What makes first person plural a tricky narrative voice?
I absolutely loved Joshua Ferris's debut novel Then We Came to the End. Critics highly praised his use for the first person plural as a narrator. The work is set in an office and the "we" used represents the group of employees.
I can think of several ideas that seem like they would be candidates for a first person plural narrator - a group of neighbors, students in a high school class, soldiers in a battle unit, any sort of cohesive group you can think of.
What are the pitfalls that I have to look out for when writing in the first person plural? What will jolt the reader out of his or her enjoyment of my story and characters and make him or her focus too much on the narrative voice? What can the first person plural voice not realistically convey? If I were to use the first person plural to write about a group of characters, when should I consider breaking out of it?
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