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, 15:07:21 UTC 6 years ago
At the same time you don't want your POV character to 1. know things that will just destroy the suspense of the book or 2. play "I know something you don't know!" with the reader (I HATE THIS. HATE HATE HATE.) I think George RR Martin's the master of this in the Song of Ice and Fire--with one notable exception in the first book, none of his POV characters know things the reader can't know and none of them know the plot.
I've noticed that urban fantasy tends towards the first person. I think this often works well for the genre, particularly when we have a POV who knows how his/her world works, or more specifically, how it works differently from the world the reader inhabits.
June 21 2011, 16:36:25 UTC 6 years ago
This makes me wonder if mixing tenses would work - main protaganist tells most of story (and POV is in 1st person), but for the omniscient audience view of what is happening off scren, it switches to 3rd person.
Or would that be too jarring?
I'm not immediately thinking of any examples, which probably means it doesn't actually work well.
June 21 2011, 17:51:39 UTC 6 years ago
The series was deliberately written as a pastiche of Alexander Dumas's work, if it helps to picture it.
Though that never changes POV character, only seems to. Come to think about it, though, Brust does a lot of POV tricks in some of his later books, even if the first ones are pretty straight forward first-person.
* Brust's Dragaerans/elfs are very long-lived, and they don't quite have a one-to-one aging rate compared to humans. (That is, 3,000 is considered 'very old, but not obviously using magic to exceed a normal lifespan', but the main character of the first two books starts his adventures at around age 80-100, where he's considered as an adult, or nearly.)
June 21 2011, 23:24:42 UTC 6 years ago
I have NEVER seen this work.
I'm not saying it couldn't, but I think it's unlikely it would. It's, as you say, too jarring. It ends up reading like listening to someone's inner monologue constantly while a news broadcaster narrates their life history.
If you want to look at really complex POV's, read Cat Valente's The Orphan's Tales. Keeping the timeline and POV's on that straight must've been maddening. It works beautifully. But I can't think of another example where someone did, say, nested POVs--in this case, third person with first persons within first persons within first persons within first persons--and had it not be an incoherent mess.
June 27 2011, 21:59:57 UTC 6 years ago