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[silburygirl]

In a sweeping move of stupidity, I became beyond engrossed in my book on the bus home today and didn't notice that my foot had fallen asleep until I was trying to climb down from the second level to get off at my stop. Which meant that I not only nearly died on the stairs (although that was partially the insane bus driver's fault for steering like

Comments

[thehalflie]

I take it you're enjoying Remains of the Day then? I'll let you know how the movie turns out when we watch it during Week 12 classes. God, it's like being back in junior high - the week before Christmas is movie week kids! (Not that I'm complaining as it is clearly superior to the French grammar test that is also occurring that week).

As for the beta-ing...it's coming. You really shouldn't have given me the words "extension" because that equals procrastination. At least the time difference is currently working in my favour...

[silburygirl]

I take it that I should have withheld that piece of information from you?

Yes, I am, and it is lovely. Do tell me how the movie is, but, really, how bad can anything with Emma Thompson be?

[thehalflie]

Well you mentioned something about it being the next thing you were going to read, but I wasn't sure if you had started yet.

It's not Emma Thompson I worry about, it's everyone she has to act with.

[silburygirl]

But her awesomeness cancels out the awfulness of all those around her...

I love the English language this early in the morning!

[harmony_bites]

Most of my stories, if you include Trek, are in first person. I agree with you on third's flexibility, but I think as a writer, what made first person attractive is that if better helped in getting into a character's head, pretending I was the person.

One of the first fanfic stories I wrote, and one that I got a lot of ego boo for, was this first person story, "A Captain for a New Age" from the POV of Captain Harriman--who I loathe. It was scathing and inspired by some Kirk-bashing, so I wrote this story where I tried to put a lot of the sentiments I was hearing against my favorite character in this other, unsympathetic character's words. Someone congratulated me on doing a great job using an "unreliable narrator" and I went huh? That author started a thread then on "the unreliable narrator" and POV.

Ever since then, I became fascinated with POV and how it effects a story. I love this anthology, Points of View which groups stories by POV from interior monologue to omniscient. I even have read one novel I very much like, "Bright

[silburygirl]

It took me a while to wrap my head around the idea of an unreliable narrator, because it was so close to that paradoxical idea that everything that exists is inside your mind-but then how does your mind exist? Now, it's something that I can't read a book without examining

[harmony_bites]

It took me a while to wrap my head around the idea of an unreliable narrator, because it was so close to that paradoxical idea that everything that exists is inside your mind-but then how does your mind exist? Now, it's something that I can't read a book without examining.

That perspective changes you a great deal as a reader and writer--the realization that you can have a character think something, and it's just wrong, wrong, wrong. Sometimes it can be done to mislead, but often it can just be used ironically, or just how much one character misjudges another, especially if you get that other character's POV.

Second person is an interesting perspective as well. I remember being quite young and a teacher trying to explain to us that it didn't work as a creative writing form, then being shut up very quickly when someone pulled one of those "Choose Your Own Adventure" books out.It rarely works. One of the differences between HP and Trek is that it's much more craft-conscious, more literary, and the most common and popular form is the

[silburygirl]

However, I even did one story in it. One thing my Trek partner in crime once said stuck with me--that it's a very good POV to show "damage"--a distanced, split-off character. That certainly follows with the novel "Bright Lights, Big City" which is told from the POV of a cocaine abuser.

That's an interesting point. One of the books that I mentioned above, Written on the Body, is primarily written in a typical first-person style, but every so often it lapses into the second person, as though the intended audience is actually his/her lover, and I found those passages to be the most moving in the book-it was like finding love letters written for someone else. So I think that from that letter-writing perspective, there is both that feeling of intimacy and distance-the person obviously isn't there, if someone is writing to them.

What I do like about third, and yet paradoxically I've never used it, is the ability to go wherever you want. I've alternated between two POVs, but I've never used rotating where you could get several different