The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #96356   Message #1884796
Posted By: Grab
13-Nov-06 - 12:41 PM
Thread Name: BS: Novel preferences 1st or 3rd?
Subject: RE: BS: Novel preferences 1st or 3rd?
Description is the road to tedium

Better avoid anything more complex than your typical airport thriller then! ;-)

Description is where you *really* tell who's a good writer and who isn't. Check out Gerald Durrell for example, who can happily cover 3 pages describing a single moment in Corfu - and I wouldn't change a word of it.

Back to the main question, it's like asking whether we prefer food or drink. They both give different styles and different ways of approaching the story. The one thing that I *don't* like though is a totally god-like third-person approach, where the author thinks they can dip into every character's head at random. That just doesn't work, and it's a sign of a bad writer. For third-person to work, if you're describing what people are thinking/feeling then it has to be from a limited set of characters or not at all.

Graham.