Why is young adult romance now being written primarily in the first person?
My recollection is that when I started reading romance novels in the 1980s, the majority (perhaps 60%) were written in the third person. This included some "young adult" romances with characters in their early 20s.
I stopped reading them until recently. "Nowadays," it seems that the vast majority of young adult romances (80%-plus) are written in the first person.
Why might that be the case for young adult romances, and is it "less true" for stories of "older" people?
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In general teenagers tend to be (a) a little narcissistic and (b) intensely interested in their peers and what they think and feel. When you write in the first person as a teen protagonist, you are effectively taking on the persona and presentation of a peer, a fellow teen with whom they can empathize, rather than that of the distanced, adult, third-person narrator.
I'm actually currently in the midst of converting my own YA manuscript from close third person to first person. In addition to the above reason, I wanted to be able to present the worldview of my protagonist, with its prejudices and foibles intact, without the implicit endorsement of an authorial voice. There are also things that feel intrusive to report second-hand that you can report in a less filtered manner with a first-person narrator.
I'd be lying if I said that it wasn't also true that I noticed that almost all popular contemporary YA is in first person now (and we know how "on trend" teens like to be, even if they think of themselves as rebels). But the change also seems to have freshened and opened up the narrative. The biggest challenge, of course, is maintaining an authentic voice, in the face of not having actually been that age in a very long time.
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I think the trend is a fad, like slang, like teens finding their own "language" to communicate (as every generation does), like fashion. Remember bell-bottoms? Like music. Remember disco?
Something sells, others emulate it, a fad emerges, only to be rejected when those that embrace it become "The Establishment", cops and politicians and parents and people with jobs -- So new teens that are biologically driven to separate themselves from their parents (to begin mating and having their own families) reject the old fad and start up their own.
A tiny part of that big dynamic is in what they like to read for fiction. Wait a generation. When these teens are parents, the books they loved will be too out of touch with their technology, fashion, and social norms, and new books will be needed, and they will likely be written differently by new norms.
I don't think there is a deeper meaning than that; just like I don't think there was a deeper meaning to bell-bottom jeans or disco. They were embraced not for any greater utility or being "better" on any rational scale, they were embraced for one crucial reason: they were different. Not your dad's straight-leg jeans, not your dad's music, not your dad's politics.
We're going to rebel against conformity! (But all in the same exact way as our peers, of course, we don't want to be that weird.)
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I doubt it is specific to romance. It seems to be everywhere. I keep finding books that have no reason to be in first person (and in some cases every reason not to be) which are in first person nonetheless.
In part it may just be a fad. It's a bit like the way people wore blue jeans when I was growing up. They did it to be different. All of them. I wanna be a rebel, as long as everyone else is being the exact same type of rebel too.
A deeper reason may be a societal lack of confidence in objective truth. The artist was traditionally supposed to be the truth teller. But today everyone has their own truth. Speak your own truth. Tell your own story. Third person narration is an assertion of objectivity. First person is an expression of personal truth. Or personal truthiness at least.
It may well be that young adults are particularly devoted to this entirely personal notion of truth, to truth being what you feel, not what you see. But it seems to be a fairly general phenomena. Art that does not lead the bandwagon inevitably follows it.
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