paulamcg: (Default)
paulamcg ([personal profile] paulamcg) wrote2019-12-28 01:08 pm
Entry tags:

First-Person Narrative, or Not?

I’ve just started writing two short stories simultaneously, one for Remus Fest and the other for HP Golden Age’s Salt and Pepper Fest. So far I’m using the third person in both – partly because I somehow enjoy this challenge, and partly because I remember (and saw in some sign-up comments at R/S Small Gifts) bias against the first person. I wonder how common the dislike of first-person narration is in the fandom.

I wrote my main fanfic, a long chaptered story, in the third person – but included letters in which the protagonist could narrate his backstory, and I allowed him to do it more and more in vivid scenes, using the present tense. In my short stories of the same period, too, I experimented with and developed my first-person-and-present-tense style.

That kind of first-person narration is still my favourite – particularly in slash fics with a lot of interaction between two characters of the same gender. But I want to also take the challenge of finding other ways to avoid clunkiness with pronouns and names. I doubt there’s much difference between my third-person and first-person short stories in how close I take the reader to the view-point character’s consciousness.

Having written this year mainly for my own indulgence, I at least pretend not to care too much whether the first person scares off readers. But now writing for fests, Ḯ’m more interested again in other writers’ and readers’ views.
pauraque: bird flying (Default)

[personal profile] pauraque 2019-12-29 03:40 pm (UTC)(link)
Very interesting to hear your thoughts on writing first-person, since I do it so rarely myself. Now I kind of want to give it a try! I did a quick check of my own fics on AO3, and with 164 works spanning 18 years, I only found one story written in a clear first-person narrative. I suspect I wanted to put the reader more directly into the character's unreliable perspective, since it was Voldemort's POV and focused on his twisted thoughts. There was also one epistolary ficlet where the whole thing is a letter written by one character to another, but that doesn't quite count, I don't think.

I also wrote a fic that reads like (the much-dreaded!) second-person narration most of the way through, though the end reveals that there is an "I" that's been speaking to "you" all along. But that was an X-Files fic from the perspective of an alien, and it was definitely my intention for it to sound weird and inhuman. The fic went over well at the time, and I do remember getting comments (even in 2003) that people felt third-person narrative was normally best, but this was an exceptional case.

I don't feel like I have trouble keeping track of whose body parts are whose when I'm writing m/m or f/f scenes, but maybe I've just been writing third-person fic for so long that I'm not conscious of that process anymore.

As for the time travel fic, I eventually decided to introduce the time-traveling doppelganger as "the Hermione from two o'clock", as opposed to "the Hermione from one o'clock", then transitioned to calling them Two O'Clock and One O'Clock and finally just Two and One. I wasn't sure if it was going to work, but reader feedback claimed that it was fine and not confusing, so I guess it was all right! I've been meaning to browse AO3 tags and see how else people have dealt with characters meeting themselves.