First person and first novels
Back when I was still working on my first novel, I mentioned it to a bibliophile acquaintance who had been in academia for many years. She cheerfully turned to the woman next to her and said, “Did you hear that? Pat’s working on a novel! And it’s in the third person!”
I spent years being slightly taken aback by this reaction, as third person seemed to me to be the obvious choice. After all, at least 80% of the books I read and loved were in third person. It was somewhere between five and ten...
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Denise
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Dec 14, 2018 11:52PM
I had never heard of these prejudices before, but your arguments against them are sound. As I read your article, it also occurred to me that the idea "first-person first novels are usually bad" could also come about because of statistics. It's more likely that a first novel, regardless of POV, will be relatively inferior simply due to its nature as a first attempt. If first novels are also statistically more likely to be written in first-person, it would follow that first-person first novels would be more likely to be less well-executed. So, it's possible this prejudice is based on correlation rather than causality.
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