User blog comment:Grizzly Bear/Writing In Third Person!/@comment-4665292-20140603225306

For me it's a lot easier to write in first person. I mean, I'd absolutely love to write in third person, since that'd make it so much simpler to describe characters and stuff, not to mention that it'd allow for a bunch of additional ways to mindfuck readers, but it also has a lot more potential complications.

I'm a slow and pretty crappy writer to begin with, and writing in third person would only amplify that because it'd mean putting a lot more thought into locations, etc. In first person, writing "I walked down the street for what felt like hours" seems fine, but in third person, it'd come across kinda clumsy to write "S/he walked down the street for what felt like hours" because the inexistent/objective narrator wouldn't have any reason feel all the hours of non-time that the character did, and then the street would pretty much have to be described, etc. even if it's not relevant in the slightest, just to give readers the feeling that it felt like hours for the character. (If it was relevant that it felt like hours, at least.)

It might also not have the impact it'd have if it was written from a first-person perspective. For example, describing mental illnesses or such. It's a lot more likely for someone to have an emotional/horrified reaction to something that's written as if it was true to the character(s) even if it's clear that it isn't from an objective point of view than if it's written from said objectional view as if it was true, because the latter would make it harder to suspend disbelief or whatever. And describing the delusional worldview as delusional would risk breaking the atmosphere unless something else was milked into it, at least for me.

As for the whole argument that it's illogical/unrealistic for the narrator to write about the things... well, I don't know. I personally don't read first-person stories as if they'd happened already unless it's clearly important that they have, or becomes important later on; whether it's been written down at all is also not important most of the time, unless it's important to the plot. I mean, I assumed no one read everything as "real" (I might not have the best timing to say this, considering those 12-year-olds...) unless it was something that's really, really well-written and necessitates that kind of relation.

I mean, maybe I'm stupid or whatever, but I think horror (or creepypastas in general, which may or may not always be technically horror) written in first person is no different from sci-fi or fantasy or whatever written in first person when it comes to the attachment readers have to characters. Sure, it might be easier to relate to some random person who finds a mysterious abandoned cellar or something than to a genderless cyborg elf living on a faraway planet, but isn't that all up to the writer? Like, if the writer succeeds in writing stuff that grabs you and you can relate to the characters (whether it's written in first person, second person or third person or fourth person), doesn't that make it more likely for you to disregard the leaps of logic/plotholes/unrealism than the opposite, regardless of how little the plot makes sense, how logical it is for the characters to do what they do, and how unrealistic it is?

And eh, I didn't mean for this comment to become this long, but well...