching a movie because you are kind of outside of that limited first-person perspective you're able to give the story a grander scope but then the cons as is already kind of obvious the third person is simply it is less intimate it is harder to get close to the characters and even if you do very skilled work in close third it's always going to be kind of missing what you'll you're going to get in terms of immediacy from first-person which just makes third person the wrong choice for a lot of stories and genres so another con a third person is that it's very easy for writers to default to head hopping so it's kind of the bug standard pitfall a first-person is defaulting to telling head hopping can be a huge problem in third person because you are able to have a lot more POVs especially if you're writing an omniscient you're able to give the reader more insights into what everyone is thinking and doing but you shouldn't be head hopping in any single scene that is confusing for a reader there should still kind of be an internal logic as you write we're like okay in this section the narrator is only going to reveal information about this character so the reader feels like they're with this character this part you still have to have kind of roles in structure to execute third-person well and I think partly because it is the default in you know kind of in many genres of literature people think it's easy and it's not easy I mean neither of these are easy technically and I do think it is kind of a con that third person is harder to master than people think and really kind of that sums up my pros and cons on third and you're thinking wow if she had way more for first person and third person I do cut it's funny I I do slightly preference third person I think it has pretty good overarching prose not that many cons and yet all of the books I've written so far they're being published are in first person I think first person has enormous prose but pretty enormous cons as well but it just lends itself so beautifully to specific category and genres that first person is really worth mastering but it really is preference so you know yeah our most ye books and first person yes but that doesn't mean you can't write an amazing way book in third person that feels just as close in an immediate as a first-person narration but I do kind of want to warn you that some readers simply have their preferences so there are certain agents for example ye agents who are never going to wrap a weii written and third-person very commonly you might hear advice if you've written away a and third person to switch it to first I think that's kind of a knee-jerk that people go to they're like oh this has a problem I'm having trouble connecting to the character so make it first-person sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't I think just as often the answer is to dig deeper into the POV that you have chosen to write in and get more mastery of it and I I do want to talk about a misconception I've seen about first versus third I've heard people say that Oh first is more voice see than third so it's better to write and first but you can be very voice see in third if you're skilled at it and really that is the takeaway here that any writer can achieve a level of mastery and great storytelling no matter which POV they choose you can inject voice into either POV and it's kind of a matter of kind of how you vibe as an author and some writers do vibe more with one over the other like they feel more comfortable writing in first so that's the one where they develop their skills the best and vice versa and then as I mentioned within these POVs you then have to choose your tense which is past versus present I have so many feelings about this and I did actually make a video about kind of POV intense choices which I will link to down below where I went over a lot of my feelings specifically about present tense I think that first-person present tense is the most commonly messed up POV intense combination it is the easiest to screw up and it is also one of the best you read for immediacy and intimacy if you can master that combination but this video is just about POV first versus third that's really it kind of an overview of what they are I'm sorry if I haven't settled any feuds between these two conflicting tenses because I really do have a pretty even keel feeling about them there are distinct pros and cons to both but also this share pros and cons and any skilled writer can find mastery in either one give this video a thumbs up if you liked it and I will make more videos about this kind of nitty gritty crafty stuff let me know down below in the comments any questions you have about this do you prefer first you prefer third is there anything you are confused about or wondering about let me know down below if you're not already subscribed to the channel I post new videos two to three times a week thank you so much for watching guys and as always happy writing

Channel: Alexa Donne

Views: 21,614

Rating: 4.9443154 out of 5

Keywords: alexa donne, author tube, writing advice, how to write a book, publishing advice, 1st vs 3rd person, writing POV, POV and tense, what POV to write in, what is 1st person, what is 3rd person, pros & cons of 1st person, pros and cons of 3rd person

Id: 6OGAfjnsjoM

Length: 18min 27sec (1107 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 26 2019