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Unpopular fandom opinions, POV edition
Dear anon meme people,
I thought you might want to know that when you use the acronym AYRT, despite the fact that I theoretically know what it means, I hear it in my head as an elderly man with a broad Yorkshire accent stating an affirmative followed by spitting out of the side of his mouth.
I doubt this is what you intended, but it does sometimes make threads more interesting.
I started re-reading The Gods of Mars after I saw the movie, and I have realized that a couple of the sillier things that I assumed were added by the scriptwriters (like the ridiculous framing story in which ERB is John Carter's nephew and executor) are actually honest-to-goodness book canon. Sorry, scriptwriters! I should have remembered you can always have faith in ERB to go to the extra few feet over the top.
In a related matter, I had forgotten that most of the Barsoom books were written in first person, and in thinking this over, I have come to a sudden realization: I don't like third person limited POV. That's why the Barsoom books suck me in irresistably but when I tried to read Tarzan I just kept skipping ahead to the next bit with Jane in! Tarzan is all third person limited - well, okay, "third person Edwardian" which is basically a very messy version of limited, but generally close enough.
And when I think back to the books and book series I've been really very fannish about, comparatively few of them are third person limited, especially considering how very dominant that POV has been in my lifetime. Even Harry Potter is a modified third person limited; JKR jumped out of the limited POV whenever she felt like it, and especially at the beginnings of the books.
I've been reading Hal Duncan's series of writing tutorials based on The Eye of Argon (which someone on my network linked to, and are quite good, by the way, they pick apart into elements of craft a lot of basic things I'd never quite looked at that way) and the one on POV pushed me to thinking about this, too. I really don't like third person limited. I can do it, with reasonable comptence anyway I think, and a well-written story written in it is fine as a reader, but it's no fun; I've generally tried to stick with it unless given an excuse not to, because it seemed like the thing to do, but why?
From my perspective as a writer, it seems to combine all the worst of first person and third person unlimited, with none of the advantages of either: voice is harder, plot is harder, structure is harder, pacing is harder, all the little details of camera angle etc. are harder, there are so many interesting possibilities that are cut off and no new ones added.
As a reader, I think the main reason I prefer other POVs is that third person limited makes no sense: with first person, I know, the protagonist is telling me about things that happened to them, yay! And with a proper framing story (like John Carter's or John Watson's) it's really easy, if one is so inclined, to drop disbelief entirely and pretend you're reading an actual first person account. With third person unlimited, you know you're being told a story by someone who has learned all there is to learn about this story, and is putting all their effort into making it the best story possible, whether they're retelling true events that they've researched, or they're making something up.
With third person limited - why? What is the explanation - and I'm not talking about craft or style or Doylist reasons, I'm talking about for the story as its story - why would you choose to tell a story in limited POV? What's the frame? Who is telling this story, and why, and why don't they know anything except what this one guy is seeing? With a really good story and good writer it doesn't matter, ideally the reader gets sucked into the immediacy of it and stops noticing it's a story entirely, but short of that happening, the story itself is sort of a non sequitur, lacking context. I think this is why the couple of Barsoom novels that aren't first person are so jarring: unlike the first person accounts, which were of course handed to ERB during John Carter's occasional involuntary visits to Earth etc, I don't know where the third person stuff came from or who is telling the story or how they know all this stuff, so it's hard to believe in them or trust them enough to care.
And, really, that's part of what gets to me as a writer, too: if I have a frame, if I know where the story came from and who is meant to be telling it and why, everything just falls into place so much more cleanly.
So consider this my manifesto!
I like first person POV!
I like third person omniscient, when it's done well!
I like third person omnipotent, where the writer makes no effort to pretend they're not tormenting the characters just for our pleasure!
And the one I call third person personal, because I hate the official names for it, where the narrator is outside the story but is very present as a distinctive voice, I love that one a lot.
I like documentary and epistolary stories which use a lot of limited POVs but frame them all!
I like second person POV!
I like the Homestuck POV, which is a specific variant on second person!
I once wrote a story in We-You POV, and I'm not ashamed of it!
While I acknowledge that there are still stories for which third person limited is the best POV to use, where an outsider perspective following one person very closely makes sense as a frame, I will never again attempt to put a story in that POV just because it's "normal" or because I think it will get more readers, not if it's a story that can be just as well told in another frame.
Now pardon me, I am going to go rework some of my stalled WIPs into more interesting POVs.
I thought you might want to know that when you use the acronym AYRT, despite the fact that I theoretically know what it means, I hear it in my head as an elderly man with a broad Yorkshire accent stating an affirmative followed by spitting out of the side of his mouth.
I doubt this is what you intended, but it does sometimes make threads more interesting.
I started re-reading The Gods of Mars after I saw the movie, and I have realized that a couple of the sillier things that I assumed were added by the scriptwriters (like the ridiculous framing story in which ERB is John Carter's nephew and executor) are actually honest-to-goodness book canon. Sorry, scriptwriters! I should have remembered you can always have faith in ERB to go to the extra few feet over the top.
In a related matter, I had forgotten that most of the Barsoom books were written in first person, and in thinking this over, I have come to a sudden realization: I don't like third person limited POV. That's why the Barsoom books suck me in irresistably but when I tried to read Tarzan I just kept skipping ahead to the next bit with Jane in! Tarzan is all third person limited - well, okay, "third person Edwardian" which is basically a very messy version of limited, but generally close enough.
And when I think back to the books and book series I've been really very fannish about, comparatively few of them are third person limited, especially considering how very dominant that POV has been in my lifetime. Even Harry Potter is a modified third person limited; JKR jumped out of the limited POV whenever she felt like it, and especially at the beginnings of the books.
I've been reading Hal Duncan's series of writing tutorials based on The Eye of Argon (which someone on my network linked to, and are quite good, by the way, they pick apart into elements of craft a lot of basic things I'd never quite looked at that way) and the one on POV pushed me to thinking about this, too. I really don't like third person limited. I can do it, with reasonable comptence anyway I think, and a well-written story written in it is fine as a reader, but it's no fun; I've generally tried to stick with it unless given an excuse not to, because it seemed like the thing to do, but why?
From my perspective as a writer, it seems to combine all the worst of first person and third person unlimited, with none of the advantages of either: voice is harder, plot is harder, structure is harder, pacing is harder, all the little details of camera angle etc. are harder, there are so many interesting possibilities that are cut off and no new ones added.
As a reader, I think the main reason I prefer other POVs is that third person limited makes no sense: with first person, I know, the protagonist is telling me about things that happened to them, yay! And with a proper framing story (like John Carter's or John Watson's) it's really easy, if one is so inclined, to drop disbelief entirely and pretend you're reading an actual first person account. With third person unlimited, you know you're being told a story by someone who has learned all there is to learn about this story, and is putting all their effort into making it the best story possible, whether they're retelling true events that they've researched, or they're making something up.
With third person limited - why? What is the explanation - and I'm not talking about craft or style or Doylist reasons, I'm talking about for the story as its story - why would you choose to tell a story in limited POV? What's the frame? Who is telling this story, and why, and why don't they know anything except what this one guy is seeing? With a really good story and good writer it doesn't matter, ideally the reader gets sucked into the immediacy of it and stops noticing it's a story entirely, but short of that happening, the story itself is sort of a non sequitur, lacking context. I think this is why the couple of Barsoom novels that aren't first person are so jarring: unlike the first person accounts, which were of course handed to ERB during John Carter's occasional involuntary visits to Earth etc, I don't know where the third person stuff came from or who is telling the story or how they know all this stuff, so it's hard to believe in them or trust them enough to care.
And, really, that's part of what gets to me as a writer, too: if I have a frame, if I know where the story came from and who is meant to be telling it and why, everything just falls into place so much more cleanly.
So consider this my manifesto!
I like first person POV!
I like third person omniscient, when it's done well!
I like third person omnipotent, where the writer makes no effort to pretend they're not tormenting the characters just for our pleasure!
And the one I call third person personal, because I hate the official names for it, where the narrator is outside the story but is very present as a distinctive voice, I love that one a lot.
I like documentary and epistolary stories which use a lot of limited POVs but frame them all!
I like second person POV!
I like the Homestuck POV, which is a specific variant on second person!
I once wrote a story in We-You POV, and I'm not ashamed of it!
While I acknowledge that there are still stories for which third person limited is the best POV to use, where an outsider perspective following one person very closely makes sense as a frame, I will never again attempt to put a story in that POV just because it's "normal" or because I think it will get more readers, not if it's a story that can be just as well told in another frame.
Now pardon me, I am going to go rework some of my stalled WIPs into more interesting POVs.
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I have no idea where I picked that up, but I must have read some book somewhere with a character who said ayrrt or something like it.
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I like 3PL best, and though I have loved 1P narrators, I tend to be pickier with them. (Reading, not writing, since I'm not a writer.) My reasons, which are mine and may not apply to others who like 3PL:
Omniscient narrators feel very distant from the story to me, making it harder for me to submerge myself in the narrative and care about the characters. I want to get inside a character's head and under their skin, feeling what they feel and seeing what they see. Third person limited makes the character and their world feel more real to me. No one is "telling" the story, or at least that's the illusion: I'm living it, inside this character's head. A frame would break that illusion.
First person is tricky for me, because it registers as a big "WATCH OUT FOR UNRELIABLE NARRATION" sign; that can be fun, but it can also push me out of story-immersion, making me feel like I'm always bracing against being tricked. Also, an "I" implies a "you" and I don't want to be reminded there's a me reading the story. A really compelling character voice can get me past that - Roger Zelazny, for one, was a master of compelling 1P narration.
All that said, I will read whatever POV you feel like writing in, because you're an author I trust. That's the biggest and most important variable. :)
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Also, mm, I'm not sure I believe in reliable narrators? I mean I've done enough writing on my own at this point, and enough close analysis of other work (by which I mean, fandom) that, well, at this point I feel like "many of the truths we cling to depend on a certain point of view". :P And I guess I want to know what that point of view is, explicitly. Even if it's "Authorial voice in the sky". A reliable narrator is just someone who doesn't want you to *notice* when they're wrong. :D (Also, from a writer's POV, writing a reliable narrator is both more boring, and a lot more nerve-wracking, because then you don't *dare* be wrong in a way that *is* noticeable, or it all falls apart.)
I totally get your point about the immersiveness of 3PL, though! It does have its advantages (especially if one wants a close POV for a character who just wouldn't be writing in first person - sometimes first person becomes *too* intimate). And to some extent the idea of the lack of any frame in 3PL is that you're supposed to be *in* the story, and not thinking about the telling of it - but sometimes I *like* thinking about the telling of it. And, also, a good framed story can be that immersive, too, you forget the frame eventually. (Also, a not-particularly-immersive story with a good storytelling frame can still work well, where as a non-immersive 3PL story often just plain fails, you know?)
And sometimes I wonder where the "3PL is immersive and invisible" is just because it's so much the default that it's what people are used to reading. I mean, I'm reading a lot of Homestuck fandom now, and a *lot* of Homestuck fic is 2nd person (partly because the canon is, party beause a lot of the writers are new enough that they' haven't been fully indoctrinated into 3PL) and I thought I'd never get to a point where 2nd preson didn't stick out like a sore thumb, but after reading a lot of fic where 2nd person is taken for granted, I find it if anything *more* immersive than 3PL. I mean, in 2nd person you really *are* put inside the character's skin!
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When I talk about unreliable narrators, I usually mean the deliberate trick, the author choosing to withhold important info or trying to lead the reader to wrong conclusions. (And I'm not saying they're bad or that I don't like them, just that I read a story very differently if I suspect the author is not playing straight with me. It's more like puzzle-solving - "What are you hiding from me?" - and less story-immersion. And yeah, I want some signposts of what kind of story I'm in and whether or not I can take anything at face value, or I will feel cheated.)
I think basically we're in agreement about 1P highlighting the story*telling* aspect, while 3PL (done well) is a story that isn't being told but experienced. (Okay, it's a story that's pretending not to be told.) We just have different preferences. :D
You have a good point about 2nd person. I don't see much of it, so I hadn't commented on it, but I have read some excellent stories that made the 2P invisible very quickly. I think the author has to have a really good grasp of character voice, because they don't have the reinforcement of the character's name being constantly repeated or the outside description of gestures or physical traits - badly done, it's easy to lose track of exactly whose skin you're in. (I think that's true of 1P fanfic too, actually. A lot of fic relies pretty heavily on the reader filling in the details based on just the name, and without even the name, that collapses. Distinctive character voices are to be desired in any POV, of course, but 3rd person of any type gives mediocre fanfic a boost just by using character names. Except maybe not, in a fandom like Dresden Files, where the default assumption would be 1P Harry narration; only deviations from that need to be marked somehow. I don't read Homestuck, so I don't know what markers people use to distinguish characters from each other in 2P, but I bet there are particular quirks of speech that get used a lot. Don't those characters have colors and weird typography attached to them, too? And is this parenthetical ever going to end?)
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Although, on second thought, maybe what I write would be what you call third person personal? Because my narration is done not explicitly as the POV character, but still in the style of the POV character, if that makes sense. It's this sort of middle ground where the narration isn't impassive but also isn't the POV character actually talking/writing.
I wrote second person a few months ago and I think it worked for its specific purpose, but I don't think I could make it work for a setting that didn't have that sort of built in. Although, now that I've said that, I kind of want to challenge myself. Hmm.
Also: add me to the list of people who will never be able to unhear AYRT, thanks so much. :P
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And I definitely don't mean to judge people who do write, and like, 3PL. If that's your thing, go for it, and yeah, there are definitely stories it still works best for - I'm sure I will still write some.
What I think of as third person personal is more like, in the extreme example, asy, Lemony Snicket, where the storyteller is an outsider but you know who they are; they aren't even trying to be invisible (It doesn't have to be as explicit as Lemony Snicket, but that's the sort of thing.) I think what you're describing is more a very close 3rd person limited?
I think in my own writing that if my POV is so close that even the narration is in their voice, a lot of times it would work just as well in 1st, but on the other hand there are still characters where first will never feel anything other than gimmicky (especially when writing in fandoms, where making up a frame in which the character might be telling it can be a lot more restrictive.) And also admittedly I just find writing a very close third is very hard for me, because I am constantly trying to find a balance between the intimacy of the voice and the distancing effect of the third; as a reader that doesn't bother me unless it's so poorly done as to really stand out; it's just when the words are coming slowly I assume my own writing is so poorly done that it will. If something works for you, don't change it just because! It definitely works for you.
(this was not meant to be an "all 3rd person limited stories suck" post! This was more me suddenly realizing "wait, third person limited doesn't *have* to be my favorite, omg!")
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I see what you mean about Lemony Snicket. I think I would have categorized that as first person - it's just that the frame tale is so miniscule as to make you forget it's there.
Actually, hmmm... I don't know enough about that series to know if the narrator is actually given any character, or even named. My sense is not, but then it makes me wonder what fandom has done with that POV. *is curious*
Coming back to this discussion is making me want to experiment with POVs now! :D
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(And there are much less extremem examples of this - it's not ucommon for there to be occasional "authorial asides" in older novels - where the narrator starts speaking directly to the audience - even if they don't have a framing story, which I would usually put in the same category.)
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I prefer it to first person because first person has that element of performance, of the narrator telling the reader something, while the third person is more like "this is what happened" - and yes, maybe that is the whole idea of making the story absent, of backgrounding the how and just leaving the what.
I guess, though, I prefer whichever POV works best with the story. And how is that for a weasel-word?
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And it's interesting that you like 3PL because of its capacity for unreliable narrators when
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I do love when people play with POV, and I've read some fascinating fics with non-standard POV. I love the POV you call third-person personal, possibly because it's the voice many fairy tales are told in, and I grew up on fairy tales. (Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is one book that does a fantastic job of that POV).
Third omniscient is one I'm wary of when writing, and I think probably a lot of other people are too, because it's too easy for that to turn into a head-hopping multi-person version of third limited. Which -- okay, Jane Austen does that, and makes it work for her, but she's a rarity.
Anyways. GO YOU on changing up the POVs you write in! I definitely support more variety, even though I do love third-limited.
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Published fiction (at least in main-track SF&F) has a pretty strong emphasis on it, too, I think I picked up on the pressure for it there before I really got in to fandom. And I've found that in fandoms where the source is something other than 3rd person - Dresden Files, ACD Holmes, Homestuck being the three most recent to come to mind - the fandom writes a *lot* in canon POV. But media fandom classic is definitely big on 3PL - I wonder if that's because videos are (almost always) sort of inherently in 3rd person, so the nature of the source itself pushes people toward that?
A lot of novels before the 20th century used various "messy" third persons - ranging on a scale from head-hopping 3rd person limited to a sort of unintentional omniscient personal. I'm sure people have written entire theory books about this, but I suspect it's just that the novel was new enough that they didn't really have the modern concept of strict POVs that we do. And readers at the time somehow still managed to enjoy novels!
And I know headhopping is *anathema* to fandom, but like Jane Austen, it's possible to use it really well! I wonder if that goes back partly to working from source again - to some extent the POV usage in movies and TV is often the equivalent of head-hopping. But if you do head-hopping badly, it's really really bad, especially with an audience trained to expect plain 3rd person limited. If you're interested, the Hal Duncan post I linked up there talks a lot about ways a writer can unintentionally signpost a different POV than the one they're using, and I think a lot of the issue with whiplash in bad headhopping is not the headhopping inherently, it's that writers signpost one POV and then suddenly switch to another one. I've never really been brave enough to write it yet, but I think it works best if you signpost for omniscient - which Austen usually does - and then limit it down. (And plain omniscient is hard enough as it is!)
(tbh this is really less me changing the POVs I write in than admitting I already have, *cough*. I checked, 13 of my last 20 stories on AO3 are in something other than 3PL.)
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*goes off to read the post you linked and play with POVs some*
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I am always glad to make people think more!
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As to a Watsonian reason for third person limited, I think its very unnaturalism is its virtue. Unlike 1st person, 3rd limited marks a story as a work of fiction, as an impossible perspective. It is storytelling at its most convention-driven. When you read a 3rd limited story you have the sense "Oh, the author has chosen this perspective because of the access to literary effects it provides." And I don't mean that merely in the literary pyrotechnics sense. There are a huge amount of not flashy effects an author can create by naturalistically controlling the reader's access to information. And... hmm... that's an interesting thought on 3rd person limited which I hadn't thought about before. In 1st person and 3rd omniscient, when information is withheld there must be a character reason for it. In 3rd person limited, withholding information for plot reasons is actually naturalistic.
That said, I love reading and writing 1st person and 2nd person, I love epistolary and documentary fic, I like other perspectives.
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I'm not sure that omniscient is *inherently* harder to do well than 3rd limited - like I've said, I actually find 3rd limited *really hard* - but because there's so little work, comparatively, being currently written in good omniscient, omniscient is, mm, harder to learn? Most people just pick up the rules of 3rd limited by osmosis these days, but it's a lot harder do to that with omniscient unless you're reading only certain kinds of novels, and that leads to its own stylistic problems. And omniscient certainly isn't *easy*. And because people see 3rd limited as the invisible default, bad omniscient becomes a lot more noticeable than bad limited (also, if it's bad because it's an uncontrolled mix of the two, people tend to blame it on the omniscient rather than the limited.)
I am not surprised, given your love for metafiction and other really weird stuff, that you like 3rd person limited! I agree that it's definitely the best if what you're doing is playing with the toolkit (although again that might be partly because 3rd limited has the all conventions because it *is* conventional.) And a lot of other people are saying it's good for exactly the opposite reasons - I'm going to have to think about this some and maybe read back over some of the metafiction you've posted, because I think part of my issue with 3rd limited is the pressure to make it invisible, and that kind of writing really isn't interested in making it invisible.
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My Yuletide story this year was sort of an etude on perspective, though my beta made me remove the kinky 2nd person section.
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Yes! I think that's a big thing. It feels to me like 1st person requires me to be watching for what the narrator is and isn't willing to tell me (because the omissions are actually part of the exposition and character development). Which isn't a bad thing - I've loved a lot of stories like that! - but it's not as immersive as 3PL, because in 3PL the POV character doesn't get to decide what parts of their inner workings I see. There's the illusion that there's no filter.
Obviously, from a Doylist perspective, the AUTHOR is still picking and choosing what to show, for plot/character/exposition reasons. My strong Watsonian leanings make me want to ignore the puppet strings, and 3PL makes it easiest (for me).
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I do think 3rd limited cuts out some particular distractions, but first person also cuts out some particular distractions, different ones.
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I don't mean to rank-order types of POV in terms of their overall effectiveness; they're effective at different things. I think that allowing the reader to erase the sense of being told a story is a strength of 3PL, but that doesn't mean other POVs don't have their own strengths. Or that everyone wants to be unaware of the narrator - clearly
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That being said, I think of the narrator as being there in nearly all my stories these days, and also that the narrator is me, or close enough. I don't know to what extent other readers feel this, but no matter how nominally limited the third person, I'm using my turns of phrase and my vocabulary, not the character's. The gap can be minimal, or make for a certain ironic distance. Possibly it's only third limited because there's not that much call to switch perspectives in a short story (my WIP novel is definitely omniscient), but I've always also felt that the "look at me! I know the beginning and end of the tale I will tell you and have a bird's eye view of everything!!" school of omniscient narration to be... gimmicky. Unless that's what one's going for.
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There is a whole different toolkit of narrative between text and moving pictures, and sometimes I wonder if the reason 3PL has become so dominant is because it's the best approximation of the most natural way of doing movies - the dominance of 3PL in text started happening at around the same time movies became mature enough to start building their own language.
When I'm writing 3PL, I always struggle with how much of the narration is in character voice and how much is me. It sounsd like you've gotten really comfortable with a sort of limited 3rd person omniscient/personal, which is great! You can definitely do a story where the narrator's voice is a presence without going all the way to the obtrusive, gimmicky stuff, and I wish I was better at hitting that balance.
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I think this particular voice came about because most of my viewpoint characters fall into one of two categories: 1) any thought I can come up with, they can come up with; 2) action-oriented and non-self-reflective. In the first, I have no reason to limit myself, and in the second, I can say more about the character than they'd be able to say about themselves.
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BOB: I wonder what Joe is thinking!
NARRATIVE: What Joe is thinking.
and
BOB: I wonder what Joe is thinking!
NARRATIVE: Leaves it a mystery until future date when Joe reveals what he's thinking at plot-relevant point.
And I usually prefer the latter. With the former, if the omniscient narrative doesn't reveal the answer, I'm going to wonder why it's withholding, and possibly feel that it's arbitrary and coy. I usually have the same reaction to dramatically unreliable narrator first person stories unless it's established that the narrator is a lying liar who lies in a way that makes withholding and misinformation logical.
I feel like very few writers do first person well; I like it when it is done well (O HAI SUTCLIFF) but am deathly sick of it in, say, cookie cutter urban fantasy where all the feisty protagonists sound the same (and the dominance of first person in UF also bores me because there's almost no alternative, which perhaps is how you feel about 3PL). I think it works best when the protagonist or narrator has a strong voice, and many writers are not very good at distinctive narrative voice. I'm much more willing to read workmanlike non-exceptional prose with indistinguishable character voices for the plot in third person than first.
I think also a lot of people have a kneejerk reaction to texts that are studded with "I", which happens a lot in both mediocre cover letters and mediocre 1P fiction.
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On the other hand I feel like I am more likely to bail out of bad first person quickly than out of bad third, so that may be *why* I haven't read that much cookie-cutter urban fantasy! (And I have read some really bad published 3PL stuff, too...)
And there are definitely stories where omniscient doesn't work. (There are ways to strike a midway point between omniscient and limited that can work really well, but they tend to be a) a lot harder to find and maintain, and b) have very few current examples out there to work from.)
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I kind of don't like 1st person but am not sure why. This gives me a lot to think about.
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