I’m still not sure I’m with you on the scene breaks. If a story incurs a three-day gap, that gap should appear in the story as something. In a person-to-person telling this might take the form of a head scratching while the storyteller regroups to pick up the story in an interesting place.

Jumping to an outside POV is something else. I see it done well in novels but it would be tough in a short story. That doesn’t mean I haven’t done it, but it requires extreme circumstances and should only be done by trained professionals. Should.

Maybe you meant something else by “scene break” than a jump to another time and place marked by a line break. If you mean a break without transition (“Two days later Jody caught up to me at the Steak Pit…), I probably agree.

Anyway, the other two points are reasonable. Of course violating the no dying clause is a SF staple, but it ain’t easy.

I’m not sure I have ever read a published first-person narrative that did not have scene breaks. And the book I’m reading at the moment also has POV shifts.

I for one enjoy rules, and believe in a lot of them, and don’t break them just “to be different.” Everything I do in my writing is a conscious choice. But if half the published world is ignoring a rule I think that rule can safely be used by an amateur, or not, as suits her particular story.

While I’m not sure I necessarily agree with all points, I certainly agree with the point about the narrator not dying in the end (unless the narrator is supposed to be a ghost or one of the legions of the undead, that is, which might just happen in spec fic.). I once wrote a poem like that, written from a 1st person POV. The editor that I submitted the piece to liked the basic idea of the verse, but she suggested that I change the POV. Basically, she wondered how the narrator would be able to tell readers about his own bones sinking into the muck. It was actually a better poem after the revision.

Then again, a tale occurring in the present tense COULD possibly have the narrator dying at the end, but for all I know present tense could be one of those current writing taboos. Like all writing “rules”, it probably takes some skill and talent to successfully and effectively break them.

Richard, an example of the narrator dying in the end that I can think of is “American Beauty” (a movie, not a SFF story, I’ll give you that, but…)

The trick there is that right up front, he tells you he’s going to die and that he’s narrating from beyond the grave. That might be a way to do it, but it’s a conceit that almost never works, and can be easily overused.

Creative types typically dispute absolute rules, right? By way of example, I’ve just read Paul Park’s “The Last Homosexual,” and he uses 1st person POV with breaks to give dramatic pause in the narrative or to reset the locale, mostly. It’s worth pointing out these issues with POV when talking about craft; we should be aware of stylistic choices and be able to justify them or suggest more effective uses.

I grabbed a few F&SFs of the shelf and sifted through them looking for first POV. They all had a scene break or two. Not many, but a few, kind of an Act I, II, and III thing. On strange Horizon I found a first person story littered with them (http://www.strangehorizons.com/2009/20090316/nira-and-i-f.shtml) This did strike me as unusual.

I’m not arguing the point of limiting scene breaks, but I don’t find many examples completely bereft of them.

-Oso

I’m going to submit a first person dead guy POV story witrh breaks in present tense just to make you twitch. Ha!