On Fri, 07 Nov 1997 12:21:13 PST, "Soren Smith" <freemage@hotmail.com>
wrote:

Most fics are, indeed, written in third person, for two reasons I can 
think of:

A)  Narration.  First person locks in your POV, preventing you from 
writing anything that the narrator doesn't experience or hear about.

True. This is the reason I've only written one of my major fics ("A
Peaceful Life") in first person, though I personally find first person
*easier* to write because I can get away with less description. Even on
this fic, I had to cheat with one scene by saying "I wasn't there for
what happened next, but Ryoga's told the story to me about a billion
times."

B)  Characterization.  In FF's this is even more important.  When a 
story is told first-person, every action the narrator takes is 
amplified, so that even slightly OOC behavior is blown out of 
proportion.  Even the style of narration has to be IC (a number of Ranma 
fics told from Ranma's POV forget about this, giving him a level of 
self-awareness he rarely displays).  Unless told as a distant 
retrospective, characters should use the same ``voice'' that they use in 
the source material.

Gotta disagree with ya here. The way people talk is not always the way
they think. Ranma IMO presents a certain face to the world because
that's what he's confortable having people see him as. I do believe he's
capable of a greater self-awareness than you'd know from his usual
dialog, even if he'd rather not admit it to someone else or even to
himself.


Gary Kleppe
http://www.execpc.com/~kleppe/comics