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, 15:01:40 UTC 6 years ago
I was about to point out an exception, except you should know it, because you wrote it. Then again, Rose wouldn't be the only urban fantasy* hero who doesn't stay gone when they die, which comes to mind as look Ghost Story will be released soon.
As for me, perspective comes with the scope and inclinations of the author. In other words, can the writer put hirself enough into the character's head to not feel like every other snarky urban fantasy hero, and make the story matter to this person? And, also, is there information that needs to be conveyed that hero can't see, or would suspend my disbelief if sie is always there to eavesdrop? I think it's probably why a lot of the traditional epic fantasy is in third-person, so you can see the scope of the conflict without having Hero McHero meddling in everything. If you have a conflict that isn't The End of the World making it deeply personal (and first person) can make it have meaning -- it's not the End of the World, but it might be the End of Someone's World.
(Then again, I've seen some truly awful third-person villainous pieces where I wonder if this person really thinks human beings** act like that. If you cannot write a villain who is either believable as what sie is, or just so damn fun that I don't care if sie's torturing small animals, then perhaps it's better to edit those scenes out and leave the villain a bit more ambiguous.)
* Rose is a weird case, since she's clearly in the modern the-myths-are-true fantasy, but she's the opposite of urban. Oh, genre names.
** Or things close to them,
June 21 2011, 20:46:14 UTC 6 years ago
It's hard to say "human beings don't act like that" given some of the historical examples we've got. Gilles de Rais and Elizabeth Bathory would be hard to write into a novel other than a historical novel because it would be hard to get readers to believe they were people, and yet they were.
On the other hand, you do have to deal with readers, and most readers live in a world where they expect powerful evil people to be "believable"--meaning, not so evil that they'd give themselves away before they ever got any power in a world like our own, where people have to get themselves elected/promoted/followed on Twitter/liked on Facebook.
Hence my confusion as to what to do with Rakard. I know he lives in a world where his birth and wealth and bloodline mean he never had to get himself elected or promoted, he bought his commissions and he's pretty well able to do what he likes, which is essentially "nothing good". But at the same time even I have to sit there and wonder, "How has this guy got control of even one warship, let alone a fleet of them?" When I have my answer (above and beyond the immortal 'you don't have to not be an asshole to win fucking wars'), I guess I'll finish the thing and finally let the heroine do away with him :)
It's a lot easier to sell readers on BP-evil (the powerful and privileged not having to think about the consequences of their greed, short-sightedness or laziness on those directly affected) than on knuckle-dragging, moustache-twirling evil, and I think part of that is that your Ted Bundy and your Josef Fritzl are more likely to seem "just a little bit off" than to drag their knuckles or twirl their staches--and then there's the fact that Lackey has cornered the market, particularly on the rapey kind of villain (and the quickest way to get me to trash/rewrite something is to make comparisons to her stuff). But there have definitely been real historical documentable individuals of the human species who are crueller than most of us can ever really imagine or understand other people being, and we like to think of them as being semi-supernatural boogeymen...which makes life all the harder for their victims who survive the experience, because nobody wants to believe them.