![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.