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.

[paulamcg]

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.

[pauraque]

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.

[paulamcg]

Thank you so much for still replying, and commenting also on Maggie’s comment below – participating so generously in this discussion!

Now I think I’ll go and read that Hermione/Hermione fic. You’ve certainly given a try to unconventional solutions in exceptional cases.

I’m trying not to take myself and the reception of my fanfic too seriously. This discussion could make me start suspecting that I’ve done something completely wrong all this time (while fortunately not writing even close to a hundred stories since 2003). Perhaps if I’d stuck to the conventional third-person POV, I could have become a BNF and my life would have been different… or not! In fact, I’ve started writing (somehow, I hope) proper sex scenes only this year (after my eight-year absence), so lack of those could have been another reason, besides the first-person titles, why I always had limited popularity. And maybe I still have a lot to learn about not mixing up body parts. :)