Sunday, October 31, 2021

First person plural

 I've figured out why First Person POV is difficult. At least, why it is difficult for me.

It is because it is dialogue.

See, dialogue can be a challenge to write because you are balancing two elements. On one side are the needs of the characters and the natural flow and directions of a conversation. On the other side is your need as a writer to have certain things brought out in the conversation.

What is worse is that you want to bring them out in a particular order so you can have a build and progression. That ideas are introduced, developed, then something is achieved that gives that scene a reason to have been there.

In that order. Even if the instincts of character one is to ask the question the reader has been wanting to ask, and the instincts of character two are to blab everything they know. Well, there went your build and your tension, and you already gave away the sting line so now you have two characters trying to make awkward small talk to fill out the rest of the scene. Oh, and since they started talking about The Big Thing, you can't back them off to also bring the conversation around to a name-drop or a minor clue you were really, really hoping to work in there as well.

A book written in First Person POV is all dialogue. Every moment of the story is one person speaking, saying what it is that their character and their feelings of the moment and the natural directions their mind goes leads them to say.

So you are trying to "speak," as naturally as possible, whilst simultaneously censoring and prodding and trying to figure out just how you can delay realizations and drop necessary background information and otherwise shape this conversational stream to form itself into the arcs of sentences, paragraphs, and scenes.

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