Thank you for a wonderful response! I’m overjoyed to have a discussion like this. (It reminds me of the good old days on FictionAlley Park’s discussion threads – fifteen years or so ago!)
It’s interesting to hear about the negative feelings towards first-person POV in other fandoms, too. It might be true that people are afraid to write – or it doesn’t even occur to them to write – in a technique they don’t see much of. But I’ve seen some Fest participants mention first-person (and second-person) POV specifically among their dislikes or “don’t want to receive” in their sign-up comments.
Yes, now I remember years ago reading such views that we’d better not write fanfic in the first person, because the readers have already read the canon character’s voice or imagined it themselves and can’t find the voice we’d write convincing. And I’ve always thought that I give a voice to my viewpoint character (not only in the dialogue, of course, but) in the whole narrative, no matter which grammatical person I’ve chosen. (That can be one reason why I couldn’t possibly be interested in writing fic in Harry’s POV.) (My style’s not been about the character actually speaking to the reader, but rather like stream of consciousness, although I think that in some short pieces my Remus has spoken in his mind to his absent Sirius.)
Oh, I’d forgotten about those green-eyed Gryffindors and the other men! There’s been so many intimate scenes I’ve been jerked out of enjoying when suddenly an epithet has made me think there’s actually a third man present and being caressed.
I definitely agree that it’s best to use the (same) names. I wouldn’t like to even write Moony instead of Remus only for a change. There must be a reason such as Sirius thinking about Remus as his Moony at a moment when he’s getting emotional in a certain way. And particularly the viewpoint character must be referred to by the name he identifies with. (Of course there can he exceptional moments… In a fic set on November 1, 1981, only the memory scenes are in Remus’s first-person POV and in the current-time moments he thinks of himself as “the fool”.)
But I think I couldn’t “translate” a first-person fic word-by-word to third-person POV, without making the prose less elegant and fluent. Now for a while I felt silly that I’ve said I find the first-person better for stories with same-gender interaction. Of course, there’s a lot of elegant narrative about characters to all of whom the writer must refer with the same pronoun. But slash fanfic is often for a big part about the characters looking at and touching and smelling each other’s body parts. Recently I’ve found it an interesting challenge to construct the text (and even the details of the interaction) in a third-person story so that there isn’t very frequent need to spell out the name of the owner of each knee, chest and hand.
You’ve inspired me to rambling about my writing, and I’d very much like to hear about the solution in your fic about a character interacting with him/her/themselves.
no subject
It’s interesting to hear about the negative feelings towards first-person POV in other fandoms, too. It might be true that people are afraid to write – or it doesn’t even occur to them to write – in a technique they don’t see much of. But I’ve seen some Fest participants mention first-person (and second-person) POV specifically among their dislikes or “don’t want to receive” in their sign-up comments.
Yes, now I remember years ago reading such views that we’d better not write fanfic in the first person, because the readers have already read the canon character’s voice or imagined it themselves and can’t find the voice we’d write convincing. And I’ve always thought that I give a voice to my viewpoint character (not only in the dialogue, of course, but) in the whole narrative, no matter which grammatical person I’ve chosen. (That can be one reason why I couldn’t possibly be interested in writing fic in Harry’s POV.) (My style’s not been about the character actually speaking to the reader, but rather like stream of consciousness, although I think that in some short pieces my Remus has spoken in his mind to his absent Sirius.)
Oh, I’d forgotten about those green-eyed Gryffindors and the other men! There’s been so many intimate scenes I’ve been jerked out of enjoying when suddenly an epithet has made me think there’s actually a third man present and being caressed.
I definitely agree that it’s best to use the (same) names. I wouldn’t like to even write Moony instead of Remus only for a change. There must be a reason such as Sirius thinking about Remus as his Moony at a moment when he’s getting emotional in a certain way. And particularly the viewpoint character must be referred to by the name he identifies with. (Of course there can he exceptional moments… In a fic set on November 1, 1981, only the memory scenes are in Remus’s first-person POV and in the current-time moments he thinks of himself as “the fool”.)
But I think I couldn’t “translate” a first-person fic word-by-word to third-person POV, without making the prose less elegant and fluent. Now for a while I felt silly that I’ve said I find the first-person better for stories with same-gender interaction. Of course, there’s a lot of elegant narrative about characters to all of whom the writer must refer with the same pronoun. But slash fanfic is often for a big part about the characters looking at and touching and smelling each other’s body parts. Recently I’ve found it an interesting challenge to construct the text (and even the details of the interaction) in a third-person story so that there isn’t very frequent need to spell out the name of the owner of each knee, chest and hand.
You’ve inspired me to rambling about my writing, and I’d very much like to hear about the solution in your fic about a character interacting with him/her/themselves.