This is probably a cliche question, but I wanna ask your preference in POV styles. It's just that I'm having a hard time deciding whether to go for first or third point of view in a BL story that I wanted to write.
Apr '20
Apr '20
I typically write from first person, but that's usually because my stories start off with a character idea, then develop into situations.
For stories that start as a situation, then have characters added, I lean more toward third person.
I didn't even realize I did this until you asked, so thank you.
Third person omniscient, I can't help myself. I like showing character thoughts, sometimes a little tangent, and not focusing on just one lead for the whole story.
For comics, interchangable first person (for character focused chapters) and third person omniscient.
For novels, first person or third person limited. But I really like it when people get experimental and surf between two POVs.
Dang. Now I feel like changing to third person pov for my present story now.
Edit: Actually, I never really thought much about povs, but I kinda had a temporary interchange between first and third on the middle chapter when the character changed. I don't know if anyone would like that, or if people would get bothered with it.
It useful exercise to try different POV from what you normally use. Like, many writers who use first-person have tendency to overthink and overdescribe. Changing to third-person reinforces "show, don't tell."
I prefer third person mostly because I find a lot of inner dialog to be really annoying. I prefer limited over omniscient, if there is a 2nd or third person add, they are limited to their own chapter.
I do sometimes like when the third person is told by a present narrator who has random tangents.
I feel first person tends to work better with stuff like mysteries or someone who is journaling. I like it better when they are unreliable. I have read some stories with unknown 1st person, which is interesting but can come off a bit annoying. It is a version of first person which I don't really want to catch on tho.
Omniscient Third Person for me. I like shifting between multiple POVs. For my story, a romance, it's definitely focused on the POVs of the main couple...and their feelings towards the conflicts they have
I am ready to have rocks thrown at me. I have put on my armor. Omniscient third-person for me. I want to know the smallest details of a person, I want my perspective to be as unlimited as a work permits. I want to be at the center of all happenings, a ghost that no one sees but that sees and knows everything. I need a lot of intellectual stimulation.
And that is exactly what I feel a first-person cannot give me. I read many first-person books that I considered as good: "The Catcher in the Rye", "To Kill a Mockingbird", "Jane Eyre", and many more that I cannot recall. The thoughts of the characters (especially Holden Caufield's) were so mesmerizing that just thinking about it makes me lose my breath, the mastering of description, the strength of feelings, even the subjectivity of thought. They were perfect. You end up forgetting at some point that you are reading first-person, though you are part of the narrator. It was amazing.
And rare. I know this will sound discriminatory, but as soon as I see a first-person POV in a work written after, say, 1970, I rule it out immediately. Though it is a book of 1955 that really killed the first-person for me. Namely, "Lolita" by Nabokov. And ever since then, the first-person has become a synonym of easy writing for me. A synonym of authors thinking their main characters to be worthy of supreme interest, when they rarely illicit more than a yawn from me. I find the feelings of these narrators shallow and standard. Had it been in third person, the reader would have never been pulled so deep into a character and realized how boring that character truly was.
It feels like me writing a story about myself. You're (sic; supposed to be Your) not that interesting, dawg (me telling myself).
And in the other extreme, you can also end up spending 90% of a chapter inside someone's head and go nowhere; I know this is a hot take but despite being my prefered choice of writing, I really didn't like reading Good Omens because I forgot what was happening in other POVs after a while. It's always important to have in mind both the character voice AND the event pacing together, not in separate processes, and that improves both first and third person.
This is how I felt about the Hunger Games. I thought the movie was interesting but really disliked the book. I don't think Katniss is a partially interesting character, she just lives in an interesting world. I never felt the character's thoughts were realistic to the world. I remember the first time I saw an elevator and it scared me as a young child, I never felt like Katniss had these types of responses to unusual stuff. She should have been motion sick on the train, she should have got a stomach ache from fancy food, she should have been afraid of indoor plumbing.
POV is a storytelling tool and needs to be used in a way that takes the best advantage of it. It doesn't matter what anyone, even the writer prefers. I think POV is an important artistic choice when creating a story and the best fit for a story should be chosen.
Use the POV that best fits the story you want to tell. I think the POV can make or break a story. Look at how your favourite books use POV. Would the story have been weaker or stronger if another POV was used?
I'm a dirty genre fiction loving pleb who reads to be entertained (shocking I know) and if I only read books with my preferred POV I would have missed out on some of my favourite books.
I enjoy all of them equally. I don't do well writing in first person, but I don't have any problems reading it. I also really like the lesser used second person P.O.V. As long as it's well written, I've never had a problem with the perspective.
You touched on something so important here. Namely, "realism". Katniss Evergreen (I have neither watched the movie nor read the book, hence I am talking about something I know nothing of), in all her glory, is a sort of Mary Sue, isn't she? Exactly because she is in fact devoid of any humanity.
Everything you wrote about is correct. When one is taken out of their natural habitat and put in a completely unknown environment (in my country, we say "The pig was placed where it did not belong" to describe erratic behavior ensuing from a change of habitat; it is actually a rude way of saying people with little self-control given too much power for the wellbeing of the planet and acting on a power trip), there should be a sort of shock, a sort of adaptation period that is characterized by erratic behavior. She should have eaten herself to death had she been hungry for a long period of her life (I think that is what happened), she should have been fascinated with inner plumbing if it were the first time she saw it.
However, the author never thought of such details (but you did, excellent job) because Katniss was not real. She was a perfect (stupid, false little dilemmas do not make a character real; its behavior in non-flabbergasting, ordinary situations is what makes it real) projection of the author's view of herself. And I can just list such novels, one after the other. Think "Twilight", think "50 Shades of Grey".
But where the movie could camouflage all that shallowness was the fact that a movie is a third-person limited POV, even if you get Morgan Freeman to do the narration!!! Shawshank was told by Morgan Freeman (who happened to be a character in the movie, but you know Morgan Freeman never plays a character, the characters always play him) and yet, it still was a third-person limited. Though Katniss might have a resting b-face, maybe inside she is going insane but cannot express it through facial expressions because she is emotionally stunted. That is what you tell yourself.
