I was inspired to write this series by two things: a blog dissing FPPOV by a writer I admire, and a Q&A session on one of my loops with an editor whose house guidelines specifically state: “Things to avoid include: first person POV (at least in the beginning).”

But… but… why?

Natalie Damschroder states (bolding mine):

The exact reasons people give for loving first person are the reasons I hate it. See, most people feel first person is more intimate. Like the narrator is a friend, sitting beside the reader and telling them what happened. I agree that it’s like that—but I don’t agree that it’s more intimate. In fact, I think it’s more distancing… when I’m reading first person, the narrator is telling me the story. I want to live it, not hear it…First person exacerbates flaws in the story that I might ignore otherwise. The first person narratives that I stick with and enjoy the most, however, are the ones that are written as if they were third person. There’s very little direct address to the reader, or self-aware language.

(In the interest of full-disclosure, Natalie goes on to admit she’s trying her first FPPOV story now.)

I’ve never felt the “distancing” that Natalie mentions. I’m not sure I even understand it. Why should there be any more likelihood to “live” the story when “she does this and he does that” than when “I do this, I do that?” Can you really be “living” the story in any POV other than second person? (i.e., “You do this, you do that.”)

Indeed, there are arguments to be made that third person is necessarily more distancing, since there is the distance between subject and narrator–even the modern, involved, limited third-person narrator. In first person, there is no veil between the protagonist and the reader. Whose heart has not broken all over the page as Charlie from Flowers for Algernon begins to disintegrate, and doesn’t even possess the mental faculties to understand what has happened to him? Would such a reaction be the same if we read, “As time passed, the effects of the treatment wore off, and Charlie regressed to his former state…”

If anything, I think the true argument to be made against first person is how completely it forces you to live through the reality as the narrator sees it, no matter how unreliable that narration is. (::cough:: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd ::cough, cough::). In first person, you cannot distance yourself from this narrator. You cannot, even if you want to. You’ve been aligned to his or her worldview, however despicable it might be. I’m sure we can all think of a few like FPPOV books like that.

Now let us discuss the bolded text, wherein first person is accused of exacerbating flaws. In my research of FPPOV hatahs, this is a common refrain. Though I am barred by the rules of the email loop from repeating the editor’s words, it’s pretty much what he said.

I am curious, however, what flaws these are. Some FPPOV detractors even go so far as to state that FPPOV is the refuge of the sloppy novelist. But I’m having a hard time finding details. Any takers? Someone suggested the repetition of “I” and that in third person, you get the option of “he” or “Sailor Boy.” I read my novels out loud during the editing process, and though repeated words jump out at me, (oh, all too often, which is *why* I read out loud while I edit)…”I” is not one of them.

I suppose it’s different for every novel. One detractor opined that you miss a lot of detail when forced to view the world through the eyes of a given protagonist (he was speaking specifically about first person in science fiction). And yet, isn’t it fun to have that extra layer of mystery? Is this person really the way they’ve been described, or is the protagonist prejudiced? And could it be that the reader, in trying to divine the truth, is the one putting the distance between herself and the narrative?

The editor also stated that though many people think it’s easy, convincing FPPOV is in actuality quite difficult. I have certainly read FPPOV done poorly, as I have read books in any POV done poorly. But I’m not sure that I think of it as any more or less difficult than writing convincing characters — no matter what POV you choose.

And perhaps that’s where the issue is. If you don’t take to the characters, there is no escape in FPPOV. No distance. If the voice bugs you in third person, you may be able to tolerate it for the sake of the story. But in FPPOV, the voice is with you at every turn. If you LOVE the character (or, um, love to hate her) then this is a plus. Otherwise, I can imagine getting annoyed/frustrated/angry much more quickly.

Then again, there’s a third-person POV writer out there who turns me off by page 20 of every book of hers I’ve ever tried to read.

Of course, in this case, we’re discussing strong, convincing FPPOV stories featuring characters we don’t enjoy. I have a friend who can’t get through a Shopaholic book because of her very strong, very negative feelings about Becky Bloomwood. Lord knows there have been people, inconceivable as it sounds, who don’t care much for Amy. What about a FPPOV book where the voice is just… meh? Is this better or worse than a TPPOV with meh characters? Which is more distasteful?

The final problem the editor pointed out with FPPOV is that it required very careful blocking. He expressed doubt that a “strong plot” could be achieved in first person, since it required the protagonist to be present at every scene. No chance for a villain POV sneaking behind the protag’s back. Often, you see this problem solved with what Rachel Vincent calls “a Scooby Doo scene” where the villain somehow explains what he or she was doing throughout the book. (Vincent also rightly says this scene needs to be cut down as much as possible.) This, perhaps, would be similar to the scene discussed in the comments section yesterday, where the hero of the romance explains to the heroine how much he loved her all along. Or, you simply arrange the plot so that such monologuing is not necessary.

If the story truly centers around the protagonist (here we have the difference between the heterodiegetic (e.g., Ishmael) and the autodiegetic (e.g., Bridget Jones) narrator), then it’s probably pretty easy to make sure she’s there all the time, is it not? I’ve written 600 pages in my series, and there has only been one scene where I had to write around Amy’s absence.

So are these flaws real flaws, or are they a matter of taste? Natalie says she dislikes direct address (external focalization) in favor of “to the moment” living alongside the character. (Natalie and Sam Richardson would be buddies, I think.) I love it, in all mediums. I love Shakespeare’s asides, I love Ferris Bueller talking to the screen, I love Veronica Mars’s voice overs, and I love Amy’s confessions.

Focalization, of course, does not need to remain stable throughout the text. Like a camera, it can zoom in and out of the moment as needed.

So again, I wonder, why is there prejudice at all. Certainly, the problem of “sympathy” becomes even more trying when you are dealing with first person narration. But when achieved, the result is even more stunning than in third. A skillful writer can avoid repetition of sentence structure, and other claims (navel gazing, etc.) can be a danger in any narrative voice. Is it really a matter of taste after all?

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(That’s First Person POV…)

Ruth Kaufman’s recent RWR article about FPPOV has engendered a lot of discussion on various email lists and blogs. Since most of the email lists and blogs I read focus on romance and its various related genres, most of the discussion I see seems to center around the so-called “recent” rise of FPPOV.

I never thought of it as new, and especially not in romance, and I also never thought of it being a current trend. What about Jane Eyre? Or Clarissa, (all epistolary novels being, by necessity, in FPPOV), or (wandering farther afield, genre-wise) Moby Dick, most of the stories written by Edgar Allen Poe, Gulliver’s Travels, or Frankenstein, or David Copperfield, or how about getting really old school and saying Dante’s Inferno? (First person epic poetry, even!) Perhaps FPPOV is more popular in romance now than it was, say, ten years ago, but I think the discussion is better centered around why it ever went away then than why it has returned now.

Not only does first person POV enjoy a long and distinguished history in the realm of romantic literature, since it was featured so often in gothic romance (not Udolpho, perhaps, but certainly heavyweights from Bronte to Du Maurier employed it), but as one of the pre-eminent narrative devices in the development of the relatively new form of the novel, full stop.

Daniel Defoe, commonly (and perhaps erroneously) considered the Father of the English Novel, employed it in his most famous work, Robinson Crusoe, as well as the more “woman’s fiction” centered The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders. At the beginning, the novel was considered first a predominantly “female” (read: fluffy and dismissable, and how things haven’t changed in three hundred years!) form of writing before being co-opted by Defoe et al., which is why many early novels featured female protagonists. More than thirty years previously, the now-famous poet/playwright/spy/first female professional English writer Aphra Behn employed the technique in her book (ostensibly a highly-suspect memoir about an equally suspect trip to Venezuela) called Oroonoko.

In Oroonoko, Behn employed the oft-maligned conversational technique of speaking directly to the reader. (The most famous example of this, perhaps, is “Reader, I married him,” in Jane Eyre.) This kind of author intrusion would be re-interpreted by later writers as the now-out of fashion omniscient narrative. In first person, however, this meta-narrative omniscence lends an extra level of realism to the text — the person telling you the story knew what was to come next. It’s the technique I use in the Secret Society Girl series. The Amy telling you the story knows more than the Amy acting on the page. (We’ll discuss this in more detail — complete with the debate about whether or not Amy is an overt autodiegetic limited external focalizing or an overt autodiegetic limited internal focalizing narrator — tomorrow. Say it with me: Jargon! Goodie!)

This emphasis on realism, to the point of pretending the novel was a memoir, or a found bunch of letters, or etc. (a technique which is very rarely used today, and usually only as some sort of marketing stunt, as with Gryphon and Sabine, the Lost tie-in novel, Bad Twin, or Journal), became very important to the nascent form of the novel, because no one was sure that readers would buy the fantastic prose tale they were about to experience without first being assured, somewhat, of its veracity. First person framing devices were enormously popular. (Compare to the idea of a campfire horror tale where the teller insists this happened to a friend or a cousin.)

It is, of course, very rare today to pretend, either with a wink or with any degree of seriousness, that your novel is anything but a novel. (No Frey jokes, please.) In fact, it seems far more common for readers to insist that a writer’s clearly defined fiction is in fact, a thinly veiled memoir or roman a clef. Especially in the genre of chick lit, where such high-profile books as The Nanny Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada seem to be just that.

I’ve seen and heard quite a bit of speculation about my own novel. I suppose I should feel flattered that the story is imbued with so much realism that people would think it was actually true. After all, that was the point. I wanted to write a book about secret societies the way they really are, and not the way that Hollywood often makes them out to be. But it’s fiction. If my depictions of a secret sociey’s rituals and behavior sound true, that’s no different than describing realistic police procedures in a mystery. My book is based not on my experience at Yale nor on the experience of any other person. It says so right on the copyright page

But it leads me to an interesting point. If, in fact, there has been a resurgence in FPPOV in novels, which I do not necessarily claim, can it be connected to the upsurge in emphasis that the market is putting on the author’s personal experience with the subject about which she writes? Many writers have told me that authors writing medical thrillers benefit from having a background in medicine, that authors writing from the point of view of a certain ethnicity will play up that ethnicity (to the point of changing their name to a more suitable, ethnic-sounding pseudonym), and that authors writing glamorous fiction had better have a little glamor going on in their bio. The first question an agent is asked upon shopping a piece of multicultural fiction is whether that author is indeed, a member of the culture.

Half of the marketing buzz about the uber-bestseller The Da Vinci Code seemed to center on how many of the novel’s statements were based in fact. (At a recent visit to the Louvre, my mother overheard a curator politely interrupting a “Da Vinci Code tour” to remind the visitors that a certain fact that the DVC tour guide was relating was, in fact, completely fictional, at which point one of the visitors snapped back that she knew all about the cover up, having read the book!)

So, have we returned to the early-novel sense that fiction should be, on some level, true? And is that why the veneer of first person, with it’s “this happened to me” conceit, so popular in the type of fiction (say, chick lit) where the sense of realism (this could happen to you or your best friend) is so important?
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All this week, Diana will be discussing FPPOV.

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10.16.06 | Uncategorized | By Diana | 19 comments | PRINT