![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
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.
no subject
no subject
Third person limited seems to be the most common choice I get to see in the (HP) fandom. That preference could be partly due to the canon, and partly belong to this culture in general.
One reason why I’m so attached to my old style is that I actually keep writing the same story: short stories which are all part of the same JKR’s-first-five-books-compliant universe and my Remus’s life in it. For instance I’ve almost always written Sirius’s voice in the first person. And now I remember that it all started because in the very first short stories, set post-Azkaban and pre-OotP, he was unable to think of Remus’s name, which had to be replaced by (the only) “he” in the text. When I wrote my first James/Lily-centric fics I decided to give them third-person voices, partly because, unlike in slash, I didn’t have to fear confusion with pronouns or too frequent mentions of names. Such fears have probably been stupid, as I’ve understood when above talking to someone who’s written even self-cest in third-person POV with no such problems. :)