Writerly M-Type Thing

[dawn_felagund]

We got some of the snow from the storm to the south of us, just enough that schools were two hours delayed this morning. This meant that I missed teaching first and second periods, which were fully planned. Tomorrow is a half-day, so I only have to teach first and second periods. Which means that this is one of those rare moments in my life when I

Comments

[indy1776]

I don't understand the hatred of first person myself. It's just another way to tell a story; neither good or bad in and of itself. And as someone who enjoys writing it, I try not to let the vitriol get to me but don't always succeed. (I actually mentioned in my answers to this that the SWG is the only place in fandom I've ever seen where first person fics are widely read and loved.)

[dawn_felagund]

Oh! You did this too! I need to go read that. :D

I just mentioned to Huin that I've edited for two small literary magazines in my time and never noticed more awfulness in first person than in third. To me, PoV is a tool like any other in a writer's repertoire. Putting something off-limits that is the best choice for a particular project simply makes no sense to me.

[heartofoshun]

I do have a prejudice against second person--it recalls bad horror fiction for me. "Desperate, you round a turn in the musty, dark tunnel when you hear the shuffle of footsteps behind you. You run faster and faster, but then you stumble, sprawling flat on your face. Before you can scramble to your feet, you feel its hot breath on your neck and smell the stench of its foetid breath!" Got that out of my system! That is the kind of thing that second person conjures up for me.

[with_rainfall]

:D Not to mention all those CYOA Goosebumps books (good Lord, I used to devour those as a kid!) That said, I know it's not great literature, but Peter Lerangis manages a pitch-perfect and genuinely interesting Ducky McCrae in the Babysitters Club YA spin-off series California Diaries. Mind, those are written in journal format, so not quite the same as novels.

It also... kind of worked in If on a Winter's Night a Traveller.

[heartofoshun]

I do not enjoy many YA books (and did not read them as a kid). I have read and enjoyed a few extraordinary examples as an adult like Harry Potter, the Narnia books and the Winkle in Time series, so I had not read any of the first ones you mention. I looked up and read several reviews of a Winter's Night a Traveller. It does sounds intriguing and like I might actually really enjoy it or find it maddeningly frustrating. It does unabashedly admit to using the form as a device not really to tell a straightforward story but to cause one think about the experience of reading and writing. Thanks for the recommendation, I may try that one.

[dawn_felagund]

Second person always strikes me as gimmicky--rarely appropriate but used to be DifferentTM. That said, every time I think something can't work for me in a story, someone writes something wonderful with it but of the time? No.

[indy1776]

Maybe it's because first is fairly rare that terrible examples stand out more than the good ones? (And then people are scared off it so they don't get better at it.)

POV is definitely a tool, nothing more and nothing less.

It's true and so upsetting

[heartofoshun]

I will probably post this somewhere else also. But I got annoyed thinking about that prejudice again, that I just took ten minutes and listed a very few of my well-respected first person novels as quickly as I could.

A Few Great first person novels (in no particular order):

The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner
The Quiet American by Graham Greene
The Remains of the Day (sorry, forgot the author--great book)
I specialized in Henry James for a while early in my academic years- so The Ambassadors
How about Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (not only first person but that unpopular form, A Novella!)
Someone else mentioned somewhere recently, maybe on my LJ comments on this topic, Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy (fantastic unreliable narrator!); she also did others which I liked even better in the first person like Mask of Apollo and The Last of the Wine (greatly influenced my Maitimo and Findekano in both style and content)
Wuthering Heights
The Great Gatsby
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier (if not great, then very, very good)
Great

Re: It's true and so upsetting

[dawn_felagund]

Clearly, the body of English literature (and French!) would be better if those works had been rejected right off the bat simply for being done in first person.