Message Board Topic 8/10

[Comsie]

I'm sure many of you already know the three ways to write a story. But just for a quick review, they are as follows:

 

1st Person: Writing from the main character's perspective. (Ex. "I love him. And I can't sleep until I tell him so!")

 

2nd Person: Writing 'to' the readers, as if they're the main character. (Ex. "You love him, and you won't be able to sleep until you tell him so")

 

3rd Person: Writing from an ominipotent point of view, as if you can see things from the outside. (Ex. Johnny loves Evan. And he won't be able to sleep until he tells him so.")

 

I personally prefer to write in the first person, simply because I feel as though it's more intimate as far as emotions go. But I've tried all three, and found some interesting challenges and advantages with each one. Most professional writer's use third person. It's pretty much the standard. I did that with 'Skylight', and had a few stumbling blocks as I had to avoid some of the things I do in first person. Hehehe, so that one always keeps me on my toes.

 

What do YOU guys think about the different perspectives? When writing or reading...which ones do you prefer? Why? And have you tried any of the others? It can be quite an exercise! Hehehe!

 

Let us know your feelings on this!

[Rilbur]

I almost have to write in third person; I just can't 'do' first.

[Graeme]

2nd person is rare and doesn't often come over "well". I'll just say that it should generally be avoided unless you really, really, really know what you're doing.

 

There are a couple of variants of 3rd person that are worth mentioning.

 

3rd person limited is similar in nature to 1st person, in that you are essentially following a single person. You may get glimpses into their thoughts and motives, but for the other characters you have to guess at their thoughts and motives, based on their words and actions. A lot of published novels are written in this form (eg. the Harry Potter novels are largely 3rd person limited) though a lot of authors stretch it a times to give glimpses into the other characters. More importantly, it's possible to jump to the view point of another character when there is a change of scene or chapter, so a story can follow one character for a while, and then another, as the story requires.

 

3rd person omniscient is where the author can give access to the thoughts and motives of all the characters in a scene. This can be really useful and powerful, but the downside is that the author has to make a lot of decisions about what will and won't be revealed.

 

1st person is, to me, the easiest to write in, because the author just has to put themselves in the shoes of that character and write accordingly. Where it is weakest is where there is more than one main character, because 1st person only allows for one narrator. There's not a lot of difference between 1st person and 3rd person limited, so if more than one main character is required, I would suggest using 3rd person limited so when the viewpoint changes, the reader is immediately aware without requiring any gimmicks like "CHARACTER X" headings at the change of viewpoint.

 

I saw a recommendation to use 1st person whenever you want to really restrict the flow of information to the readers (which is why it's popular in mysteries, though 3rd person limited is also often used), or when you have a story that's psychologically based (that's why I used it in my recent The Price of Friendship novel, because I wanted the readers to really understand what Rick was going through, and why he was acting as he was). Comicality's A Whole Other You is a great example of this -- we see, from the point of view of a straight guy, what it's like to learn that his brother is gay. In my opinion, when there is a single main character, and the readers only need to know what that character knows, 1st person is a very good choice.

 

Otherwise, I would go for 3rd person. A good 3rd person limited story reads pretty much as if it was 1st person -- we really empathise with the character who we're following. 3rd person is also good for those wide-sweeping stories that have lots of characters, or where this is a lot of action taking place and it's not feasible to have one character experience all of that action. From a writer's point of view, the biggest problem I have with 3rd person is simply deciding what to include and what to leave out. Because I have the option to include scenes that occur anywhere in the world (literally), I have to pick and choose what to include and what to leave out. Sometimes working that out can be a real struggle.

[Nephylim]

I like to mix. I have been doing a lot of experimentation in this respect recently. I used to write almost exclusively in third person... telling a story. Then I started to experiment with first person and then I started to think a lot about perspective and started to experiment with showing different perspectives on the same story.

 

It started really with To Have and to Hold where I experimented by alternating the perspective of the characters from chapter to chapter.... ie telling one chapter from the perspective of one character and the next from the second then back to the first... so there was only the two of them.

 

Now I am going further with Death is Not and Option by having more than one character speaking in more than one tense and more than one person in random order. So you never know which character you are going to get next (I tell you at the head of the chapter who is speaking so it isn't too confusing) and sometimes they start by looking over something that the previous character has already recounted from their point of view therefore starting in the past tense and moving to the present tense as they catch up.

 

It gets a bit complicated sometimes but I am quite pleased with the way it is working out. I think it adds dimension to a story in that you get different characters and perspectives looking at the same situation and you see a little why people do what they do and how they seem not only to themselves but to others while they are doing it.

 

I don't know if any of this makes sense as it is just an experiment for me at the moment. i suppose only time will tell if it works or not.

[Comicality]

Good points all around. Believe me, I'm taking notes. Especially because the next chapter of "Skylight" that I'm writing is taking forever to get it 'right'.

 

It was a story that definitely needed to be told in 3rd person, because it involved a lot of different characters, a lot of different relationships, and everyone involved had to be separated from one another for long periods of time. So it would have been confusing to keep changing 1st person perspectives for that one. But I like it.

 

And I, too, have some difficulty keeping conversations straight in 3rd person, without constantly saying the character's name over and over and OVER again. Hehehe, I always worry that I'm doing it too much, and try to change it up. But I can't. It kinda needs to be said.

 

2nd person is really...'different', but I wanted to try it a few times just to do something different. I did a story called "One Night, Why Not?" about a college boy going to a gay bar/club for the first time and finding himself someone special. I think it was really fun. I got to really bring the reader in by describing the whole experience to them directly. It's not something I would do often, but for the occasional break from the 'norm', it's a fun exercise.

 

I'm trying a new story now with 3rd person, and I'm putting it in print, so I hope it goes over well. But for a lot of my online stuff, 1st person is still my favorite.

[Mark Arbour]

Comsie,

 

Great topic. I think that first person is great when you want to really get into one person's mind. A great example of that would be "The Secret Life of Billy Chase," which I follow religiously. I used first person on my "Chronicles of an Academic Predator" saga for that reason, because I wanted to live in the mind of one person.

 

When I went to write my "Bridgemont" saga, I switched to third person, although as Graeme has mentioned, it's probably third person limited. It's a historical piece, and I had to try and create a world that is so much different than today (CAP started in the '60s, while Bridgemont takes place in the 1790s). It's worked well for me, giving me the ability to be omniscient where I need to.

 

BUT, what really pisses me off is the attitude of some of the people you may encounter online, in this genre of gay stories. This attitude is nurtured inside arrogant people, and espouses that third person writing is really the ONLY way to write a story, and that anything written in first person is simply a hack story. This is nonsense, and shows how shallow and inflexible they are. I often worry that young writers will run into some of these idiots and have their creative juices stymied. Sigh.

[Former Member]

Now that I write stories instead of plays I nearly always use thrid person...omniscient normally. I find it makes the story more rounded if the reader gets a glimpse of everyone's mind. Plus it's fun to change viewpoint at random.