The twenty-first century can be characterized by one thing alone- the first person, be it blog posts, memoir or tweets the world is seen through the lens of ‘I’ or what the author artistically calls the ‘little pillar of self’. This shift from generality to the singularity of the self is a worrisome trend.
“I believe, third-person narration is the greatest artistic tool humans have devised to tell the story of what it means to be human.”
This is contrary to what greats like Sebald think. Price, however, disagrees, for after all even the first person is unreliable and the building blocks of great stories worldwide have been through the omniscient approach. Even though the third person is essentially anti-internet, it is one way of storytelling that does justice to characters who are hypocritical themselves and will not represent themselves as well as a third person account could.
Read more of this thought-provoking essay here: In Defense of Third Person by Adam O’Fallon Price
Analyze your own writing and see if you are more of a first-person narrator or if you have attempted to write in the third person.
