First-Person Narrative, or Not?

[paulamcg]

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.

Comments

[pauraque]

First-person POV doesn't bother me, but I have gotten the impression that there's some negative feeling towards it, not only in HP but in other fandoms too (with the notable exception of fandoms where the source material itself is written in first-person POV, such as Jeeves & Wooster). There may be a bit of a feedback loop: People think no one likes it, so they don't write it, so people rarely see it, so they think no one likes it...

The specific complaints I've heard about it usually center around people's sense that it raises the bar for writing in-character, i.e. if it's the main character speaking directly to the reader, every sentence has to sound like their voice, and supposedly too many writers can't pull it off. Personally I wonder if this is understating the difficulty of writing in close third-person POV, which should be equally consistent in its character voice. Most fic is written in that POV and nobody seems to think it's an insurmountable barrier.

My experience with writing slash and femslash in third-person is that clunkiness can almost always be fixed just by using people's names, which readers hardly ever notice. (But readers do notice epithets like "the blond" and "the shorter man" and "the sexy Slytherin" and a little of that goes a looooong way, with overuse quickly becoming unintentionally hilarious!) However, I did recently write a time travel fic where both characters were the same person, and I did consider using first-person for that one, though I eventually decided on a different solution.

[musyc]

I read both third and first person all the time! I do think it's a little harder for an author to get first person to attract my attention, but I'll click out of a fic for all sorts of reasons (failure to punctuate dialogue, anyone calling Hermione 'Mione, etc) so it's not a slam on the tense or POV itself, in general.

I think that when the canon is first person, like Rivers of London, it's a lot more accepted and often expected.

[magnetic_pole]

I'm not sure where this fandom preference came from! I feel as if the fandom hive mind tends to understand things that can go wrong quickly (using epithets coming to mind immediately), and then writing advice swings to the black-and-white prohibition, as much writing advice does. Often I think we're using a proxy saying things like "I don't want too introspective a story" when we say "no first person POV." I've definitely done so on fest sign ups, saying "no I love yous" because I don't want too much mushiness in general, not because I mind the occasional endearment or confession.

I say write whatever you want! I actually love second person, though I know everyone groans when they see it. Some stories just call for that imperative mood. M.

[sperrywink]

I am one of those people that doesn't particularly like first person, and pretty much loathes second person!

For me, unless the fic is <500 words or so, second person becomes tedious and kludgy, and for first person, if the first paragraph isn't absolutely spectacular in voice, I find myself backing out of it immediately out of secondhand embarrassment. Yes, it can provide more intimacy and putting the reader deeper in the head of the POV character, but it needs such a delicate hand to work well that all too often I get thrown out of the story by the first person voice being off. It also needs to strike the right mood. I can handle first person in memoirs because that is the author speaking, but for fiction, I don't necessarily want to be in a character's head so closely, I want to be in the midst of the story, which I find third person works best for.

As for present or past tense, I'm more flexible there, and usually don't pay too much attention to what tense a story is in. In fact, the biggest thing I learned in fanfic writing was keeping a consistent tense, because I don't notice it overly.

[walgesang]

A major take-away is writing the way you enjoy, I feel! There are certainly many things that can throw me out of a fic and admittedly first-person POV is not usually my go-to, but I'm often willing to give it a try if it's in a story that appeals to me. Also, especially in my earliest days of fandom, there did seem to be a lot of people I would run across that would feel like they were too shy to write because of options of how someone ought to write (or the popular pairings, etc). I always emphasize that people should do what they enjoy!

[rhoda_rants]

Dangit, I had a reply to this all set, but it got eaten. :(

Trying again:

I don't think it really matters what tense you use as long as you use it well. Fandom getting nitpicky over certain things is just part of fandom, and you can either let that dictate how you write, or ignore it and the people who want to read in the tense you're writing will show up. I guess it's different for challenges bc people will have specific requests, but if you're just writing for you, I'd say keep doing that. I do feel like the hostility towards first person is mostly arbitrary, and probably due to a lot of stories being badly written in that voice, but it's not the tense's fault. What did First Person Present ever do to anyone?

You notice a similar weirdness around tenses in Victorian Gothic novels, where people just couldn't accept a character talking directly to the reader for whatever reason, which is why Wuthering Heights has this convoluted flashback-within-a-flashback structure where the guy in the house talks to the housekeeper who used to work for the Lindens and somehow has ridiculously accurate recall for every interaction between Cathy and Heathcliffe from when they were children onward--it's absurd, and I think some literary conventions are still clinging to that a little.

Hm, that's an interesting blog series idea, come to think of it. "How Fanficcers Are Like Readers of Victorian Gothic Novels: Part 1, Being Extra About Tenses."

ANYWAY, if that's your favorite way to write fic, just do it. The readers who want it will show up, and those who dislike that tense will read something else.