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 27 2011, 21:27:44 UTC 6 years ago
I am pondering whether my guess as to which the first book is happens to be correct. If so, I have some minor to middling issues with it, but the point of view is most emphatically not one of them.
I recall lots of 3rd person urban fantasy -- back when War for the Oaks and De Lint were at the center of the fuzzy set that was urban fantasy (credit to Atteberry for literary fuzzy set theory) -- but then, I'm talking UF, while you're talking UF/PR. So... I'm probably wrong about the first book.
First person can help when the protagonist is slow at picking up on things. But, here, length matters, as does writing skill, as does how fast the reader is.
So, in Late Eclipses, it's fine that what might be obvious to me isn't obvious to Toby. It isn't just that you're using first person. You're writing well enough that I know how freaked out Toby is by Oleander. You could do this third or first person, with the strength of your writing alone. First person makes more sense, sure, but if you'd been going third person limited to Toby's point of view all along, I doubt I'd mind.
But, it also matters that Late Eclipses is short enough that Toby being "slow" doesn't really last that long, either in subjective reading time or "objective" plot time. I recently read a duology where my issue wasn't that it was a third person narrative with multiple points of view and people who seemed slow on the uptake. The sheer length of the work meant that the slow-on-the-uptake trope, however well justified, got old. And, I had other issues with the work, but that's off topic here.
Subjective reading time may matter more. If I'm reading through slow moving chapters or even pages, I'll get more antsy. It's like subjective time in playing an RPG. I've had players in my email game get impatient at slow character improvement, and I've had to recalibrate. Even if something is taking only weeks or a month for the PCs, if it's taking years of player time, that is forever.
So, yes, point of view matters. But, it's only one of several things which matter.
July 8 2011, 15:58:05 UTC 6 years ago
A lot of things matter, yes. The point under discussion here was specifically the POV.
July 9 2011, 02:04:39 UTC 6 years ago