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 23 2011, 03:03:22 UTC 6 years ago
Also first basically means if I don't like the main character, I can't stomach the series. While that's probably always the way to bet, even a close third gives me at least a shot at sticking around if I like other parts of the ensemble. And a close third also for me is just as effective as first at removing the distance thing, though I know other people's MMV.
The other thing is that I find first person fail in the attempt to cram exposition or description into the framework particularly jarring. Perhaps because I am not a visual thinker I do not find the tradeoff worth while. (Not to say it can't be done well. Just that it's easy to do not so well, especially if you feel the info needs to be frontloaded, and it's a particular peeve of mine.)
That said, it's a mild preference and I totally get that some stories demand to be written in certain persons. And I do like the discipline that first or a close third provides in making the author get out of everyone else's head and show don't tell. I'm not as doctrinaire as some about never switching POV within a scene, but I do think it's an easy thing to do wrong or just too much.
The only one that's a dealbreaker for me is second person, which pisses me off to no end unless it's made immediately clear that "you" is a specific person that is not in any way intended to be me or any other real world reader. (Basically at that point it becomes a special case of the epistolary format). Fortunately second person is extremely rare.
July 12 2011, 19:33:16 UTC 6 years ago
July 12 2011, 19:37:32 UTC 6 years ago
July 12 2011, 19:38:43 UTC 6 years ago