Unpopular fandom opinions, POV edition

[melannen]

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.

Comments

[lotesse]

*will never be able to unhear AYRT*

[princessofgeeks]

GO YOU!

[kiezh]

This is really interesting. I've seen people express a preference for first person before, but I don't think I've seen anyone express a distaste for third person limited. Which of course you should feel free to do, I definitely don't want to say that your reactions are wrong! People like different kinds of storytelling; that's a feature, not a bug.

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. :)

[marginaliana]

This is really interesting, because I write a lot of third person limited POV. In fact, I think I pretty much only write third person limited. First person always seems unconvincing to me unless the voice is extremely spot on and the frame story makes sense, and also I feel like there are things that you can't have a first person narrative say, no matter what the frame story. Like long bits of description.

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

[isis]

I love third-person limited both as a reader and a writer, because it allows for the unreliable narrator concept. The most interesting stories (to me) are the ones in which there is information that the POV character does not have, or that he or she has made incorrect assumptions about (but does not realize they are incorrect!).

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?

[sophia_sol]

Oh, huh, this is really interesting and not something I'd ever thought about before! I've certainly noticed fandom's love-affair with third-person-limited, to a far greater extent than published fiction. My hypothesis is that people like it because it allows a great deal of emotional connection to a character, without putting it into first-person: fandom is big into giving the reader FEELS, and I know plenty of people (including myself) are for some reason wary of reading first-person.

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.

[justice_turtle]

This is fascinating! I haven't thought much about POV, really - I read Ursula LeGuin's chapter on it in "Steering the Craft", but it felt too big for my head, sort of? Like my horizons were being stretched too far at once. ;P Your post is more compact, easier to handle, and also "third person personal" finally makes sense. :D

*goes off to read the post you linked and play with POVs some*

[seekingferret]

Too sleepy for more than this, but let me just say that I love the way Steinbeck writes third person omniscient more than almost anything in the world.

[petronia]

This is interesting! As a writer, I usually rely on diagesis a lot - the "movie in my head". So for me, third person limited is the natural choice: it's the camera following the main character around (where first person would be the camera-as-protagonist). That is, you can ask that exact same question of most movies and TV that do not employ the "Blair Witch" in-story footage mode: what viewpoint are we in, and isn't it a completely artificial one in the context of the movie's own universe, considering that there isn't a character standing there whose eyes we're seeing through? (Ans: yes.)

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.

[holyschist]

Huh, third-person-limited is both my default as a writer and my preference as a reader. And I think it can be fun to not know more than that one person knows (and in some types of stories--e.g. mysteries--you have to limit what the narrative knows anyway). It's the difference between

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.

[19_crows]

This is interesting, mainly because it's something I've never thought about before. I think I like 3PL best, partly because it seems like the "right" way to tell a story, based on all the books I've read.

I kind of don't like 1st person but am not sure why. This gives me a lot to think about.