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In Jane Austen's novels, for example, it happens more than once that characters learn about an event second-hand: Darling, I've just heard that... Or It is only the desire to be useful th...
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#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2019-12-12T21:57:22Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/36151 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T08:49:24Z (about 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/36151 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
In Jane Austen's novels, for example, it happens more than once that characters learn about an event second-hand: > Darling, I've just heard that... Or > It is only the desire to be useful that compels me to tell you that... This allows you to introduce events that your narrator couldn't have witnessed, and it's not as boring as you might think: characters might learn about a past event in a dramatic moment (making previous decisions they've made suddenly wrong), the person recounting the event might colour it with their own emotions, their own POV, etc. Taking this to an extreme, Roger Zelzny, in _Chronicles of Amber_ has on occasion whole chapters of a secondary character telling the MC something that happened to them in the past, with no interruptions from the MC. It reads like a complete mini-story, told in first person. You wouldn't find a story told in first person boring, would you? Same here: it works.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2018-05-16T11:26:10Z (over 6 years ago)
Original score: 3