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, 20:47:21 UTC 6 years ago
I like first-person a lot both as a writer and as a reader, but if there's any kind of minor glitch in it, I get very literal-minded and start wondering, when and where and to whom is the narrator telling this story? Sometimes that works out and sometimes it means I don't read more. One could get equally if not more literal-minded about third-person narration, but just because of my reading experience, it seems like the default to me, the transparent unmarked kind of narration, so I'm less likely to stumble in that direction.
P.
June 21 2011, 20:56:12 UTC 6 years ago
I get the "there are things they would not tell." One of the things that bothers me most about modern urban fantasy first person is the amount of narrated first person sex from narrators who, quite frankly, shouldn't want me to know that much of their business!
June 21 2011, 21:09:06 UTC 6 years ago
I have that problem with the sex in Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone books (the alphabet mysteries). She always starts with a precis of who she is and ends "respectfully submitted" as if she's reporting to an employer, and yet there are several fairly explicit sex scenes in some of the earlier books that really don't seem appropriate for that particular conceit.
P.
June 22 2011, 13:41:26 UTC 6 years ago
June 21 2011, 21:58:36 UTC 6 years ago
Which may be why I run across characters who won't tell ME things until they think I need to know them.
(I don't know if anyone else has ever had a character reveal their actual gender to them after 20-30000 words, but I really did not know that Lady Dracaena was Lady Dracaena and not the cross-dressing lord I thought she was until I got to the point where she told all of us, although I sometimes suspect that she didn't know, either.)
June 22 2011, 00:18:41 UTC 6 years ago
Lovie has to be first-person, because she makes decisions that only make sense inside her head, and then she lies about them later. One can watch her do these things, and boggle and wonder how the fuck, or one can watch her narrate what she's done, and understand how the fuck, and still wonder how the fuck, but in new and exciting ways. One hopes that one does not want to punch her quite as badly after seeing the inside of her head. She is writing to her blog audience, I think.
If a character cannot convince me that they need to have first-person perspective, and they need to be the first person, then I don't tend to give it to them, on account of how they will RAMBLE ON about things that are important to no-one but them. I maintain that it takes a strong writer to be able to write strong characters first-person, and have been known to scream "WHY DID YOU LET HER NARRATE?!?! YOU'RE NOT LEVELED-UP ENOUGH FOR THAT!!!" at the page, where a character is rattling on at the expense of the plot structure.