"I am not a huge fan of the conjunction of first person with present tense. It just feels very false, because how could a person ever tell about what's happening to them AS IT'S HAPPENING?"
Ooh, interesting! I use past tense because it's what I learned from books as a kid, but I do often narrate my life inside my head as it's happening -- not as much anymore, but when I was littler/pre-teen, it'd literally be how I filed my memories, I had to translate everything into a narrative WITH PROPER PUNCTUATION before I could, like, get past "okay someone said a thing to me" and come up with an answer and say it?
(Which was really good experience for writing, I think! I've had literally almost thirty years of practice in picking the right punctuation to make a thing sound in the reader's head like it did when somebody originally said it.)
I don't do that as much nowadays because keeping up with a conversation is kind of an important social skill to have -- it's very hard to make friends when your every contribution to a conversation comes out at least two minutes after the remark you're responding to -- but yeah, first-person narration always feels very natural to me because I DO IT.
*fascinated by brains as usual* :D
ETA: except also when I... became trans? genderfluided to trans for the first time? When I first became a boy instead of a girl, however you say that? ...I switched to using third-person narration a lot more, and thinking of myself as fictional male characters, narrating my life to myself as How Would X Do This Situation. Interesting! I hadn't really realized that connection. :D
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Ooh, interesting! I use past tense because it's what I learned from books as a kid, but I do often narrate my life inside my head as it's happening -- not as much anymore, but when I was littler/pre-teen, it'd literally be how I filed my memories, I had to translate everything into a narrative WITH PROPER PUNCTUATION before I could, like, get past "okay someone said a thing to me" and come up with an answer and say it?
(Which was really good experience for writing, I think! I've had literally almost thirty years of practice in picking the right punctuation to make a thing sound in the reader's head like it did when somebody originally said it.)
I don't do that as much nowadays because keeping up with a conversation is kind of an important social skill to have -- it's very hard to make friends when your every contribution to a conversation comes out at least two minutes after the remark you're responding to -- but yeah, first-person narration always feels very natural to me because I DO IT.
*fascinated by brains as usual* :D
ETA: except also when I... became trans? genderfluided to trans for the first time? When I first became a boy instead of a girl, however you say that? ...I switched to using third-person narration a lot more, and thinking of myself as fictional male characters, narrating my life to myself as How Would X Do This Situation. Interesting! I hadn't really realized that connection. :D