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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.
no subject
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.)
no subject