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, 19:33:23 UTC 6 years ago
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.
June 21 2011, 19:35:43 UTC 6 years ago
June 21 2011, 19:53:51 UTC 6 years ago Edited: June 21 2011, 19:54:10 UTC
I've been reading way too much mediocre fanfic lately.
June 21 2011, 20:55:31 UTC 6 years ago
I think that's only really interesting if there's crucial information that you get from each person's perspective that you wouldn't get from another.
June 21 2011, 21:20:56 UTC 6 years ago
OTOH, in writing fanfic I've found myself doing some curious things with point of view at times. There was the crossover story that wound up -- initially by accident, then deliberately when I realized halfway in what I was doing -- as a sort of round robin affair. I was writing in third person, but each individual chapter ended up in the head of a different character, with just enough chapters for each significant character to take one turn.
There's the not-quite-finished piece that's partly in play-script form, and which therefore has some bits in the form of stage-directions. That one therefore winks at the fourth wall in spots (well, and it also has the Muppets in it, and they do fourth-wall riffs themselves at times).
There's the Yuletide piece that ended up as a quartet of first-person statements, as if to an offstage interviewer. That one surprised me; I had a handle on the focus character from the first, but not on how to actually get the story across until the interview-format leaped out and bit me on the nose.
And there's one other piece -- which I also need to get back to and finish -- that actually is in first person, because it seemed like it needed to be. (Third in a sequence, the first two having been in third person, each from another major character's POV.) In that particular case, first person seemed right for the character at the time....
It really does amount to picking the POV that feels appropriate for the context, I guess. And where the fanfic is concerned, it's felt right to experiment when the mood strikes.
June 21 2011, 22:23:30 UTC 6 years ago
In the HP fandom, I almost always wrote Snape and/or the Malfoys in first person. (And yes, they said things that they wouldn't have said to a stranger; I always feel like first person is a better organised version of your roof brain chatter, the narrative you tell yourself and put in place around your life as you're living it when you try to make sense of it.)
I wrote Harry in first person I think maybe once, and it was in a series of stories that had already been jossed and had gone intentionally AU at that point, largely because starting in about 2003 and culminating in 2005 I liked my version of that universe better than the official one. (From 2001-2003, and to a lesser extent in 2003-2005--I still wrote canonical fic then, but not House of Ill Faith or Lightning War--I was writing alternative interpretations of canonical events and not fucking around with the canonical facts.)
So I think there's something to be said for the distinction, because it seems to me intuitive that the time to use first-person in fanfic is when you're writing characters that the POV character in canon doesn't like or doesn't know very well or both, and when you're trying to direct the reader's attention to the fact that there might be more than one way to look at a series of events, that we're taking the creator's word for it that X, Y, and Z happened, but this is how it looked to the other side or how it looks to me as a reader who is not you as a reader and thinks some of JKR's heroic logic is almost as scary as (if not scarier than) that of her villains, even though her villains' actions are worse.
Also there is nothing more fun than writing humour pieces from Dolores Umbridge's POV. She is an absolutely horrible person but she doesn't think so, and she can be hilarious because of it, particularly when you get into how twee her view of the world really is and talk about how she likes her kittens trapped in china plates where they can never overset her inkwell or snag her stockings. Besides, she SO shops at Angelic Pretty and I'm sure she's mad I got the last of the pink Vanilla-chan socks...