1stP has to be extremely well-written, or I won't like it. And much of it is just mediocre. It feels somehow lazy to me.
I started writing my current WIP in 1st, and immediately abandoned that and started over in 3rd. It just didn't work. There was too much going on for just one point of view.
I confess I agree on the often lazy feel of 1stP, but that happens in 3rd, too. I wanted to avoid judgements like that in this analysis and stick as much as I could to countable facts in order to tease out my own feelings on the topic.
In the 4th part of this series, I do a closer analysis of three books where 1stP is essential and done well.
Yeah, put like this it does indeed look like a trend. (Needs some quantitative data, though -- maybe one for Nicola Griffith's genre award monitoring project?)
Oh, and it's possible to write second-person. Multi-viewpoint second-person, even. (Hey, it's a thing I've done :)
Second person was beyond the scope of this analysis. It's so rarely used that it doesn't make a difference to trends of this sort. I have a vague plan for a post someday about 2nd person writing (I think of it as a tactic to distance the narrator from himself), but I need to read a lot more of it first.
My biggest question of this trend is that chicken-and-egg thing. And of course this is limited to my particular quirks of recommendations and tastes (note it's more heavily F than SF).
I think of it as a tactic to distance the narrator from himself
I call it "first person omniscient". Because that's what it's good for: giving a series of over-the-shoulder views from the POV of different characters that function like first person but have the ability to cut away and examine things the narrative viewpoint shouldn't be aware of.
Wait, possible terminology confusion here.... To me "second person" narration is use of "you" for the character. Bright Lights, Big City being the traditional exemplar. Within SF/F, the opening of Karin Lowachee's Warchild is written this way.
What I call "first person omniscient" is like Neal Stephenson's The Big U, where the narrator covers lots of things that happened that he wasn't present for.
I think it's safe to say that 1stP allows the writer to get away with some things, but makes others harder, at least to me.
Yes, on Katniss (a point I noted in the previous part of this series, and will note more in the next part). In that case, though, I thought that worked less as letting her get away with being cold and more as showing that no, she's not actually cold.
I think yes, I'm inclined to cut 1stP narrators slack for bad behavior if they're explaining themselves sensibly. Isn't this true for people in real life? But perhaps some authors lean on this heavily when it's just being neat-o, not being a larger aspect/theme of the story (as with Katniss, imo).
But I still get sooooo annoyed by 1stP narrator insecurities. (This is not helped by the preponderance of YA fantasy with female leads--so much playing the "insecure teen girl" bullshit! I hated that crap when I was a teen girl; it has not grown more tolerable with my age
( ... )
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I started writing my current WIP in 1st, and immediately abandoned that and started over in 3rd. It just didn't work. There was too much going on for just one point of view.
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In the 4th part of this series, I do a closer analysis of three books where 1stP is essential and done well.
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Oh, and it's possible to write second-person. Multi-viewpoint second-person, even. (Hey, it's a thing I've done :)
Reply
My biggest question of this trend is that chicken-and-egg thing. And of course this is limited to my particular quirks of recommendations and tastes (note it's more heavily F than SF).
Reply
I call it "first person omniscient". Because that's what it's good for: giving a series of over-the-shoulder views from the POV of different characters that function like first person but have the ability to cut away and examine things the narrative viewpoint shouldn't be aware of.
Reply
What I call "first person omniscient" is like Neal Stephenson's The Big U, where the narrator covers lots of things that happened that he wasn't present for.
Reply
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Yes, on Katniss (a point I noted in the previous part of this series, and will note more in the next part). In that case, though, I thought that worked less as letting her get away with being cold and more as showing that no, she's not actually cold.
I think yes, I'm inclined to cut 1stP narrators slack for bad behavior if they're explaining themselves sensibly. Isn't this true for people in real life? But perhaps some authors lean on this heavily when it's just being neat-o, not being a larger aspect/theme of the story (as with Katniss, imo).
But I still get sooooo annoyed by 1stP narrator insecurities. (This is not helped by the preponderance of YA fantasy with female leads--so much playing the "insecure teen girl" bullshit! I hated that crap when I was a teen girl; it has not grown more tolerable with my age ( ... )
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