19 KiB
[Q][D] First-person or third-person?
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Author: u/None *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2j23g9/qd_firstperson_or_thirdperson/
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Score: 10
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Created: 2014-10-12T21:14:44
Post:
Since the major "shtick" of rational fiction is that the characters very noticeably think over their problems before making decisions, which is better, first-person perspective or limited third-person perspective?
Additionally, which do you all prefer, simply from a quality of writing stand-point? Is first-person or third-person more conducive to quality writing, independently of whether it's rational fiction or not?
Comments:
u/None [+7] (an hour later)
I prefer third-person because I think it reads better, especially in rational/ist stories where the main character is hiding something like a plan from the reader for the point of suspense. HPMOR has used this well (or should I say, is using it), whereas in first-person Worm, when the plan finally came into fulfillment, it seemed sudden and contrived (to me, at least). IIRC, the incident in mind was about Monarch spoilers?
Although past this, I think first person is pretty well-suited for a ratfic. The Two-Year Emperor is a good example of this: by being in the main character's head, we can see how their thoughts play out, we can see how they draw deductions and come up with plans, and that's half of rationality right there, isn't it?
:. Both have their upsides and downsides. My opinions cancel out. This post was a waste.
u/None [+3] (2 hours later)
I agree wholeheartedly with what you said about Worm. In fact, that's such a fantastic point that I'm going to write what I'm working on from the third-person (which was the entire secret point of this thread). I love Worm, but that sudden plot development was just too much.
u/None [+3] (3 hours later)
Oh! Well, there you go. Maybe my post wasn't such a waste after all. Glad I could help!
u/AmeteurOpinions [+5] Finally, everyone was working together. (5 hours later)
I find it hilarious how much of the discussion in this sub can be reduced to "Worm vs. HPMOR".
u/None [+4] (5 hours later)
We should make a master-Thread to Rule All Threads to cover every possible permutation of the idea, and then let this sub die a peaceful …
Wait. No, terrible idea. Nevermind.
u/AmeteurOpinions [+5] Finally, everyone was working together. (5 hours later)
HJPEV defeats Voldemort... then people start triggering. Somebody write that.
No, wait, first he meets a girl with curly hair and Worm Spoilers.
u/None [+4] (5 hours later)
Harry realizes he has Worm spoilers
People start referring to him by the name of an ancient Egyptian god. He then discovers that god's name is his username in the programming language of magic, and consequently gets sucked into a secret conflict between Ra and Worm
u/AmeteurOpinions [+2] Finally, everyone was working together. (6 hours later)
PM'd you so that we don't have to spoiler tag half our posts.
u/None [+3] (14 hours later)
I now want to read / write a story just like canon Harry Potter, but where when Dumbledore thinks with storybook logic, "storybook" refers to the tales of Taylor Hebert and Ching-Yu Kuang, instead of Babbity Rabbity and the Peverell Brothers …
u/AmeteurOpinions [+2] Finally, everyone was working together. (15 hours later)
Ching-Yu Kuang
Sorry, I don't recognize this one, and my google-fuis failing me.
u/None [+3] (16 hours later)
Sorry. He's a character from Sam Hughes' Fine Structure. I think his full name is only said a few times, though, so that's a totally understandable nonrecognition, even if you have read it.
u/None [+2] (7 hours later)
[deleted]
u/None [+1] (16 hours later)
I can't argue against that, either. Tattletale is awesome, but yes, she was a monster of exposition.
u/None [+5] (4 hours later)
[deleted]
u/None [+1] (6 hours later)
I'm writing a work of original fiction, but it has multiple protagonists. Most likely I'm going to go with third-person limited, changing (I did for the first draft), but I wasn't entirely certain.
u/nohat [+4] (2 hours later)
I've come around to appreciating first person. I've found that it is very good for mystery and rational fiction because the reader is explicitly seeing what that character is thinking, seeing, and feeling. It's playing it 'fair' with the reader. The reader can think about what they would do, and what they know, and compare their thoughts to the character's. The limitation also forces you to figure out how show the information to both the character and the reader. Often enforcing limitations like this is great for inspiration and writing quality. There are downsides. If your character is introspective, you run the risk of telling instead of showing what they are feeling. You also can lose out on viewing the wider world.
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (10 minutes later)
I prefer limited third-person, mostly because it allows you to do outside-viewpoint digressions and (more cleanly) hope between multiple viewpoint characters.
In my opinion, third person allows you to do just as much as first person, and then some more stuff on top of that. I don't think it affects quality of writing all that much either way - it's just that first person limits your possibilities.
(I write pretty exclusively in third person - I might be a little biased.)
u/None [+1] (16 minutes later)
I generally think along the same lines, but then Worm was first-person with limited third-person digressions, so I'm less certain.
(I write almost exclusively in first person. I'm definitely biased.)
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (50 minutes later)
I think the biggest thing is to know why you'd do one over the other. I found this episode of Writing Excuses to be a fairly illuminating discussion on why to use one or the other. I personally don't see myself dipping into first person anytime soon because I have so much less experience with it, but I think that there are certain stories that can be better told with that more intimate perspective.
u/None [+1] (an hour later)
(I just want to say, independently of this, thank you for introducing me to Writing Excuses. I wasn't familiar with it, and I'm driving for ten hours tomorrow, so this will be helpful.)
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (5 hours later)
The more I think about it, the more I think that the interludes were the high point of Worm - they definitely stick out a lot more for me than the endless chapters stuck in Taylor's viewpoint, and I felt like they were far better at developing the side characters than anything that happened in the first-person parts. But I don't know how much other people would agree with that.
u/None [+3] (6 hours later)
I agree for the most part, but then I take into account confirmation bias. You only remember the third-person chapters that stuck out to you, while others weren't so successful. Also, you're comparing "occasional chapters from a third-person perspective" to "many many chapters from Taylor's perspective." The interludes are more "singular" than the rest.
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+3] Utopian Smut Peddler (14 hours later)
Limited third. First person has too many hangups, especially for people from a fanfic background reading the work. You can do it, but you start under the automatic stigma of first person narratives -- that you are an amateur who doesn't know any better.
The only reason to do first person I see is if you are writing someone telling a story.
For example, the Dresden Files books by Jim Butcher use this mostly because it is a hard-boiled detective trope. You can almost see him reporting on the case after the fact, face bandaged up and with a tumbler of scotch in his hand.
Charles Stross' Laundry series uses it because they are first-person reports (later, literally written reports) of the events that occurred, from a single person's perspective (plus guesses about other, off-scene stuff). As he doesn't want to hide motivations or justifications for his actions long, this works very well for a straight-forward character dealing with events as they come at him at 120kph.
The Nero Wolfe series by Rex Stout uses first person because it is reports by a single detective, often as if he was writing up case notes or telling the story to his boss. Sometimes, he tells his boss things from first person, in first person, making this deliciously meta. Sometimes, he attempts to actively see things from his boss' perspective, again a great meta point. This makes the other characters pop more, as you see only his clearly biased but also carefully trained detective's eye view of them and their actions, contrasting and comparing his abilities against a master detective's instead of seeing everything from a more perfect (if limited) god's eye view that would have to skip over things or weasel about details. That would be really boring in a detective novel, after all. It also avoids lots of "he noticed, but apparently no one else did" types of sentences.
So unless a story really needs first person, and needs it bad, I say third person limited all the way. The character's internal life does not need to fully be exposed and you don't risk breaking suspension of disbelief by not saying what someone is thinking when they have to deal with something dramatic. The reader can worry about the character from a more detached position, instead of being confused by not knowing what is going through their head sometimes. You also have a built-in reason to show more, tell less than in first person. And fewer problems with making the first person character simply a self-insert.
It is harder to write third person limited in general, as you need to maintain POV at all times and only switch carefully (no switching mid-scene). But the results are more like a play or a movie, plus a few internal hints occasionally. I think that is a good thing, most of the time. It is actually easier to write groups of people sticking together in third person, too, as you usually don't have to track as carefully what the POV character sees and hears and thinks when describing a scene.
As for rational fiction? Still third. Way, way too much tell-not-show already, and we don't need yet more awkwardly detailed descriptions of what a rational person is thinking. They usually aren't very realistic. A lot of the time, people writing rational fic want a smart character. And if they aren't that smart or smarter themselves, their generated internal models they have for their character's thoughts and motivations quickly break down.
You can Sir Arthur Conan Doyle it up (he wasn't Sherlock Holmes smart by any stretch) by explaining the results of rational decisions a little fuzzily (wait, what brand of tobacco was it, and how was it identified?) while making the process that was used to arrive at the results the most interesting part of the story. In this way, you can write any level of intelligence into a rational character in third person. Not so easy to do in first person.
u/None [+3] (15 hours later)
There are some excellent answers in this thread, but I feel the question is ill-posed. It feels as though you are asking whether you should type the story on a computer or write it by hand. There are reasons to do either, but they depend entirely on the story.
For example, there was discussion about how to handle mystery. In this case, third-person allows you to keep a character's thoughts hidden from the reader. Meanwhile, first-person allows for an unreliable narrator.
Perspective is a tool to be used in service of the story.
u/autotrope_bot [+1] (15 hours later)
Unreliable Narrator
In most narratives, there's an element of trust that the person telling you the story is telling the truth, at least as far as they know it. This trope occurs when that convention is discarded. The narrator's facts contradict each other. If you ask them to go back a bit and retell it, the events come out a little differently. It can be like dealing with a used-car salesman -- there's a real story in there somewhere, but you're left to piece it together through all the lies, half-truths, and mistruths.
I am a bot. Here is my sub
u/None [+1] (16 hours later)
I had already pretty much decided to do third-person limited. I was just curious about what the people or /r/rational thought about it, considering how there seems to be such a variety throughout the community.
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+1] Utopian Smut Peddler (2 days later)
Third-person limited also allows for inner thoughts and opinions that are not reliable. Usually, everything is still filtered through a single point of view character and their beliefs and knowledge can still tint the narrative. This isn't solely the purview of first person.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (18 hours later)
For The Two Year Emperor (which I considered linking but then decided that would be utterly whorish and it's easy enough to find on this reddit since I link it here every bloody week) I mostly use first person because it allows me to (a) insert humor into the thought stream of the narrator, (b) better show his reactions to the madness around him, (c) allows for some very specific foreshadowing, such as about how.
That said, I dip into third person in a couple of places, either for narrative purpose or for humor--for example, a third person view of a KEW attack, and a couple of reframings right in the middle of an action moment. The latter provides a sense of tension as the reader waits for the events to resolve, provides needed context, and is a good way to inject a bit of dry humor. It's also a really easy way to utterly screw up and look completely lame, so I don't do it often.
First person is typically done in one of a few ways: real time (what I do with 2YE), epistolary style (Dracula), or as an after action report (can't think of a famous example offhand). I strongly dislike the latter two, as the fact that the main character obviously survived sucks most of the tension out of the story. Also, epistolary style can just be boring as hell.
The problem that first person has is information hiding. If you show a plan ahead of time, it must fail. To have it stated and then succeed is (generally) boring. The trick I use for this is scene cuts. If I want to show that a plan exists but not what it is, I'll have Jake say to the others "Ok, here's what we do..." and then cut to the next day where they are actually doing it.
The major advantages that I see are:
First person told-in-real-time has an immediacy that third lacks, and makes it possible for the audience to identify more with characters who, in third person, would not be identifiable. "The Tell Tale Heart" is a good example of this. The narrator is a crazy murderer; told from the outside, you just want him to go to prison ASAP. Told from the inside, you get sucked into his worldview much more.
Third person makes information hiding easier, simplifies the process of dealing with characters smarter than / very different from you, allows showing things happening in multiple places more easily.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
Note (for the uninitiated, not you): A lot of what he's talking about are rather common tropes, as can be seen on TvTropes (which I highly recommend for all writers). For instance, Unspoken Plan Guarantee pretty much is what he was talking about in the fourth paragraph.
Also, something I've noticed with third-person vs. first-person is perspective changes. I haven't read any books written from the first-person which are both not epistolary and from multiple perspectives (epistolary novels, like Dracula, and more contemporary World War Z, are perfectly capable of changing perspective), whereas most third-person books I've read tend to have multiple perspectives (A Song of Fire and Ice being the best example I can give).
(side-bar: the first book I ever finished had thirteen different POVs, and was in first-person. They all had different, distinctive, narrative voices, too. It's just, the book sucked. It was partially that what I'm working on now is basically a major retooling of that idea, but from the third-person and with less POVs, that I made this thread)
Note: Both you and /u/alexanderwales have now commented on this post. I'm feeling starstruck, despite the fact that you're both rather active in the sub.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (a day later)
First off: wow, someone is feeling starstruck about me. Cool.
Second: you linked to TvTropes! You bastard! Do you know how many person-hours of productivity you just destroyed?!
u/None [+1] (a day later)
Of course I know. Why else would I have done it? Mwaha.
u/TimTravel [+2] (a day later)
I'm leaning third. Easier to do perspectives from another character with less disruption. Then again a lot of times third is just "inner third person" where you say things like "John liked flowers. They had lots of effective poisons for killing bad guys. Poison was awesome!" where it's sort of his inner thoughts but you're saying them in third person outside quotes and italics.
It is actually possible to make things clear to the reader that aren't clear to the main character with strict person but it's difficult. It's uncommon that you'd want to, but still.