would you ever write first person POV fic?

I have written one for Hobbit! “A Different Road” is kinda technically a monologue by an AU Bilbo who left the Shire after the Fell Winter and became an adventurer, but it DOES count as first person! 

And if I may briefly launch into a diatribe on first person POV it is a hard, hard POV to write. I know it dominates YA literature but you are seeing the best of the best of authors, ones who can master that very difficult art, and who make it look deceptively easy. 

First Person seems easy to a lot of beginner writers because 1) they’ve read a bunch of First Person, and how hard can it be? 2) you’ve developed your OC and it’s sometimes easier to write in sort of a diary format (especially if you’re a writer who practiced by keeping a diary) or just speaking with “I” as you would in an essay or real life.

But the thing is, First Person is very limiting in many ways and as such presents a ton of challenges over and above the basic challenges of writing and completing an actual story:

– If it’s First Person/Present Tense, it can be disorienting for the reader as we’re stuck in the very narrow view of the character. We know only what they know in that moment, so sometimes a writer has to resort to crazy coincidences like overheard conversation to expand the available information beyond what the character knows. Present tense in general, even in Third, creates a dreamy quality for readers that can be disorienting. 

– First Person/Past Tense then the reader can automatically infer that the character survives long enough to tell their story after the fact. If you have a death-defying action packed adventure, that lowers a lot of tension because we know the protagonist survives at least to a certain point near the end. (First Person/Past can be well utilized in epistolary-style stories, btw, written down after the fact for a certain audience by the character.)

– First Person begs the question of not just when the narrator is speaking, but who the narrator is speaking too. One can also reasonably assume that how they tell their story is affected by who they are telling it to (a lover, a friend, family member, an enemy, a figure of authority, or an audience of strangers).

– To pull off an engaging First Person you have to have a strong and unique character voice. If your narrator just has a fairly bland, informative voice you might as well just keep it in Third Person because you’re not gaining much by having it in First. 

(Aside: Third Person gives you a lot of tools, like the ability to jump around in time, to jump between characters inside and outside of scenes without confusing people, the ability to show events the narrator isn’t aware of, and the ability to kill characters in the middle of action because they’re not the vehicle through which the story is being told. To give an example, the Hunger Games books are told in very close First Person. We don’t know anything Katniss doesn’t know until waaaay after the events of the story, and the novels can be very claustrophobic at times as a result. The movies, in contrast, while a different medium, are in Third Person, in that we know events running parallel to Katniss’s experience as they are happening and even in her POV we see things external to her.)

Going back to the value of a First Person voice, man, when you can pull off a good First Person voice you are a god. One reason I’ve avoided it is because I don’t really think I can do most characters justice by staying in First Person the whole time because you have to be really engaging. What voice I can pull off I think I can still do by filtering the description in Third Person through their POV to add color, without taking on the limitations of the POV (see the beginning of The Only Way Out is Down which is Third Person but runs very close to First in terms of voice, a deliberate choice of something I wanted to practice on my part). Basically, I think I can do First Person, but I don’t think I can do it well, I’m not a huge fan of what is gained rather than lost in terms of using First over Third (a more intimate view and in exchange for all the above mentioned tools) and most importantly, I don’t think I can sustain it for more than a couple thousand words, much less write a novel in that voice.

That said, one of the best fics I ever saw, the one that made me believe First Person might actually be worth doing and isn’t universally garbage except at the highest published levels was a Bleach fic called “After the Fairytale Ends”.

To paraphrase my writing teacher: unless you have a deliberate idea of something you want to do in your story that can only be done in an alternate person and tense, just stick to Third Person/Past Tense. It’s the clearest, the easiest for readers, and provides the most tools for writers.

http://stream.yourmusics.us/20151101/1190498/Fastball%20-%20The%20Way_(song365.cc).mp3?plead=please-dont-download-this-or-our-lawyers-wont-let-us-host-audio
https://avelera.tumblr.com/post/178181384730/audio_player_iframe/avelera/tumblr_oxdp4j4lwF1wowd7o?audio_file=http%3A%2F%2Fstream.yourmusics.us%2F20151101%2F1190498%2FFastball%2520-%2520The%2520Way_%28song365.cc%29.mp3

rocknrollwillneverdie:

The Way – Fastball (All the Pain Money Can Buy, 1998)

Do you ever hear a song from your childhood and remember that yOU LOVED IT SO DAMN MUCH??

smolsarcasticraspberry:

hey asking for a friend but uh. what’s it gonna take for fandom to relearn the difference between “canon” and “word of god”?

★ canon = the text itself; the show/movie/book/comic; the actual up-on-Netflix content; anything a casual fan would reasonably interact with
★ word of god = anything else, i.e. interviews with cast/crew/showrunners; DVD commentaries; comments from the crew on social media or at cons; literally any written or verbal remarks about the text made by writers or showrunners or actors

word of god does not equal canon, and yet i increasingly see fandoms conflating the two and acting like word of god comments from The Powers That Be count as canon and are equivalent to canon footnotes to the text and i’m. NO. listen. it’s not. that’s not what canon means, and word of god comments should not be treated as part of the canon text. this isn’t just me being a pedantic text purist, this has actual negative consequences for shows and fandoms and people’s experience of the stories, i mean:

  • it privileges the creator’s interpretation of the text as the only “correct” one. death of the author? no one’s heard of her. writers and showrunners get to tell fans how to interpret the text, and a solid 80% of fandom is going “okay, if you say so!”
  • it stifles fandom debate and analysis, because fan analysis of the text at hand is rejected outright by other fans on the basis that “well the showrunners said it’s like this”
  • it contributes to fandom bullying, in which word of god comments are used to harass people who have the audacity to want to interpret the work differently, or who disagree with the powers that be, or just don’t want to consider those comments at all in their understanding of the story
  • word of god comments may be confusing; they may change over time or contradict earlier statements; they may even contradict the text itself. all of which leads to fans frantically trying to reconcile word of god comments with actual canon, rather than going “okay fuck this, it doesn’t make sense so i’m disregarding it”
  • again: this only creates more arguments in fandom; if creators say x at one point, and y at another, you end up with more fandom slap-fights over which comment was the ‘correct’ one and which interpretation ‘wins’
  • it encourages lazy and unsatisfying storytelling. if fanon will accept word of god comments as canon, showrunners develop an attitude of “it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make sense, we can just handwave it in an interview”
  • this results in poor writing, or important plot points being explained in word of god comments rather than in actual canon
  • this in turn makes the story confusing and incomprehensible to anyone who’s not knee-deep in fandom. casual fans, kids, someone bingeing the series 5 years from now on crunchyroll… they’re not reading the interviews or tweets or watching the comicon panels. those viewers still need to be able to understand the story, and we are slip-sliding towards a creator-fandom model in which they won’t be able to, because word of god comments run the risk of becoming required reading for understanding the story
  • this has serious implications for how stories handle representation: if fans start accepting word of god as equivalent to canon, it means shows can keep canon rep (particularly queer rep) vague and ambiguous, and prop it up with word of god comments that “confirm the representation”. there’s no incentive to actually commit to unambiguous, clear canon rep if stories can lean on word of god to compensate for the utter lack of actual diversity in the canon text itself

the canon text has to stand alone. word of god should serve as a trove of fun trivia or behind-the-scenes tidbits about the writing process; it is not supposed to be a substitute for clear, concise, and comprehensive storytelling. a story that doesn’t make sense unless you’ve read 8 different explanatory interviews by the writers is badly written. showrunners who treat interviews as a place to offload all the character development or plot explanations they didn’t bother to include in the actual text are lazy hacks who are bad at their jobs.

word of god can be handy and fun and informative, and for people who are interested in creator comments or interviews there’s no harm in paying attention to that stuff. but it’s not canon. the canon is the text itself. anything else is supplementary to that, and fans are absolutely allowed to disregard anything not in canon if they choose.