Wilmer Stone read our stories to us in a monotone as if he were reading from the pages of a phone directory. What we learned with each stab of pain was that the words themselves and not the inflections supplied by the reader had to carry the emotion of the story.
– Solutions For Writers by Sol Stein

I’d like to challenge you.

Take the nearest piece of writing – something you’ve been writing or reading – and read it aloud with no emotion or inflection whatsoever.

How does the story change?

I’ve been on and off reading Sol Stein’s Solutions For Writers, one of the few practical and useful writing handbooks.

Best of all, it makes me think.

The words, and not the inflections, have to carry the emotion of the story.

I have a tendency to overuse italics, forcing a stress onto a particular word to make the sentence have a certain emphasis. When revising, I strip the story of all formatting. The only italics that go back in are the ones I simply can’t avoid – and even those I consider a luxury.

I’m sure others have their own guilty pleasures. A personal pet peeve is exclamation marks; while I don’t subscribe to the drastic rule of having max one exclamation mark every three pages, I’d delete them wherever possible.

Exclamation marks and italics have their place, but if abused they lose their meaning. What’s worse is that they impede you from hearing the true meat of your story.

So be sparing. Strip away all inflections. Listen to what the words alone are saying, and make them precise and clear.

When you’ve finished revising, read your story aloud as if you’re reading from the pages of a phone directory.

You may be surprised by what you find.

Inevitably, when I get a novel idea, it comes to me in first person.

The climatic moment of self-realisation (which for me generally comes first with a story) simply sounds better in first.

I lie in a daze, following the words, discovering the story… Yet when I sit to write, I write in third.

And if I start writing in first – or try changing a story into first – nine times out of ten, I change it to third.

Why?

Is it because of what I’ve read?
I haven’t come across many good books written in first. Most of the ones I’ve read have been fairly average, so perhaps I’ve subconsciously linked average writing with first person.

Is it because of genre?
A pitfall for writing in first is that it’s easy to get caught up in the protagonist and forget to pan out to the world at large. With a science fantasy like Above Ground, the world is bigger than any one character… and third person allows me to step back and describe the world without the very personal first person point of view distorting it.

Is it aesthetic?
The beauty of third person is the aching distance between reader and protagonist. You feel her pain yet can simultaneously see the bigger picture, which makes the moment all the more exquisite. For me the distance of third person allows for greater immersion and suspension of disbelief; I sink into the character because I want to, not because I’m forced to by the pronoun ‘I’.

Or is it something else?
Perhaps I am making excuses. The more I reread the above list the more doubts I have. The reasons which seemed so solid in my head appear now as flimsy as the screen from which they glow.

Thinking about it, I’ve read many averagely written third person novels – and don’t know why they stick out less in my mind. And a good writer could successfully use first person regardless of genre.

Perhaps it is simply experience. The majority of the books I love are written in third, and that is the sole reason for my unconscious bias.

What about you? Are you biased one way or another?