Points of view and why they matter.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I read a lot of urban fantasy/paranormal romance. I mean a lot. Given that I read fast enough to get through a 300-page novel in a day, easily, and am currently trying to race through my to-be-read shelf like I'm being pursued by wolves, I'm basically binging on the stuff. I'm going to need to spend six months on Urban Fantasy Weight Watchers after I finish my current read-through, during which I'll be allowed nothing but bad mystery novels and non-fiction about things that make you die (diseases, parasites, Australia). This means that I am sensitive to tropes in UF/PR the way I'm sensitive to tropes in lousy horror movies.*

The majority of urban fantasy is written in the first person. I fight the monster, I open the door to the creepy crypt at the bottom of the hill, I try not to summon a snake god to Thanksgiving dinner. This creates a feeling of absolute immediacy, while also creating a feeling of safety, since most first person narrators are reasonably guaranteed to survive their stories. (I consider, say, Rose Marshall an exception, since she's already dead. Maybe this explains why she gets shot so much.) It also limits the perspective of the books. When you're reading a Toby book, the only information you'll get is what Toby has to give, and that information will always be filtered through her particularly Toby-esque way of seeing the world.

Third person gives you more leeway on the will she/won't she question where surviving is concerned, and also creates the option to provide the reader with additional information. Sure, the protagonist is bound by their own perceptions, but the author gets to play with omniscience. This is both good and bad, and the varying degrees of third person omniscience is a topic for another day. Suffice to say that sometimes this distancing serves the story very, very well.

I have just finished reading two third person urban fantasies, neither of which will be named here, because I'm looking critically at structure, not trying to compare-and-contrast their plots or the quality of their writing. In the first, the author took advantage of the third person structure and hopped from place to place, now following the villain, now following a secondary character, now returning to the primary protagonist. The omniscience was kept to a minimum, since otherwise, the plot would have turned boring for the reader; this is obviously pretty tricky, but the writer handled it well. I don't think this book could have been written in first person, and the tense never bothered me. It was a third person book because it needed to be.

The second third person urban fantasy stuck to an extremely limited perspective, following the protagonist at the exclusion of all else. At no point, did we get information that she didn't have, which made waiting for her to catch up occasionally a lot more frustrating than I expected it to be. I'm used to being forgiving when my UF/PR protagonists are a little slow, because I'm used to being so deep in their heads that I can see why they're not making the intuitive jumps that I can make. I know how they think. In the absence of that knowledge, I kept waiting for the heroine to be smarter than I was, and I kept being disappointed. It honestly left me wondering why the author didn't stick with the first person perspective that's standard in the genre. It would have been the same story; it would even have been a stronger story, because the immersion in the heroine would have made it much more urgent.

Choosing a story's point of view can be difficult, but I find that usually, I can tell which they need to be by looking at whether the story would even be possible in a tighter perspective. And I try to keep things as tight as possible, for the immediacy. Your mileage may, and probably will, vary.

So how do you feel about perspective? Does first person keep it tight and immersive, or is it off-putting and overly familiar? Does third person make things mysterious and flexible, or is it distancing and remote? Or does it even matter if the story's good?

Thoughts?

(*If the movie starts with people in the water, it's either an evil sharks movie, an evil alligator movie, or a sea monster movie. If you see a shark within the first five minutes, it's not an evil sharks movie. Etc.)

Tags: contemplation, literary critique, reading things

jenrose1

June 21 2011, 19:33:23 UTC 6 years ago

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I prefer third person as a writer and a reader. Even if it isn't an omniscient third person, I have to get over a gut-level balk I have at first person narrative. Authors like you make it worth it, but I have trouble with most first person fanfic.

ESPECIALLY with established fandom characters, first person seems presumptuous at some level. Which is not entirely logical (after all, just about all fanfic is presumptuous at some level...) but that's just what it feels like to me.

I have similar issues with tense. I see a lot of fanfic written in the present tense (and don't get me started on those that mix tense) that really shouldn't be. I only generally use present tense for very short things, for that sense of immediacy. Reading very long works in present tense makes me tired, but that may just be an oddity on my part.

Points of view and why they matter.

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