Word: first-person
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WITH the plot out of the way, you must concern yourself with its handling. First-person is an excellent narrative mode: it allows you to commit incredible errors of style and pass them off as a characterization of your narrator. Segal takes full advantage of this technique (although his lapses are more the voice of a wisecracking writer than that of a Harvard preppie jock), which also permits brevity by enabling you to describe characters rather than illustrate them. The reader might not accept the words of an author who says. "Jenny was brilliant," but if Oliver Barrett IV himself...
...Favor the first-person plural and the future tense, as in sentences beginning "We will . . ." If absolutely necessary, the present tense is permissible, but almost never the past. The past tense is history, irrelevant for the young...
Journalism has invented conventions to protect this myth of objectivity. Things like pyramid style, the absence of modifiers, the elimination of the first-person are used to separate the reporter from the story he is writing in much the same way as he is separated by his role from the event itself...
...Brasselle's own fractured English, The Cannibals is "self-servicing." That is clear enough from the author's portrayal of the first-person narrator, Joey Bertell, the only one in the novel who comes on like the white tornado. He has sung and danced as well as Fred Astaire, is a more cunning producer than David Susskind, more urbane than CBS Board Chairman William Paley, ad nauseam. The rest of the characters are ill-disguised caricatures of CBS executives. They are such a kinky crew that the reader may well wonder how CBS stays in business...
...best known as one of the more strident practitioners of the theater of fact. Therefore it should come as no surprise that this novel contains little fancy; it is frankly and almost completely autobiographical. Like his plays, Exile is a characteristically raw and intensely passionate statement. Weiss's first-person hero is a German-born half Jew who at 18 leaves his country to get away from the Nazis. He subsequently sojourns in England, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland and Sweden (where Weiss now lives). But the title refers not so much to the transient state of a political refugee...