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Metafandom has updated its/their bibliography of lj meta, and in looking over it I realized that I’ve written about twice as much meta since graduating from college as I did while I was a student. I guess even though I’m not being required to write papers for class, I still feel compelled to analyse something.
That said, I’m now going to wibble about pov. See, the vast bulk of my writing (except for A Terrible Beauty, which was first person present tense with first person past tense flashbacks) is close third person (the kind that’s filtered through the pov character’s viewpoint and verges on first person) done in the traditional simple past. Close third person is my default writing style, and though I’ve been told that most of my writing contains a hint of “hi, I’m a Victorian novelist being paid by the word” long-windedness, in that my sentences tend to go on and on, grammatically correct but never-ending, I’ve never before tried to write something that reads exactly like a Victorian novel. That is, I’ve never tried to use third person omniscient or the sort of distant third person that keeps the narration just outside the character’s head, instead of right there inside it looking through his eyes. It just doesn’t come naturally to me. I can do passive voice, long sentences with excessive amounts of punctuation, and somewhat-more-formal-than-the-modern-sort dialogue, but authorial distance feels stilted and unnatural.
Some writers (Ian Flemming comes to mind, though he’s by no means the best or most literary of them) can vary pov, shifting from distant third to close third and back again like a movie camera zooming in for a close up and then pulling back for a panoramic shot. I am not one of them. When I try to do it, it sounds inconsistent and jarring. Third person omniscient I don’t even try, mainly because it’s my least favourite writing style (with the possible exception of third person present tense, which always reads like a badly done movie script to me).
Therefore, no matter the writing style of the original canon, I usually write my fic in close third person simple past. I’ve made conscious attempts to echo writing styles before, when I did Captain Blood and Barbara Hambly fic for previous years’ Yuletides, but that wasn’t all that much of a stretch, since Barbara Hambly is one of my literary idols, up there with Pratchett and Gaimon, and Rafael Sabatini inspired huge sections of my PotC fics and my undergraduate English thesis.
Now, though, I’ve got fics in the works for universes where the original authors (Fritz Leiber and Alexandre Dumas) have a very distinctive style I’m trying to emulate, one very wry and tongue in cheek, and one done in the full glory of 19th century French Romanticism, both with a slightly distant narrator. The Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser fic is coming along fine (probably because the pov is only a little more distant than I’m used to, and is balanced by a healthy dose of snark), but the Three Musketeers fic is taking considerable effort. Fun effort, but I still have to think a lot more about the way I say things than I usually do, to avoid sliding back into the familiar close third.
I’m both anticipating and dreading reaching the just-this-side-of-slashy h/c section of the Musketeer fic. I can tell trying to convey intense emotion and angst while sticking to that distant narrative style is going to be a real challenge. Especially since it’s not going to be Athos doing the angsting, so I can’t just fall back on broody silence and drinking as a means of expressing emotional turmoil.
That said, I’m now going to wibble about pov. See, the vast bulk of my writing (except for A Terrible Beauty, which was first person present tense with first person past tense flashbacks) is close third person (the kind that’s filtered through the pov character’s viewpoint and verges on first person) done in the traditional simple past. Close third person is my default writing style, and though I’ve been told that most of my writing contains a hint of “hi, I’m a Victorian novelist being paid by the word” long-windedness, in that my sentences tend to go on and on, grammatically correct but never-ending, I’ve never before tried to write something that reads exactly like a Victorian novel. That is, I’ve never tried to use third person omniscient or the sort of distant third person that keeps the narration just outside the character’s head, instead of right there inside it looking through his eyes. It just doesn’t come naturally to me. I can do passive voice, long sentences with excessive amounts of punctuation, and somewhat-more-formal-than-the-modern-sort dialogue, but authorial distance feels stilted and unnatural.
Some writers (Ian Flemming comes to mind, though he’s by no means the best or most literary of them) can vary pov, shifting from distant third to close third and back again like a movie camera zooming in for a close up and then pulling back for a panoramic shot. I am not one of them. When I try to do it, it sounds inconsistent and jarring. Third person omniscient I don’t even try, mainly because it’s my least favourite writing style (with the possible exception of third person present tense, which always reads like a badly done movie script to me).
Therefore, no matter the writing style of the original canon, I usually write my fic in close third person simple past. I’ve made conscious attempts to echo writing styles before, when I did Captain Blood and Barbara Hambly fic for previous years’ Yuletides, but that wasn’t all that much of a stretch, since Barbara Hambly is one of my literary idols, up there with Pratchett and Gaimon, and Rafael Sabatini inspired huge sections of my PotC fics and my undergraduate English thesis.
Now, though, I’ve got fics in the works for universes where the original authors (Fritz Leiber and Alexandre Dumas) have a very distinctive style I’m trying to emulate, one very wry and tongue in cheek, and one done in the full glory of 19th century French Romanticism, both with a slightly distant narrator. The Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser fic is coming along fine (probably because the pov is only a little more distant than I’m used to, and is balanced by a healthy dose of snark), but the Three Musketeers fic is taking considerable effort. Fun effort, but I still have to think a lot more about the way I say things than I usually do, to avoid sliding back into the familiar close third.
I’m both anticipating and dreading reaching the just-this-side-of-slashy h/c section of the Musketeer fic. I can tell trying to convey intense emotion and angst while sticking to that distant narrative style is going to be a real challenge. Especially since it’s not going to be Athos doing the angsting, so I can’t just fall back on broody silence and drinking as a means of expressing emotional turmoil.
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I know exactly what you mean. And I waffle back and forth by fandom on whether or not my voice needs to match the original author. Stoppard? absolutely. The dialogue has to feel as if it comes from his characters. Hugo? Not so much. I'll even go so far as to use what the writers on Deadwood do and modernise slang and cursing in order to get my point across - it's in translation from the original French anyway, so why not? Aubrey-Maturin? Voice is the primary reason I don't produce fic. It's the only fandom where the narration, the descriptions, feel wrong to me when they don't match O'Brian's voice. And heaven help me when it comes to dialogue with that series. I just can't invent bad puns or mixed metaphors to save my life.
Yuletide this year nearly killed me. I've written first person past, first person present, third person limited. POV wasn't the problem. Voice nearly killed me. I don't read Damon Runyon. I've seen precisely one production of Guys and Dolls in my life, and that was a year and a half ago. Fucked up slash is easiest in first person, or at least it is for me. But that just means all the narration is that - narration. It has to match the dialogue. I wanted to kill myself. POV is so much easier to match than word choice, sentence structure, grammar, pronunciation (do I write it or do I assume the reader, knowing the characters, will put it in naturally?). I am never writing Guys and Dolls slash ever again. I'm still amazed that it mostly works. Better than when i first attempted Stoppard. Belinsky came out interchangeable with Stankevich, which is wrong on so many levels. I can't do Stoppard well. I'm not that kind of a writer.
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The thing that's driving me crazy lately is a Due South AU that's a big mixed up pastiche of all kinds of 18th-19th century lit and stories set during that period. It's a mash-up of Austen, Heyer, Fielding, Dickens, and a bunch of others. And omg, the whiplash! POV flying all over the place, and the whole thing's a nightmare. I think I might have over-extended myself, but if/when I get it sorted out, it should be brilliant. Should. Well, *might* be. If I'm lucky.
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It's a mash-up of Austen, Heyer, Fielding, Dickens, and a bunch of others. And omg, the whiplash! POV flying all over the place, and the whole thing's a nightmare.
Well, if nothing else, the Austen-Fielding-Dickens influence ought to be entertainingly satirical. But, yeah, it's that 3rd person omniscient pov that makes 19th century pastiche so difficult to do properly. It's not nearly as common a style now as it used to be, and I at least have very limited experience with it. I was always taught in my writing classes that pov should be very tightly foccused, and that wandering into another character's head for a line or two and then drifting back to the main characters was a big no-no--and, of course, 19th century novels do that all the time.
There's a fine line between just-enough-pov-shifts-to-be-efective and so-much-bloody-back-and-forth-it's-confusing, and it takes more practice than the average fic writer may have to pin point where that line is.
And first-person epistolary-style prose can be difficult to keep consistent as well, if there are multiple characters involved. My high school English class had fits trying to keep track of what was going on in As I Lay Dying, with all of its competing first person povs and its not-entirely-chronological narrative (the dialect probably didn't help, either).
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I've noticed when reading original/published fiction in epistolary or journal form, that it tends to do exposition in a way which is not actually at all natural for the format. Sometimes more skillfully than others. Have you by any chance read Freedom and Necessity, by Steven Brust and Emma Bull? It's an epistolary novel set in 19th century England, but IMHO it rather cheats because one of the characters has an outrageously good memory and takes to keeping a "journal" with every single detail of stuff that happens to her, including word for word recounting of quite long and complex conversations, then sends chunks of it to her friend. Sure, the 19th century was the heyday of letter-writing, but this was just OTT.
LJ gives me a very good idea of why exposition is important (but difficult) in tight first person. Ever seen one of those LJs where it reads like, "Went to the thing with B last night. It sucked as expected. Home now, must go to bed soon because I have you-know-what tomorrow morning, argh. It had better not be the same as last week or I'll scream. Note to self: send BTZ to J."