I just heard there's a rage club, but I'm too late to be a founding member.

[antennapedia]

Jolly me out of my current state of rage, please. Rage is not a usual state for me-- not honest-to-goodness grand-gesture-level fury-- and I find it unpleasant. I'm against continuing in this state. Therefore, distraction! On the theory that if there's anything as comforting as self-absorption, it's contemplating the characters I love, I propose

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Re: nemaihne asks via IM

[antennapedia]

POV: I do not rise to Henry-Jamesian levels of obsession with it. For one thing, he agrees with fandom that the first-person is an inherently immature point of view, which opinion I consider utter bullcrap, and counter with an overhanded copy of Huck Finn, library binding edition, aimed right at his forehead. But it's important, and control over it is one of those signals that tell me whether I'm reading a writer with serious chops or not.

I'm a modern reader, so I gravitate toward a tight third as a default starting point. Particular stories will push me toward the first person instead: If the narrator is important, or if I wish the reader to consider the means by which the tale is reaching them, or if the story is in a fandom that demands it. (Holmes stories must be first-person stories told by someone near him. It's just a rule. Which means that it can be violated, but you'd better offer something awesome when you do so.)

Some storylines are primarily one person's story, and so I stick with that point of view in them. In longer things, I want to stretch out more and write segments from somebody else's head. I deliberately swap from one to another at times. For instance, I've written only one tiny piece of Giles/Xander in Giles's point of view-- because the secret is, I identify with Xander most strongly of all the BtVS characters, so I love his point of view. But the upshot is, next time I write Giles/Xander, I have to do it from Giles's point of view, just to pop out of the rut.

I've never written a true omniscient point of view story. Closest I've come is HH: Sorrows End, with those present tense external-narrator segments. I'm looking for the right story to try it with.

Second person is mostly a gimmick. Even in Bright Lights, Big City, gimmick. Some writers have managed to pull off shorter pieces in which the choice serves a worthwhile purpose, but I remain suspicious. Unless we're talking interactive fiction, for which "You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building" is perfect, timeless, and genre-defining.

It's all about familiarity. The default story-telling mode of English-language fiction is past tense, third or first person. Convention is effectively invisible and comfortable. Anything that varies from convention calls attention to itself and can distance the reader from the experience of the fiction. The reader becomes aware of the process of reading and doesn't sink quite as deep into the fictional dream. Sort of. Or so my theory goes. So for that reason, present-tense is distancing, second person is distancing, all meta-fictional tropes are distancing to some degree.

And lots of fun at times. I'm not against them at all. I'm just cautious with them, and unlikely to indulge in them myself. I'm chasing a more old-fashioned experience of story. Love reading other people doing cool things with them, though.

Because there are no real rules, and I love having my expectations delightfully overturned.