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lobelia321Following on from musings on person, I found that many people not only associate certain tenses with certain persons (first with present, third with past, whatever else) but also certain povs with certain persons.
What I'm wondering about is this: why is there such resistance to omniscient narration in fanfic? I mean the type of narration that flies in and out of various characters' heads, as found in 19th century novels and childrens' books, such as C.S. Lewis Narnia series, and where you have the feeling that there's a narrator hovering somewhere near each character's head, surreptitiously oozing her own opinions into the story?
This type of narration is very rare in fanfic. Most fanfic (and certainly my own) tends to prefer tight third person pov. (And if you've waded through my narratological analysis, you'll know that by tight third person pov I mean a homodiegetic, fixed, character-bound, internal focalisor -- haha!! *smites you with jargon* -- but I'm a bitch to jargon, and it is very precise. Although sometimes I think our own slashy jargon is more precise for our own purposes than narratologists' jargon but jargon is jargon, hooray.)
Anyway, where was I? I'm sure I was somewhere.
Yes. Pov. What kind of pov do you tend to write, and why? Why do you write tight third person or tight first person, and why do you not write omniscient narration? And do you ever intrude as the narrator, or do you stick to your focalisor / pov-character? And is there some relation between rps and pov-preference?
What I'm wondering about is this: why is there such resistance to omniscient narration in fanfic? I mean the type of narration that flies in and out of various characters' heads, as found in 19th century novels and childrens' books, such as C.S. Lewis Narnia series, and where you have the feeling that there's a narrator hovering somewhere near each character's head, surreptitiously oozing her own opinions into the story?
This type of narration is very rare in fanfic. Most fanfic (and certainly my own) tends to prefer tight third person pov. (And if you've waded through my narratological analysis, you'll know that by tight third person pov I mean a homodiegetic, fixed, character-bound, internal focalisor -- haha!! *smites you with jargon* -- but I'm a bitch to jargon, and it is very precise. Although sometimes I think our own slashy jargon is more precise for our own purposes than narratologists' jargon but jargon is jargon, hooray.)
Anyway, where was I? I'm sure I was somewhere.
Yes. Pov. What kind of pov do you tend to write, and why? Why do you write tight third person or tight first person, and why do you not write omniscient narration? And do you ever intrude as the narrator, or do you stick to your focalisor / pov-character? And is there some relation between rps and pov-preference?
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-24 04:37 pm (UTC)Because we're taught in modern writing classes that head-hopping is a lazy way to tell a story. Goes back to show-don't-tell. If you're in each character's head, then you've eliminated the need for your narrator or protagonist to react to the world around them. The writer does it for them.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-24 08:04 pm (UTC)*holds up hand*
the idea of an omniscient narrator strikes me as very "male" (you could compare this to the tradition of perspective in western art...). slash is mainly written by women.
that's my theory.
n.x :)
*cuddles your jargon*
Date: 2004-03-24 08:47 pm (UTC)So, to answer your question, I write as loose a third-person as I can get away with, and intrude as a narrator as often as I can without upsetting the flow of the story. I'm probably not always effective, but my earliest and strongest influences were the great 19th-century novelists like Tolstoy and Hugo, and there's something about it that feels natural to me. I just love that style, even if it's outdated.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-26 04:02 am (UTC)What kind of pov do you tend to write, and why?
Currently, I tend to write very tight third person, though this has not always been true. When I first started writing fanfic, I wrote first-person as often as anything else, but in going back over those stories I think I made a good choice in switching. With first, any little slip in character voice is instantly not only visible, but like a red, flashing light. *g* In third, you have a variety of options for how close you are to your POV character, so you can stick close if you feel you've got a really good handle on the character, or you can distance the writing a little if you're less certain.
why do you not write omniscient narration?
I've tried it once, though I'm not entirely sure it's truly omniscient. It's one of those things that I've tried repeatedly over the years, but I just can't seem to get a handle on it. Every other time I've tried, the result has seemed to be just sloppy third (aka "head hopping"), though I think I've finally figured out that the secret is to make your omniscient narrator a "character" in their own right. If that makes sense.
And is there some relation between rps and pov-preference?
IME, it's less a correlation between RPS and POV-preference than it is a correlation between comfort with the characters and POV. The more comfortable I am with the characters (i.e., the better I "know" them and the better I can hear and write their voices) the tighter I pull my POV. Since RPS is a more nebulous re: characterization, I think it's easier to find a yourself in a comfortable place with the character voices.
I feel silly saying it, but I've got an Elijah muse living in my brain; writing things with him as the POV character is...well, not a breeze, because writing is never really easy for me, but it's as easy as it gets. I could probably even write first-person from Elijah's POV. I hesitate because first person RPS feels to me like it blurs the line between "fiction written about real people" and "real people's real lives" a little too much.
Re: *cuddles your jargon*
Date: 2004-03-27 10:19 am (UTC)This is what annoys me, you see. The prescriptive nature of much talk about writing. I don't know where people get these rules and regulations from: how-to books or creative-writing classes or own insecurities, but they *annoy* me. Perhaps your particular omniscient narration didn't work (unlikely, I know! *g*) but to forbid omniscient narration per se just strikes me as so blindfolded. And as you say: it does have an antique'y effect because it is reminiscent of the 19th century when this was the be-all and end-all of novel narration -- but those forbidding it out of court seem to have no historical memory or imagination.
So the closest I got was alternating between two pov's
I know, this is what I've done. But I feel as if I've let myself been defeated. I want to try *at least once* (before I die!) to write a truly omniscient narration. Even if it ends up being crap. Rise to the challenge, I say! But it is a very anti-fanfic mode -- perhaps not only because of blinkered beta-mavens but also because there's something intrinsically tight-pov'ish about fanfic. Readers want to crawl into the characters' heads and they don't like to be reminded that it's all an artificial construct, written by some all-knowing narrator: they love the illusion of getting close to these characters who are so emotionally charged for fans.
Maybe it can only be done effectively in a novel and then only when the effect is intentionally archaic.
Perhaps. But see my points above about fanfic because maybe even a fanfic-novel would go against the grain of fannish reading. Hm, I do think it can be done with humour.
Tolstoy and Hugo
Tolstoy!!! And Hugo: have yet to read! Which one do you recommend as a starting point? My next on the list is Henry James's Ambassadors (gets endlessly mentioned by narratologists, esp. in context of show-and-tell so got intrigued by it) But after that: well, Mary Renault.. but after that!
I just love that style, even if it's outdated.
I don't think there's an 'even if' about it at all. Everything is bound to come round again, first; and second, outdated is not the same as bad. Anyway, simply recognising that some styles are *historically* bound (and not a result of some everlasting, eternal 'rule') is liberating, I find. Now I'm racking my brain for 20th c. omniscient. Even Vikram Seth's Suitable Boy is more alternating pov than omniscient. The closest I can come is children's fiction; I'm just reading my son the Narnia series and C.S. Lewis uses omniscient all the time.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-27 01:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-27 01:53 pm (UTC)Strangely, I actually agree with this rule. Which seems to contradict my ranting against anything being a *rule* in fiction writing.... But I suppose, strictly speaking, I don't see the tight pov *as* a rule: it's a historical fashion. The 19th C. preferred omniscience, and for them omniscience was the rule, so if we'd been writing fanfic in the 1860s we'd probably all been trying to master omniscient pov before moving on to such strange experimental things as tight third pov!
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-27 04:37 pm (UTC)I wonder if the 19th century omniscient writers were demonstrating their God concept by adopting such a pov... Now we're all about finding one's own spiritual path and listening to the inner spark, so we tend to get much more psychological. The former approach tended to over-generalize; our approach makes us navel gazers.....
Re: *cuddles your jargon*
Date: 2004-03-28 05:49 am (UTC)I think once people have been taught to do things a certain way, they don't feel comfortable going outside the box. Although it does seem that there is an unusual amount of creativity and experimentation in fanfic. Still, there seems to be an awful lot of dogma, which is annoying. It only seems to confirm my feeling that taking a creative writing class is stifling and uninspiring.
Perhaps your particular omniscient narration didn't work (unlikely, I know! *g*) but to forbid omniscient narration per se just strikes me as so blindfolded.
Well, I think it really didn't work very well, and in hindsight, I'm glad I didn't go with it because I think the story would have quickly become muddled and overly complicated. In addition, it seems that fanfiction has its own set of rules, that perhaps have sprung out of the instant gratification of being familiar with characters before the reading ever starts. Even the ponderous epics have to be spiced up a bit, and a tight pov might help do that. Still reading your narratological analysis, by the way. With a highlighter!
So the closest I got was alternating between two pov's
I know, this is what I've done. But I feel as if I've let myself been defeated. I want to try *at least once* (before I die!) to write a truly omniscient narration.
Oh, I hope you try this! I think the possibilities are very exciting.
Readers want to crawl into the characters' heads and they don't like to be reminded that it's all an artificial construct, written by some all-knowing narrator: they love the illusion of getting close to these characters who are so emotionally charged for fans.
And that really is one of the particular joys of fanfiction. Although really good omniscient narration is practically invisible and does allow for a close bond to the characters, just more of them!
I do think it can be done with humour.
Yes, certainly, and Lotswings is a good example of that. Humour could also be effective I think, when the omniscient narrator is treated as another character, also. There are definite possibilities here!
Tolstoy!!! And Hugo: have yet to read! Which one do you recommend as a starting point?
Personally, I find Tolstoy superior to Hugo in quite a few ways: economy and timelessness of style, realistic characterization and dialogue, unintrusive narration, just to name a few. But Hugo is still very much worth reading, especially if you enjoy mid-nineteenth-century art. He's awash in Romanticism and tends to sweep you away with the drama and passion of his stories and characters. I would start with The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It's very moving and compelling, and not nearly as long as Les Miserables. It's one of two books (Return of the King is the other), that always has me in tears at the end. Another one I like, is Toilers of the Sea, although I've seen it with other titles as well, and can't remember what they are!
Everything is bound to come round again, first; and second, outdated is not the same as bad.
Exactly. Obviously, omniscient narration was hugely popular and effective in its time, and there's certainly no reason not to use it, if it works for your story.
Now I'm racking my brain for 20th c. omniscient.
Definitely rare. Mary Renault does it in a limited way. She tends to keep pov tight to one, maybe two characters (when she isn't writing in first-person, which she frequently does), but every now and then, you do find yourself in someone else's head. I found it fairly unobtrusive, and probably wouldn't have noticed at all if I hadn't had these matters on the brain while reading!
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-29 09:52 am (UTC)Is this so? Am shocked. I have never taking a writing class, you see, so what gets taught there is a matter of conjecture for me and I find it all very intriguing. I still really want to take one, even if it's full of nonsensical prescriptive rules as you seem to suggest.
Because how can head-hopping be lazy?? It's the hardest pov of all, *I* find. I can't do it at all. At least, I haven't managed so far. And how could an entire horde of 19th-century novelists (Dickens, Eliot, Austen, Balzac, you name them) be written off as 'lazy'? I suppose what I find most tedious about such layings-down-of-laws is that they are so unhistorical. If we attended writing classes in the year 1863, no doubt we'd all be told to stop being so lazy with the tight third person pov and get on and do some omniscient.
Paying no attention to your writing is lazy. Being sloppy and not thinking is lazy. Doing omniscient is not lazy. (Hopping from person to person because you don't know what you're doing, yes, that is lazy and/or ignorant and/or beginnerish - but then we're not talking about bad!fic.)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-29 09:55 am (UTC)I disagree that omniscient is male. It's 19th century above all, if you like. Lots of women were using it then, e.g. George Eliot.
Now what I, of course, find fascinating is your comparison of omniscient pov to central-perspective-pov!! Will ponder this!! Whether central perspective is 'male' is another question but I'm sure you're onto something there, with the relating it to omniscient pov --except in a way, central perspective is very tight first person pov because there is only *one* correct viewpoint while in omniscient there are multiple povs.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-29 10:02 am (UTC)Oh yes, how interesting! I like the red, flashing light analogy. I think that is absolutely right: the pitfalls and also the delights of first person! The way you're forced to stick with that person and have to invent ingenious ways of making the reader know about what's going on in others' heads -- which can also be a straitjacket, of course.
NOw distance: distance is something else again! And, I suppose, separate from pov and person and tense. Hah: another post in the offing? Because even a first person can write quite stiffly and distanced; I experimented with this in my Blow Jobs ficlet where John Noble writes a first-person text in the style of a formal business letter.
make your omniscient narrator a "character" in their own right. If that makes sense.
This is very useful. I think lots of people confuse omniscient narration with sloppy third and that's where the resistance to omniscience comes in. And making the omniscient narrator a character is (haha: trots out the technical jargon) using a character-bound internal narrator. *grins* How did you find doing that in practice?
The more comfortable I am with the characters (i.e., the better I "know" them and the better I can hear and write their voices) the tighter I pull my POV.
This makes perfect sense to me!! And sometimes I shy away from knowing a character, I know I am, and that makes me write that character less intimately. And I know what you mean about the muse living in one's head; which can be both a good thing and a bad thing. Good: easy to write! Bad: too easy to write and gets boring.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-29 10:03 am (UTC)omg: God vs navel gazing.
*rethinks expletive*: Maybe I shouldn't have typed 'omg' but 'omn' (o my navel) to express our pathetically inward-turning obsessions...
*giggles*
Re: *cuddles your jargon*
Date: 2004-03-29 12:06 pm (UTC)There is! And all of my experimentation has come about solely because of engaging with fanfic and fanfic discussion. I never used to experiment when I still wrote orgfic.
It only seems to confirm my feeling that taking a creative writing class is stifling and uninspiring.
I'm still sort of very eager to try at least one, just so that I can diss it with authority. And I suppose to see if I'm up to the challenge of non-slash.
it seems that fanfiction has its own set of rules, that perhaps have sprung out of the instant gratification of being familiar with characters before the reading ever starts. Even the ponderous epics have to be spiced up a bit, and a tight pov might help do that.
And I think we don't like it if the narrator intrudes, in the C.S. Lewis or Thackeray manner: "Jill Pole was being rude but I don't think she meant it; you have to remember that she was wet and cold." (Paraphrase from C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair which I'm reading to t'son at t'moment.) We would *hate* it if we read: "Dominic said nothing but listen, I think he was really deeply in love with Billy and could just not bring himself to admit it, don't you think so, too?" It's not Mary Sue but it's -- something.
*ponders experimental ficlet with intrusive narrator in!!!
Still reading your narratological analysis, by the way. With a highlighter!
Meep!
Although really good omniscient narration is practically invisible and does allow for a close bond to the characters, just more of them!
Hm. I really want to put myself through some sort of omniscient-reading-programme now to learn more about it.
And re Tolstoy and Hugo: I didn't mean recommending either one of them (I've read the two great Tolstoys and Anna Karenina is unsurpassable, and i've read the odd short story but I've not read any Hugo, started out on Miserables but the length and bigness and slow start defeated me, possibly also the bad cover -- I must make sure to borrow the right edition!). Thanks for rec of Hunchback, and bizarre comparison to Rotk!!
Mary Renault awaits my attention, after Henry James The Ambassadors. James was one of the inventors of modern tight third and first so no omniscience there, alas.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-29 02:47 pm (UTC)In slash, I have only ever written tight third-person pov in the present tense, whereeas my non-slash writing is almost invariably written in third-person past tense, though I have experimented in longer works with split time-schemes using different tenses, and omniscient pov. (This last in particular in the Ongoing Novel, which is set partly in the 1920s and partly in the 1990s, in the same geographical place, and in which I use an omniscient pov to describe the place as a way of mediating between the two time-schemes.)
The reason I do not, as a rule - or at least, not yet - use an omniscient pov in slash is that for me, slash is all about uncertainty and discovery and second-guessing the feelings and motivations of another character, all the mis-readings and confusions and valiant attempts to interpret body-language associated with being an individual consciousness with no privileged access to information on another. That's what excites me. I could not have written the Boiling Point series - which is all about Sean B's complete inability to read Viggo, in a way - using an omniscient pov which allowed the reader equal access to Viggo's brain. The limitedness of the persective is the point. (It strikes me that this take on pov is certainly not limited to me, and accounts in some sense for the plethora of Buddha-like Inscrutable Viggos in Lotrips. People write Inscrutable Viggo because in a sense we do frequently find other people unreadable. It repicates a very common human experience.)
Omniscient narrative implies a confident take on one's subject matter -no accident that it was the great Victorian mode, and that one of the most iconoclastic aspects of the modernist novel, inflected by new developments in psychology and the sciences among other things, was dismantling that kind of masterful stance. Slash by its nature implies a slanted approach to its subject matter, because we are engaging interstitially with prior texts/canon/received characterisation. Does that suggest that an off-centre approach to one's material is replicated in strictly limited pov?
I do make pov experiments, I suppose. In a minor way, 'Third Astronaut and Fourth Cop' was an effort to take Sean's reading of the hobbits in the Boiling Point fics and inhabit it from the inside, trying to reconcile Sean's disbelieving/fascinated vision of the hobbitpile as a happy-swappy sextopia with some kind of realism.
This is an essay. I will stop.
Re: *cuddles your jargon*
Date: 2004-03-29 04:52 pm (UTC)*ponders experimental ficlet with intrusive narrator in!!!*
OMG! You *must* do this! It would be hilarious.
RE: Les Miserables; the thing can be really tedious, and it's even worse if the print is tiny. Hugo veers off into 50-page-long asides about such varied topics as the battle of Waterloo and the Paris sewer system.
By the time you've finished those, you can't remember what the hell was going on before. There are just so many things wrong with that book, but somehow it's still great. Probably because it truly has a soul, and as we were discussing earlier, that's what really counts!
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-06 02:52 pm (UTC)Eep, a novel! *is mightily impressed as has self forgotten how to write origfic...* I think that's the scope you get with long novel-length fiction: you can play around more with both pov and tense and style, even. It tends to be a bit contrived in short fic (though needn't be!).
The reason I do not, as a rule - or at least, not yet - use an omniscient pov in slash is that for me, slash is all about uncertainty and discovery and second-guessing the feelings and motivations of another character, all the mis-readings and confusions and valiant attempts to interpret body-language associated with being an individual consciousness with no privileged access to information on another. That's what excites me.
This is very, very interesting to me as it does suggest something that is particular to *slash*, as opposed to being applicable to all fiction. I suppose it's getting at what we all call 'slashiness', and most of us seem to know more or less what we mean by that and it's something along the lines you list: the confusions and the uncertainties and the delicious misunderstandings, leading to eked-out sexual tension. And i like the formulation 'valiant attempts at reading body language', *gg*!!!
I could not have written the Boiling Point series - which is all about Sean B's complete inability to read Viggo, in a way - using an omniscient pov which allowed the reader equal access to Viggo's brain. The limitedness of the persective is the point. (It strikes me that this take on pov is certainly not limited to me, and accounts in some sense for the plethora of Buddha-like Inscrutable Viggos in Lotrips. People write Inscrutable Viggo because in a sense we do frequently find other people unreadable. It repicates a very common human experience.)
Yes, you could not have written that fic that way. This is what I find: by choosing a particular pov, you have set up a particular kind of fic. Because style and everything that goes with it goes hand in hand with content. But, of course, what is interesting is how the *narrator* always knows more than the tight-pov person (focalisor) because the narrator conveys what is behind the body language (the focalisor 'valiantly attempts' to read it but we, the reader, *know*, and we know because the narrator knows and has conveyed it behind focalisor Bean's back, as it were; that's what I find so fascinating about any tight pov -- the way more gets smuggled in *despite* the tight pov).
tbc
(no subject)
Date: 2004-04-06 02:52 pm (UTC)As to Viggo inscrutability: two things. Why, do you think, is Viggo in particular prone to being inscrutabled? I've written Viggo twice and each time he was completely transparent to me and to the readers. I suppose this is because I can't quite take him seriously, in writing-terms, that is (nothing to do with rl!). The second thing: Yes, in a way we can never know another human being fully irl but we do tend to know them more than the hapless focalisor-Beans of our fictional worlds! Also, for me as a writer, I revel in the power, the omnipotence, of knowing everything about all of my characters. I don't necessarily need to divulge all that everything to the reader (see above point on narrator smuggling things in) but I hold the strings in my hand and the puppets must dance. So the pleasure of writing, for me, is partly that it is *not* like the uncertainties of rl. The experience of reading it and the actual story may mimic (and even exaggerate) the rl uncertainties, but my *writing* experience is all-knowing. This is where the narratologists hit their limits: they look only at the finished product, not at the process going on in the writer's head. Which is, of course, what interests me *as well* as the finished product.
Does that suggest that an off-centre approach to one's material is replicated in strictly limited pov?
Hm, I have no idea. I don't know to what extent the canon-dependence affects the choice or not of omniscience. I have a hunch that it's more the general penchant for tight povs but I would have to do a study of online origfic to verify that. Hm.
In fics like 'Something to Pass the Time', she is focalising through Karl, but only barely.
I *love* that fic. I betaed that fic! That is a wonderful objective pov (what Genette, for better or worse, calls external focalisation: the narrator tells us less than the character knows). It's doing stuff with *setting*, and Genette says virtually nothing about that yet I have experimented with that ever since I dared adapt David Mitchell to my own writing.
Re: *cuddles your jargon*
Date: 2004-04-06 02:53 pm (UTC)