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"1st or 3rd person?"

When reading novels, what do you prefer, firstperson writing, or third person?

If you don't understand the question, I probably wouldn't value your input anyway! ;-P

The only time I've ever written in the first person is when I was writing a horror story for school. Just so I could describe what it would be like to hear footsteps from every angle. I got an A*, so it was OK.

I think the best thing about 3rd person is that you can switch from focusing on one person to another with no confusion. Otherwise you'll just get a whole lot of "I"'s. Imagine what it would have been like if LotR had been written in the first person.

I used to like the third person because I could denote a person of no importance by not giving them a name and simply refering to them as "he" all the time. I used to think that third person allowed you to be way more descriptive as well, but then I read "On the Road" and that changed my perspective a lot, but Kerouac was a better writer than most and so he pulled it off without too much bother. All of his books were written spontaneously as well, with no drafting and as little editing as possible, written while he bummed his away across America.

I've not been able to write anything creative for years at school. We've just been writing essay after essat after essay on plays and books and poems. Currently we're ploughing through "Volpone" by Ben Jonson, with an essay-based exam on it in the summer. Sadly the irony that Ben Jonson frequently berated essay writers as morons and hated anything in essay form is a little lost on OCR examination board.

I find that writing in 1st-person is best, it is easier to describe it asif it is you, instead of someone else...if you know what I mean. Howeve, I suppose that different types of writing(story, real-life account etc) would require different writing styles

Grix, if you really want to scare your English teacher try writing in a stream of consciousness style - it's sort of half way between first person and third person. And if you really, really want to scare her then read a Hubert Selby book, speech flows into the narrative without any grammatical indication; he doesn't use apostrophes, for reasons best known to himself and at times of drama you get these huge long sentences that build up like a piece of music. While this could possibly induce coronary failure in your teacher if it's pulled off it can be the most evocative, beautiful style of writing.

Personally I prefer writing in the third person; I find it's easier to be descriptive, whereas if you try to do the same thing in the first person your narrator just comes across as verbose. Having said that 'On the Road' by Jack Kerouac is written in the first person and it's an exceptional book. I used to have loads of short stories I'd written stored on the computer but then I accidently formatted the hard-disk. From memory I think only one or two of them were in the first person. I guess that's the legacy of the truly awful personal experience stories I had to write when little.

Anyway MrHappy prefers to write in the third person, but nurses deep insecurities about the first person after I had to write about my guinea pig getting lost under the shed. In the first person...

Wow. Cool. :0D

Third person, without a doubt.

True Grix, but you are a great writer - You certainly inspired me with you're use of lanuage and perpective:-

After reading one of your stories, I re-wrote a piece of GCSE coursework (a story), and took it from a c to an A-

I forgot to thank you as well ;)

Yup, if you break the rules to make it better, by all means do so, I say.

I'm hardly a revolutionist by writing in more than one perspective, mind. :0D

It really depends on the story!

Some books just wouldn't work as well in 3rd person, others just wouldn't work in 1st person.

It often depends on what you're trying to describe, and the characters in the story.

as grix mentioned, he writes in both - it may not be a widely accepted format for English teachers, but I have not failed to enjoy one of Grix's stories!

It's easier to describe a story by doing it in 3rd person

Unless you make your character really descriptive, like Max Payne is, heh

Also, you kind of have to stick with the main character while in 1st person, whereas 3rd person - you can follow different characters throughout