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POV, that hateful bitch
One aspect of my writing that I continue to struggle with is POV. I have trouble remaining consistent with the POV I choose and have to proofread carefully for that mistake. Once I’ve chosen a POV, I have difficulty deciding how to include necessary information that the character from whose perspective I’ve chosen to write wouldn’t know. And then there’s the whole thing where I can’t seem to successfully manage any POV except third person limited.
My least favorite POV to read in fanfic is first person. First person feels too intimate for fanfic. As most of you know, fanfic for me is all about the self-insertion. I put myself in the place of one or more of the characters and so enjoy reading on two levels—one in which I am a voyeur/participant in a character’s body and the other more detached level on which I am appreciating plot and language and character insight, etc. When the fic is in first person, I feel like what I’m inhabiting is the author’s version of that character instead of the character. Which I know is an incredibly inarticulate way to say what I mean as of course all characters in fanfic are the products of their authors’ versions, regardless of POV. But first person feels too intimate, too close to me. I need the extra layer of distance that third person affords.
I usually don’t enjoy second person, mostly because I find it annoying and highly alienating to the reader. I also haven’t come across much fic written from this POV. However, I have read a handful of second person fics that I think work really well. For example: You Never Had it So by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mandysbitch: You don’t ask Sam why he’s remembering Reno in Texas. Ten minutes ago he asked if you remembered the time he caught you getting a blowjob from a waitress behind a diner in Arkansas. You told him ‘no’ because there are some parts of your shared history that do not warrant nostalgia. Sam finds it amusing now, but at the time you were both horrified. He was thirteen and he still looked up to you. You liked to think you sheltered him.
I generally write from third person limited, and find myself worrying to an extraordinary degree (like scary out of proportion degree) that I remain consistently within the POV I’ve chosen. For example, the last SPN fic I wrote was from Dean’s perspective and included this line originally: Sam notices the clench of Dean’s jaw and relents. “You just had a twenty-four hour bug. Your fever was pretty high, and that’s probably why you don’t remember anything.” On proofreading, I changed the line to read: Sam finally remembers his survival instincts, or else notices the Very Serious clench of Dean’s jaw, and relents. “You just had a twenty-four hour bug. Your fever was pretty high, and that’s probably why you don’t remember anything.” I’ve never back-buttoned a fic because of a lapse in POV, or really even noticed that being much of an issue in fic that I read period, but apparently I am terrified that there’s some flame wielding contingent of fic readers who will immolate me if I’m not slavishly consistent to POV.
I think the second-most difficult POV to write from is third person omniscient. It seems like that should be the easiest POV to write. I certainly enjoy reading it. There I am inside everyone’s heads equally and nobody can keep any secrets from me, no sirree. But when I attempt to write from that POV, I invariably default to third person limited without even realizing it. I find it really difficult to stay inside the heads of an entire cast of characters when I’m writing.
Close third person is my absolute favorite and, I believe, the most difficult POV to write from. This is the third person limited POV in which both the narrative, expositiony bits and the dialogue are all written in the POV character’s voice.ana_grrl is the queen of this POV for me. (From The End that Crowns Us: "I'll haunt your gorram ass, don't think otherwise," he says, giving Jayne his best hard look. And Jayne, he's never believed in ghosts, but he figures that Mal would do something like that. Just to be difficult. Once he's dead, once the oxygen wears out, once his body's blue and frozen and drifting along in Serenity. But Jayne still ain't going to promise not to mess with Inara, once they're off in the shuttle. Hell, he knows better than her what needs to be done. He should be in charge. So he ain't making promises to a man what's going to be dead soon enough.) I’d never been able to get this POV to work for me until recently when I started writing in SPN. I tried with Firefly fic but bombed, mostly because I could get Jayne’s dialogue right, but couldn’t stop the narrative bits from waxing poetic in words the big lug would never dream of using.
All of which leaves me with the following questions:
*What are your issues with POV?
*What about the occasional and subtle lapse of POV in fic? Eyeball bleeding deal breaker? Doesn’t even register? Somewhere in between?
*What are your favorite and least favorite POVs to write from? To read? Why?
*What are your reasons for choosing to write in a certain POV? Do your POV choices change depending on the fandom, the character you’re highlighting, the plot of the fic, or something else?
My least favorite POV to read in fanfic is first person. First person feels too intimate for fanfic. As most of you know, fanfic for me is all about the self-insertion. I put myself in the place of one or more of the characters and so enjoy reading on two levels—one in which I am a voyeur/participant in a character’s body and the other more detached level on which I am appreciating plot and language and character insight, etc. When the fic is in first person, I feel like what I’m inhabiting is the author’s version of that character instead of the character. Which I know is an incredibly inarticulate way to say what I mean as of course all characters in fanfic are the products of their authors’ versions, regardless of POV. But first person feels too intimate, too close to me. I need the extra layer of distance that third person affords.
I usually don’t enjoy second person, mostly because I find it annoying and highly alienating to the reader. I also haven’t come across much fic written from this POV. However, I have read a handful of second person fics that I think work really well. For example: You Never Had it So by
mandysbitch: You don’t ask Sam why he’s remembering Reno in Texas. Ten minutes ago he asked if you remembered the time he caught you getting a blowjob from a waitress behind a diner in Arkansas. You told him ‘no’ because there are some parts of your shared history that do not warrant nostalgia. Sam finds it amusing now, but at the time you were both horrified. He was thirteen and he still looked up to you. You liked to think you sheltered him. I generally write from third person limited, and find myself worrying to an extraordinary degree (like scary out of proportion degree) that I remain consistently within the POV I’ve chosen. For example, the last SPN fic I wrote was from Dean’s perspective and included this line originally: Sam notices the clench of Dean’s jaw and relents. “You just had a twenty-four hour bug. Your fever was pretty high, and that’s probably why you don’t remember anything.” On proofreading, I changed the line to read: Sam finally remembers his survival instincts, or else notices the Very Serious clench of Dean’s jaw, and relents. “You just had a twenty-four hour bug. Your fever was pretty high, and that’s probably why you don’t remember anything.” I’ve never back-buttoned a fic because of a lapse in POV, or really even noticed that being much of an issue in fic that I read period, but apparently I am terrified that there’s some flame wielding contingent of fic readers who will immolate me if I’m not slavishly consistent to POV.
I think the second-most difficult POV to write from is third person omniscient. It seems like that should be the easiest POV to write. I certainly enjoy reading it. There I am inside everyone’s heads equally and nobody can keep any secrets from me, no sirree. But when I attempt to write from that POV, I invariably default to third person limited without even realizing it. I find it really difficult to stay inside the heads of an entire cast of characters when I’m writing.
Close third person is my absolute favorite and, I believe, the most difficult POV to write from. This is the third person limited POV in which both the narrative, expositiony bits and the dialogue are all written in the POV character’s voice.
ana_grrl is the queen of this POV for me. (From The End that Crowns Us: "I'll haunt your gorram ass, don't think otherwise," he says, giving Jayne his best hard look. And Jayne, he's never believed in ghosts, but he figures that Mal would do something like that. Just to be difficult. Once he's dead, once the oxygen wears out, once his body's blue and frozen and drifting along in Serenity. But Jayne still ain't going to promise not to mess with Inara, once they're off in the shuttle. Hell, he knows better than her what needs to be done. He should be in charge. So he ain't making promises to a man what's going to be dead soon enough.) I’d never been able to get this POV to work for me until recently when I started writing in SPN. I tried with Firefly fic but bombed, mostly because I could get Jayne’s dialogue right, but couldn’t stop the narrative bits from waxing poetic in words the big lug would never dream of using.All of which leaves me with the following questions:
*What are your issues with POV?
*What about the occasional and subtle lapse of POV in fic? Eyeball bleeding deal breaker? Doesn’t even register? Somewhere in between?
*What are your favorite and least favorite POVs to write from? To read? Why?
*What are your reasons for choosing to write in a certain POV? Do your POV choices change depending on the fandom, the character you’re highlighting, the plot of the fic, or something else?
no subject
a) being in 3rd-person limited and then, DAMN, I have this awesome idea/line I could put in, but it'd be from another character's POV, thus destroying that limited thing. So usually, I grin and bear it and file the general idea way, and hopefully it'll pop up in another fic that I go about attempting!
b) this isn't really different POV so much as it is, that, in 3rd person POV, at least for me, sometimes when I write, I end up changing tense each time I sit down to write and don't really realize it. (commas ahoy!, there)
2) I honestly don't think I'm fic-savvy enough to realize lapses between POV! How embarassing. :X
3&4) Personally, I don't like anything in first-person that is anything longer than a drabble. Mostly because it seems so...like you're thrust into it. You don't get this gradual connection with the character.
I think I tend to write, or at least tend to want to write 2nd person if it's a character (or, in my fandom, a player) that is well-known/established. And that probably has a lot to do with my style of writing. 2nd-person has a more informal feel. But I've never written anything longer than a one-shot in 2nd person, so I don't know how well my style + 2nd person would translate into a novella/novel-length fic vs. my style + 3rd person limited, you know?
I do think that 2nd person can be very very effective in a long fic, though, if done right, but that depends on the plot too.
And, I have to say here, my 3rd-person limited is probably more of a 3rd-person limited and the 3rd-person closed that you're talking about. In that, the tone is more tailored to the character, but not exactly the vocabulary?
I sort of...when I get an idea concerning a particular player or pairing, I usually know right away what POV it'll be. For example, say I get an idea about the Florida Marlins. Now, they're a team filled with rookies, guys no one has any idea about. And I want readers to be able to connect with them, which is why when I start writing in my head, I think out scenes using "Dan did this" or "Scott said that" instead of "you"; I don't presume that anybody else knows anything about these guys (because they don't have a very large fanbase anyway), and if someone stumbles along the fic, it's because they're familiar with something else I wrote as opposed to actually looking for fic about the Marlins.
But if it were to be about, say, Derek Jeter & Alex Rodriguez, two very popular famous players that are on magazines everywhere and talked about on ESPN so much that even people who don't like them know pretty much everything about them? Well, I figure that if someone's clicking on a fic written about them, they are doing so because they know about them already, not because they want to get to know about them. So using 2nd person isn't really a problem.
Also, I've never thought about it until now, as I'm writing this, but maybe past tense v. present tense has to do with what POV you go for! And, in my experience, I write angsty fics in 2nd, and more fluffy fics in 3rd. Hmmm. *ponders the meaning of this.*
Excuse any redundancy. xD
I welcome redundancy :)
Yes! I often find myself copiously rewriting or even changing structure (let's say to vignettes, where I can comfortably change POV from section to section) to accommodate the info.
You don't get this gradual connection with the character.
Oooh, that's an interesting way of putting it.
And, I have to say here, my 3rd-person limited is probably more of a 3rd-person limited and the 3rd-person closed that you're talking about. In that, the tone is more tailored to the character, but not exactly the vocabulary?
In third person limited, you have a traditional third person narrator except that the narration doesn't reveal any information that the POV character wouldn't know or have access to. Close third person is the same as third person limited except that everything is rendered in the character's voice, not just that character's dialogue. It's as if we're getting a running third person commentary from inside that character's head. So, for instance, if Derek Jeter and his dad are sitting down to dinner, third person limited might say, Derek and his dad ate dinner in silence. Derek wondered what was wrong and close third person might read, Dad was really quiet at dinner and Derek wondered what was wrong. That's like the most shit-tacular example, ever, LOL but hopefully you can see what I mean.