Does 1st person pull you in

[warty goblin]

Agreed on the difficulty with changing perspectives, though I think most of that can be mitigated at least somewhat if it's only for a couple of chapters, and is clearly telegraphed. I think a good writer could do some interesting things with switching first-person perspectives though, like two different characters having very distinct 'internal voices', allowing you to tell them apart, even without any clear indication about whose mind you are currently inhabiting.

I recall some of Patricia Brigg's later Mercy Thompson novels doing this, adding a number of chapters from Adam's point of view, although I'm not 100% sure they were in first person as well. Nevertheless his POV was certainly distinct, albeit also boring since Adam's entire character is more or less angry sexy Alpha male dude who is sexy and angry.

I thought the perspective and character switches in the Bartimaeus series were much more interesting, since it used the greater intimacy of first person for the non-human character, and a somewhat chillier third person for the generally alienated and miserable humans. Still, particularly given how the series ends, kinda leaves hanging who Bartimaeus is supposed to be talking to, though.

N. K. Jemisen does something like that in the Fifth Season, although with second person narration in one of the storylines. That was slightly interesting, since it was one character narrating what another had done back to them, but ended up feeling extremely overwritten and flat. Rather like the rest of the book, really.

[Tvtyrant]

A good example of it working well is Hands Clean by Alanis Morrissette, who is putting herself in the hands of her molester and singing from his perspective.

[JoshL]

N. K. Jemisen does something like that in the Fifth Season, although with second person narration in one of the storylines. That was slightly interesting, since it was one character narrating what another had done back to them, but ended up feeling extremely overwritten and flat. Rather like the rest of the book, really.

Big YMMV on that one; I loved that series and the narrative development of the first I thought added a lot to it.

For an interesting, if even more "gimmicky" second person book, I'd recommend "If on a winter's night a traveler" by Italo Calvino, which bounces narrative perspective around a lot. It's a lot of fun and a super quick read

[Corlindale]

I think it can give something extra when done right, but it depends on the book and how well it is pulled off. I will also echo the sentiment that the narrator's likeability is a huuuge factor in how much I enjoy a first person story.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is probably the best novel I've read within the past five years, and I think it makes extremely good use of the first person narrator. The story is in large parts a mystery story about slowly figuring out the nature of the main character and his world, and his own gradually increasing knowledge comes across really well through the first person perspective. And he is also a very likable main character, which the first person perspective also helps reinforce. So the use of first person works for me on several levels in this particular case.

I also enjoy the second person perspective when it is done well, just because it is so rare, and you can do some fun fourth-wall breakage with it. Done right, this can pull you into a story in a quite dramatic way. The early parts of The Crimson Petal and the White makes very good use of second person, but unfortunately I do not think it is sustained that well throughout the rest of the novel. So all in all it's more of a mediocre book with a stellar opening chapter.

[KorvinStarmast]

Usually not, but Robin Hobb's Farseer books pull it off very effectively.

You beat me to it; she pulled it off very well.

I read a lot of noir detective stories growing up and as a young adult, which has a lot of first person narration. It can be done well, and it can also flop.

[Glorthindel]

One problem is it does leave nowhere to hide; I love the writing style of the Rivers of London series, but have found a couple of times, towards the end of a couple of the books, the lead character has made a leap of logic that has left me thinking "where did that come from? I've seen everything you have, and I haven't seen anything to tip off that connection". You can get away with that a bit more in third-person view, but in first person, where you are privy to the main characters thoughts, a move like that can be a bit jarring.

[truemane]

Rules are tricky when it comes to art. To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, great writers have a bad habit of writing great work while breaking them. But the only (useful) rule I've ever found that doesn't seem to have an exception is: Whatever you do, make a point, even if your point is there is no point.

Which, to me, among other things, means that whatever you put on the page needs to earn its keep. Every word costs the reader, so every word needs to provide benefit to outweigh that cost. Being the most common and the most familiar, third-person-past has the lowest cost. Any other perspective needs to provide some salient benefit to the story, or it's self-indulgent.

And you can sit an omniscient narrator inside the main character's head and narrate their thoughts and feelings and get everything a first-person POV would provide. So the key element of 1st person isn't that you can see inside someone's head, it's that you can't see outside of it. So, for me, 1st Person isn't so much a question of 'does knowing more about this person add to the story' and more like 'does this person (and therefore the reader) knowing less about the story add to the story?'

I remember when I got to the end of SE Hinton's The Outsiders and it turned out that (Spoilers for SE Hinton's the Outsiders) the book I just read was an essay Ponyboy was writing about what was truly important to him (and the final line of the novel is him writing the first line of the novel). That was the first time I'd ever encountered that in a book and it was so amazing it still makes me smile all these years later.

Margaret Atwood's debut novel The Edible Woman (about a young adult woman trying to find her identity within the perceived prison of her gender role) opens in first person and then transitions to third for the bulk of the novel and then, in the denouement, goes back to first, and she says "At least I was thinking about myself in the first person again' which is a use of POV so perfect, so ingenious, so smoothly integral to the work as a whole, that the only example I can think of in all literature that even competes is Agatha Christie's Murder of Robert Akroyd (which I'm not even going to spoil here even though it was published in 1926, if you haven't heard of it, and you like mystery novels, do yourself a favour and go read it).

All that being said, I really enjoy 1st person when it's in the hands of a good, disciplined writer who really has something to say that can't be said in any other way. I think it tends to work better in short fiction, where the entire piece can be about a single misunderstanding or a sudden reveal or a singular instance of dramatic irony. In longer pieces, the cost is much higher.

[Aedilred]

I think ultimately it's a stylistic choice and can either work or not depending on how good the writing is.

It is, I think, generally better for giving insight into a character's thoughts and feelings, and portraying things from their singular perspective. That can be a bit artificial coming from third-person, and even the recent series that comes to mind as having done it best (Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy) is still rather arch in its styling.

Does it pull me in? It can do, but I don't think the choice of first versus third makes too much of a difference to that. Perhaps first-person can be better at really digging its hooks in with emotional appeal right off the bat.

Some of my favourite novels are first-person: Robert Harris's Cicero trilogy; Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles; The Silence of the Girls; the Rivers of London series; The Remains of the Day; all the Jeeves and Wooster series; Julian. And Midnight's Children, which I would feel remiss if I didn't mention. But I could probably name at least an equal number of novels I'm fond of that are third-person-narrated.

Just steer clear of second-person. The only novels I can think of that have come remotely close to pulling that off are the Fifth Season trilogy and even then the second-person voice annoyed me all the way through the first novel and most of the second before I finally got the message as to who the narrator of that section was and why it was in that voice and it made a lot more sense.

[KorvinStarmast]

I am on the third book of R.A. MacAvoy's Lens of the World trilogy (The Belly of the Wolf) and am finding the first person style to be at times perfectly suited to the story and at other times awkward (even though MacAvoy is a fine writer and wordsmith).

Spoiler: Tea with a stone dragon?

Show

I am having a weird deja vu to the Fitz stories by Robin Hobb (also told in the first person), and specifically the Assassins' trilogy that started that one off. Lens of the World, as a series, involves a royally related illegitimate child, education provided and a unique older mentor, affinity for a wolf, being an assassin, travels/world exploration, unusual skills, love and loss, and the ultimate volume features a quest into a mountainous area during winter. Did these two compare notes over tea?

[ghbok]

I do find that over-the-shoulder third-person is quite common. That is, the story is written in "he walked over", but the entire story is limited to the protagonist and the protagonist's head. This may be the closest to first-person without technically being first-person.

[Spike_99]

When reading 1st/Present does it pull you into the Protags mind?
What voice makes it feel most like you're tagging along and are inhabiting the character?

I love 1st person stories: I love getting thoroughly pulled in by the main character. As some other people have pointed out, 1st person works very well for stories with a mystery element to it like detective stories & urban fantasy, which often have a mystery to solve.

I'm a huge fan of the Alex Verus series & Benedict Jacka does 1st person very well. In that series, Alex's magic (divination) shows him the future & no one else can see it, so 1st person is really the best way to do it so when Alex is sorting through his possible futures, it's more immersive. He did one short story so far in the same universe from the POV of a time mage. Instead of looking into the future, the time mage looks into the past. It was cool seeing how that magic works compared to Alex's.

Other authors who've done it well:
Andy Weir - Project Hail Mary. That story really only could have been told using 1st person. Any other POV wouldn't have worked nearly so well.
Christopher Buehlman - The Blacktongue Thief
Peter McLean - War for the Rose Throne series (I've only listened to the first book so far, but Thomas Piety's "voice" is distinctive and is fantastic in 1st person)
Dennis E. Taylor - the Bobiverse series
Jim Butcher - The Dresden Files series
Luke Arnold - The Fetch Phillips Archives
Andrea Stewart - The Bone Shard Daughter (it's multiple 1st person POVs, which is rare)

[Tyndmyr]

It's a tool, like anything else. It can be used to good or bad effect, but it's not inherently right or wrong, just like a shovel isn't noble or evil in itself.

First person works best for plots where we tend to follow a single person a great deal, and where the internal narrative matters quite a lot. This gives us a somewhat more naturalistic way to focus on those elements. Noir is perhaps the genre where this is most critical, but it's not essential even there. Cyberpunk sprang from noir, after all, but plenty of cyberpunk works are third person.

If there's a large ensemble cast and/or a lot of action-oriented content, third person is a better choice. Can you imagine reading Game of Thrones all in first person?

Second person is also an option, I guess, but a very rare one. Works well enough for the Choose Your Own Adventure books if you read those as a kid.

[Draconi Redfir]

I've read the Animorphs books which took place in 1st person, and that was okay... Ultimately though, I prefer 3rd person for one main reason:

it helps me remember the Character's name.

If you write a 1st person book about a character named like, "Jake hooverdang" or whatever, i am NOT going to remember his name for the entirety of the book. at some point someone will address the character and my immediate reaction will just be "wait... who?" followed by a short panic that i missed something before i take the hint.


other disadvantages of 1st person are that it kind of kills immersion, like the character is talking to you and telling you their story, rather then you reading a story that's just about them. i don't want to be a part of this story, i want to read YOUR story. stop talking to me.


that's not to say 1st person (or even 2nd person) is bad. i just wouldn't say it "pulls me in".

[Fiery Diamond]

other disadvantages of 1st person are that it kind of kills immersion, like the character is talking to you and telling you their story, rather then you reading a story that's just about them. i don't want to be a part of this story, i want to read YOUR story. stop talking to me.

I've never really understood this complaint. Do people who have this view feel that a third-person story is literally being told to them by some omniscient god or worse, the author themselves directly? If so, how is being talked to by a character any worse than that? If not, why is first person any different than third person on that front? Maybe it's because I talk to myself IRL so much (probably a higher word count of me talking to myself than me talking to every other living person I've talked to combined), and subsequently don't see the difference between thinking and talking, but if anything, the only potentially immersion-breaking aspect would be that stories are usually in the past tense rather than the present tense. Also, even if you considered it as the character literally talking about what happened (which I don't, and as mentioned above, don't understand why you would treat that as the default), why would you feel that they were talking to the reader, rather than, for example, simply recounting events to themselves?

I genuinely don't get it.

[ecarden]

I've never really understood this complaint. Do people who have this view feel that a third-person story is literally being told to them by some omniscient god or worse, the author themselves directly? If so, how is being talked to by a character any worse than that? If not, why is first person any different than third person on that front? Maybe it's because I talk to myself IRL so much (probably a higher word count of me talking to myself than me talking to every other living person I've talked to combined), and subsequently don't see the difference between thinking and talking, but if anything, the only potentially immersion-breaking aspect would be that stories are usually in the past tense rather than the present tense. Also, even if you considered it as the character literally talking about what happened (which I don't, and as mentioned above, don't understand why you would treat that as the default), why would you feel that they were talking to the reader, rather than, for example, simply recounting events to themselves?

I genuinely don't get it.

So, it depends. A lot of third person narration is basically describing the situation, so it can be very similar to simply watching a tv show, occasionally with access to what folks are thinking. Then there's third person omniscient narration which is very much like exactly what it is, a story being told to you by an author.

For first person narration, it does tend to raise the question of who they're talking to. Caiaphas Cain and Vlad Taltos are not talking to ecarden, so how am I hearing it? Both those stories give an answer to that question, which works for me, but without that narrative explanation, it does nag at me sometime.

[Fiery Diamond]

So, it depends. A lot of third person narration is basically describing the situation, so it can be very similar to simply watching a tv show, occasionally with access to what folks are thinking. Then there's third person omniscient narration which is very much like exactly what it is, a story being told to you by an author.

For first person narration, it does tend to raise the question of who they're talking to. Caiaphas Cain and Vlad Taltos are not talking to ecarden, so how am I hearing it? Both those stories give an answer to that question, which works for me, but without that narrative explanation, it does nag at me sometime.

But why though? What is the fundamental difference between "a description" and "a description in first person?" If you were watching a TV show where the camera was "through the eyes of the main character" so that you never saw the main character in full, like videogames where you play in first person view, how is that not the same as a story written in first person? You already mentioned that third person can occasionally show the thoughts of a character, so why is showing the thoughts of the character from whose perspective the story is written any different than that?

[warty goblin]

I've never really understood this complaint. Do people who have this view feel that a third-person story is literally being told to them by some omniscient god or worse, the author themselves directly? If so, how is being talked to by a character any worse than that? If not, why is first person any different than third person on that front? Maybe it's because I talk to myself IRL so much (probably a higher word count of me talking to myself than me talking to every other living person I've talked to combined), and subsequently don't see the difference between thinking and talking, but if anything, the only potentially immersion-breaking aspect would be that stories are usually in the past tense rather than the present tense. Also, even if you considered it as the character literally talking about what happened (which I don't, and as mentioned above, don't understand why you would treat that as the default), why would you feel that they were talking to the reader, rather than, for example, simply recounting events to themselves?

I genuinely don't get it.

Why is thinking that the author is telling me a story worse? That's literally what is going on; Jane Author wrote a story, and I'm reading it. Unless we're into the realm of authobiography, Jane Author is not telling a story about what happened to them, personally, but what happened to other people who may or may not even be real. When people tell stories about other people, real or imaginary, they use the third person, and have pretty consistently done so for as long as people have been writing about other people. Probably longer. I mean the opening to The Iliad is Homer telling you he's telling a story, after which the first person storyteller completely vanishes.

I find for most pieces of fiction the first person just ends up feeling even more artificial than the third person, since it's either the character telling me the story, or, vastly worse, it's supposed to be some sort of weird thought-transcript of what's going through their heads. I talk to myself all the time as well, but I don't think in sentences and paragraphs and punctuation, a lot of the time I don't even think in stream of consciousness style word vomit. I find the first case, where it is acknowledged as the character telling me the story can work, because people tell stories about themselves in the first person. Epistolary novels, stories presented as a diary, or pretty much anything else that explains why this is written in this weird way that people only use when talking about themselves to others goes a long way towards getting over that bizarre artifice. If nothing else the inherent/implicit frame narrative that comes from anything written in a vaguely epistolary fashion allows for some creativity

[Fiery Diamond]

Why is thinking that the author is telling me a story worse? That's literally what is going on; Jane Author wrote a story, and I'm reading it. Unless we're into the realm of authobiography, Jane Author is not telling a story about what happened to them, personally, but what happened to other people who may or may not even be real. When people tell stories about other people, real or imaginary, they use the third person, and have pretty consistently done so for as long as people have been writing about other people. Probably longer. I mean the opening to The Iliad is Homer telling you he's telling a story, after which the first person storyteller completely vanishes.

I find for most pieces of fiction the first person just ends up feeling even more artificial than the third person, since it's either the character telling me the story, or, vastly worse, it's supposed to be some sort of weird thought-transcript of what's going through their heads. I talk to myself all the time as well, but I don't think in sentences and paragraphs and punctuation, a lot of the time I don't even think in stream of consciousness style word vomit. I find the first case, where it is acknowledged as the character telling me the story can work, because people tell stories about themselves in the first person. Epistolary novels, stories presented as a diary, or pretty much anything else that explains why this is written in this weird way that people only use when talking about themselves to others goes a long way towards getting over that bizarre artifice. If nothing else the inherent/implicit frame narrative that comes from anything written in a vaguely epistolary fashion allows for some creativity

Question right back at you: why is the "thought-transcript" a negative thing? That sounds pretty positive to me. I do think in full sentences all the time, by the way, so I don't get where you're coming from at all. Basically, anything that isn't straight emotion and impulse is in full sentences for me, or at least large portions of sentences.

Also, if you read the person who replied to me before you, it turns out that at least some other people don't interpret third-person stories that don't have an explicit entity narrating as being narrated by the author, but see it as a verbal version of watching a show. I'd go so far as to guess that MOST people probably feel that way.

Just as you see negatives in the things you see negatives in, I find the idea of the real-world author being the actual person literally telling me a story to be a truly horrendous thing, which breaks immersion more than pretty much anything else in the entire realm of storytelling possibly could for me... at least when it comes to telling stories that aren't supposedly set in our unmodified real world, like historical fiction.

[Draconi Redfir]

I've never really understood this complaint. Do people who have this view feel that a third-person story is literally being told to them by some omniscient god or worse, the author themselves directly? If so, how is being talked to by a character any worse than that? If not, why is first person any different than third person on that front? Maybe it's because I talk to myself IRL so much (probably a higher word count of me talking to myself than me talking to every other living person I've talked to combined), and subsequently don't see the difference between thinking and talking, but if anything, the only potentially immersion-breaking aspect would be that stories are usually in the past tense rather than the present tense. Also, even if you considered it as the character literally talking about what happened (which I don't, and as mentioned above, don't understand why you would treat that as the default), why would you feel that they were talking to the reader, rather than, for example, simply recounting events to themselves?

I genuinely don't get it.

I generally view it less as (in the context of reading 3rd person books) "an omniscient being is narrating the story to me" and more "I am observing the story myself." Like how i observe ants crawling around the field. i see one ant crawl up the leaf, i see it look around and get lost before climbing back down, and then it grabs some food and goes home. for me in that moment, the movements of the ant is not being dictated to me, i am just observing it, nothing more and nothing less.

[Fiery Diamond]

I generally view it less as (in the context of reading 3rd person books) "an omniscient being is narrating the story to me" and more "I am observing the story myself." Like how i observe ants crawling around the field. i see one ant crawl up the leaf, i see it look around and get lost before climbing back down, and then it grabs some food and goes home. for me in that moment, the movements of the ant is not being dictated to me, i am just observing it, nothing more and nothing less.

I think this is how most people probably feel. What I don't understand is why it being in first person makes any difference to that.

[Draconi Redfir]

I think this is how most people probably feel. What I don't understand is why it being in first person makes any difference to that.

i guess it's some kind of conversation thing? "i do this, i do that. i am feeling this way" translates in my mind to "someone is talking to me"

Whereas "Bob ran around the room three times, his head full of clouds and confusion, was Shana really his mother!?" is just a description of events with no clear source.

[Velaryon]

1st person doesn't bother me at all. I didn't realize there were so many people who were bothered by it, either - I only know one person who's ever mentioned that they don't like 1st person narration.

Second person is also an option, I guess, but a very rare one. Works well enough for the Choose Your Own Adventure books if you read those as a kid.

I'll go as far as to say that's the only place where 2nd person works. Well, that and instructions. Every single other use I've ever seen of 2nd person has been awful and completely ruined the story for me.

[Tyndmyr]

I'll go as far as to say that's the only place where 2nd person works. Well, that and instructions. Every single other use I've ever seen of 2nd person has been awful and completely ruined the story for me.

Yeah, it's...really specific. I think I've seen it used for a short story here and there, but it only works for very, very specific sorts of story, because making the reader the protagonist just...doesn't usually work. I can't think of a full novel I've read that both used second person and wasn't awful.

Stories such as "This is How You Lose the Time War" would require first person, I think. It's a story told through a series of letters, and if memory serves, the brief portions of it that are not letters are third person, but the letters themselves are of course first person. The book's a bit light for my taste overall despite the fun premise, but it's probably a decent look at the use of 1st v 3rd person.

[Draconi Redfir]

yeah, i used second-person for a shorty story about you waking up to find yourself in a "Cube" (the film) -like facility during a writing class a few years back. Helped make my story stand out apart from the rest, which was nice.


For me at least, the second-person narrative was helpful in that situation because i was kind of trying to emulate the feeling of being immersed in a video game, you are playing your own character, and this is the setting you are in. You're not anyone special, you're not "The chosen one" or anything of the sort, you're just one of multiple other people all stick in the same circumstances. By nature of the human mind, everyone reading the story would have a slightly different perspective or feeling on what's happening, and so long as the writer avoids things like "you feel nervous because of this situation" and sticks with just "this is the situation you find yourself in" then it could work well.


Had the story gotten to the point where you reach a conclusion and escape the facility then maybe it would be different, as i would have needed to dictate every step you took along the way. As it was though, it was a 500-word-only story, so i couldn't really do much with it beyond basic introductions and settup.

Edit: Actually found an early version of the short story. don't think this was the finished result, as it kind of cuts out at the end there. Know i had trouble with the 500 word limit thing. had to get help from my sister to condense everything down into a working format.

Spoiler: 2nd person story

Show

You wake up to the sensation of falling, your body lurching as you realize what's going on, your hands flailing to reach for a ground that doesn't exist beneath you. Just as suddenly however, you feel yourself crash to a foutionately soft landing. It takes a moment for your head to fully register what had happened, your body slowly wiggling it's fingers and toes to make sure everything was still attached as you force yourself to climb out of your soft Savior and into the dark room you find yourself in. It takes a moment for your eyes to adjust to the dim light, but in that time you can easily make out your immidiate surroundings. You're in a room, small and square, with only one visible door. Where you landed there is what you can only describe as a ridiculously oversized beanbag chair taking up the majority of the space, seemingly designed to catch you as you fell from the now-visible gap in the ceiling. Climbing back onto the beanbag-chair, you strain your neck to look up the gap, there is no visible exit or way to climb up, merely a long, dark shaft that vanishes into blackness.

Reluctantly you stand once more, looking around and seeing nothing but the one door out of this room, a small table next to it holding an array of items. Carefully you approach, finding them to be an empty notebook with an attatched pen, a bag filled with some kind of dried-up pellets, a quick taste reveals them to be edible if nothing else, and a plain canteen half-filled with water. With no other options, you take the lot of them, quickly taking a moment to write your name, what you assume is the date, and a brief summery of your current situation into the journal, may as well right?

The next room is as plain as the last, dimly-lit, square, white-painted walls, nothing of note. On the opposite side, there is another door. Beyond this door is a distinct humming sound, one that can quickly be identified as you open the door to a purple room of the same size as the previous two. In this one however, the floor appears to be moving like a tredmill towards you, every step you take pushing you away from the door on the opposite side.

[Velaryon]

2nd person doesn't work for me because it's meant to convey to the reader that the character is them, but... it's not. It kinda works for Choose Your Own Adventure because those stories give the reader choices to make, but in any other case it just feels very artificial to me. I have seen it in a few places, most recently one of the short stories in Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View, where it completely ruined the story for me.

[KorvinStarmast]

Other authors who've done it well:
Andy Weir - Project Hail Mary. That story really only could have been told using 1st person. Any other POV wouldn't have worked nearly so well.
Christopher Buehlman - The Blacktongue Thief
Peter McLean - War for the Rose Throne series (I've only listened to the first book so far, but Thomas Piety's "voice" is distinctive and is fantastic in 1st person)
Dennis E. Taylor - the Bobiverse series
Jim Butcher - The Dresden Files series
Luke Arnold - The Fetch Phillips Archives
Andrea Stewart - The Bone Shard Daughter (it's multiple 1st person POVs, which is rare)

*takes copious notes*

yeah, i used second-person for a shorty story about you waking up to find yourself in a "Cube" (the film) -like facility during a writing class a few years back. Helped make my story stand out apart from the rest, which was nice.

I don't think I've ever written in the second person. I think I need to try one. (Short story, very short). I can't (other than choose your own adventure books) recall every reading something in the second person. (Maybe I have and just don't recognize it).

Any famous examples?

Spoiler: 2nd person story

Show

You wake up to the sensation of falling, your body lurching as you realize what's going on, your hands flailing to reach for a ground that doesn't exist beneath you. Just as suddenly however, you feel yourself crash to a foutionately soft landing. It takes a moment for your head to fully register what had happened, your body slowly wiggling it's fingers and toes to make sure everything was still attached as you force yourself to climb out of your soft Savior and into the dark room you find yourself in. It takes a moment for your eyes to adjust to the dim light, but in that time you can easily make out your immidiate surroundings. You're in a room, small and square, with only one visible door. Where you landed there is what you can only describe as a ridiculously oversized beanbag chair taking up the majority of the space, seemingly designed to catch you as you fell from the now-visible gap in the ceiling. Climbing back onto the beanbag-chair, you strain your neck to look up the gap, there is no visible exit or way to climb up, merely a long, dark shaft that vanishes into blackness.

Reluctantly you stand once more, looking around and seeing nothing but the one door out of this room, a small table next to it holding an array of items. Carefully you approach, finding them to be an empty notebook with an attatched pen, a bag filled with some kind of dried-up pellets, a quick taste reveals them to be edible if nothing else, and a plain canteen half-filled with water. With no other options, you take the lot of them, quickly taking a moment to write your name, what you assume is the date, and a brief summery of your current situation into the journal, may as well right?

The next room is as plain as the last, dimly-lit, square, white-painted walls, nothing of note. On the opposite side, there is another door. Beyond this door is a distinct humming sound, one that can quickly be identified as you open the door to a purple room of the same size as the previous two. In this one however, the floor appears to be moving like a tredmill towards you, every step you take pushing you away from the door on the opposite side.

That reads to me like an ad for a game ...

[Lord Torath]

I've done some second person bits, but those were dream scenes I was handing out to players in a D&D game (dream room in X2 - Castle Amber), and it worked there pretty well. Another one where the Paladin had a dream from the perspective of his 'warhorse' (this was 2E AD&D where paladins may need to quest for their mount) that the player really enjoyed. He thought he was going to get the giant elk he saw in the dream, but ended up with the sabre-toothed tiger that took it down. He was not disappointed.

I rather like 1st person, when it's done well. Robin McKinley has a lot in 1st person. Sunshine is probably my favorite of hers, and I read it as her telling her story to the SOFs sometime after the end of the book.

I wasn't as fond of the 1st person present tense in the Hunger Games series, although I can sort of see why Suzanne Collins wrote it that way. It makes it more immediate, with the action happening right now, and not repeated from the perspective of looking back on it afterward.

Edit: Has anyone here read The Chronicles of Elantra (by Michelle Sagara), otherwise known as the Cast in < > books (Cast in Shadow, Cast in Courtlight, Cast in Secret, Cast in you get the idea)? Those are also told from 1st person, and they are fantastic. Nope, they're told from over-the-shoulder 3rd person from Kaylin's perspective. My mistake.

[Draconi Redfir]

That reads to me like an ad for a game ...

kinda yea. I had a very (very, VERY) loose concept for a game a few years back where you need to walk in a straight line, managing food and water supplies while walking through rooms that would drain or dispense those resources in different ways. With the odd body of another player lying around acting almost as communal bonfires, letting you take or leave resources as you desire, and leave notes in their journals to tell others what you experienced and what clues or memories you've seen to try and figure out what is going on with other players. (Like the saferoom walls in left 4 dead)

For the writing assignment, i just kinda took that idea and turned it into a story.

[Vinyadan]

I think first person can be very powerful as a marketing tool. If you, as the author, can lead the reader to confuse you with the hero narrator, you can turn yourself into a huge presence in the public mind as it buys into his myth. This, of course, is the artistic way to do it; the other option is to outright lie about yourself and give copious confirmation that you totally lived through all that

On the other hand you have odd situations where the story is narrated in first person and it is autobiographical, but the character is different from the author. So Dostoevsky wrote about his exile to Siberia, but would rather not talk about why he was sent there, and created a first-person narrator, Goryanchikov, who got sent to Siberia for killing his own wife. Result: people started to believe Dostoevsky had killed his wife.