thoughtfulThe 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.)
June 21 2011, 15:29:29 UTC 6 years ago
In third-person narrative I do prefer that the majority of the time it's still from a perspective of what that person knows. Not totally, but if it gets too 'omniscient' I lose interest, and jumping around between viewpoint characters needs to be very well signalled otherwise I lose whole chunks ("Wait, why's he doing that? Oh shit, this is /her/, when did that start?").
But the 'person' bothers me a lot less than the tense. There are few books where I actually like the use of present tense (Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" is one of them), it's hard to do without sounding like a screenplay (NS managed, but he seems to keep getting into my head and finding a style I dislike and then using it and making me like it!). Occasional use can work, though, as in Roger Zelazny's 'hell-rides' which switch into present tense for immediacy and then switch back afterwards.
As for future tense, I don't want it. Things like "Little did he know that he would lose it all in the nxet week", and chapter headings like "In which the hero finds out that the Daft Wader was his father", which were common in Victorian writing.
And then there's Charlie Stross's "Halting State" written in present tense SECOND person! I never thought that could work (for anything apart from computer games: "You are in a room. There is a troll here. What do you want to do?"), but he actually did it well. I think the sequel is due out fairly soon...
June 21 2011, 15:44:11 UTC 6 years ago
June 21 2011, 16:02:11 UTC 6 years ago
Oddly, I found it actually colored my re-read experience on some of Robbin's other novels which were in first and third person. I know it was intended as an experiment, but it's one that backfired for me, because some part of my brain started rereading all of his work with that treatment. I sort-of wonder how well I would do with the Stross, given that while I find first and third interchangeable if they're done well, I never quite drop my 'in character' awareness with second person.
June 21 2011, 22:01:02 UTC 6 years ago
June 27 2011, 22:06:52 UTC 6 years ago
Present tense bugs me in theory. The problem is that I've been reading so much written in present tense that I've started to get used to it. And, complicating things, for the play be email game I run, I do, really and truly, want everyone using present tense for what their PCs are doing and saying right now. I try to avoid second person, though, because the players are not the PCs.