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Writing techniques & Hermione standing over Ron in a leather corset
On Writing First Person
I discovered something.
I usually hate first-person stories. As soon as I see that 'I' in the first few sentences, I run. With first-person you lose half the visuals, you get trapped in their thoughts, repetition is often mind-numbing. It also tends to throw the continuity and time-line out of whack.
But it works when you need distance. When the subject matter is horrific or particularly intense.
It does the opposite of what you'd expect. It gives you distance. (That's why it works in 'Interview with a Vampire.')
The character tells you the attitude you're supposed to have. You spend so much time in his head, you don't have time to react to how lurid this all is. Instead you react to his reactions and asides. Gives you more distance to swallow it, while still preserving the immediacy of the scene. This is why it had to be a first-person narrative. Much as I hate them.
On Drabbles... and Hermione in a leather corset
Good Drabbles stimulate the imagination!
I've been watching the Drabbles lately, and see a pattern in those that work:
1) An underlying tension between the characters (of course)
2) An original plot, something that outside the expected
3) A plot that is completed by suggestion.. ie, you can see what's coming
4) A history that is filled in by suggestion
I've decided that a Drabble at its best is complete story where the reader fills in the blanks.
Examples:
1) Certain characters, as soon as you put them together, you get a whattheheck response. Ron/Hermione may not come as much of a shock, as the history is in canon. There isn't much for the imagination to work with there.
2) But Hermione standing over Ron in a leather corset, flogger in hand, making him beg... will suggest a great deal to the imagination.
3) Ron stubbornly refusing to do as she says, but totally turned on suggests an outcome to the reader, so the reader completes the story in their minds - he's going to give in. Thus they feel satisfied even by this brief vignette.
4) A statement at some point that explains what brought about this situation fleshes *ahem, pardon* the history. "All right, Malfoy, you've had your little peep show. Now where's Harry!?"
Voila! You have no mere scene, but an entire story in highly concentrated form.
*bows*
Can you tell I've just read CLS's Fashion Sensibility?
I discovered something.
I usually hate first-person stories. As soon as I see that 'I' in the first few sentences, I run. With first-person you lose half the visuals, you get trapped in their thoughts, repetition is often mind-numbing. It also tends to throw the continuity and time-line out of whack.
But it works when you need distance. When the subject matter is horrific or particularly intense.
It does the opposite of what you'd expect. It gives you distance. (That's why it works in 'Interview with a Vampire.')
The character tells you the attitude you're supposed to have. You spend so much time in his head, you don't have time to react to how lurid this all is. Instead you react to his reactions and asides. Gives you more distance to swallow it, while still preserving the immediacy of the scene. This is why it had to be a first-person narrative. Much as I hate them.
On Drabbles... and Hermione in a leather corset
Good Drabbles stimulate the imagination!
I've been watching the Drabbles lately, and see a pattern in those that work:
1) An underlying tension between the characters (of course)
2) An original plot, something that outside the expected
3) A plot that is completed by suggestion.. ie, you can see what's coming
4) A history that is filled in by suggestion
I've decided that a Drabble at its best is complete story where the reader fills in the blanks.
Examples:
1) Certain characters, as soon as you put them together, you get a whattheheck response. Ron/Hermione may not come as much of a shock, as the history is in canon. There isn't much for the imagination to work with there.
2) But Hermione standing over Ron in a leather corset, flogger in hand, making him beg... will suggest a great deal to the imagination.
3) Ron stubbornly refusing to do as she says, but totally turned on suggests an outcome to the reader, so the reader completes the story in their minds - he's going to give in. Thus they feel satisfied even by this brief vignette.
4) A statement at some point that explains what brought about this situation fleshes *ahem, pardon* the history. "All right, Malfoy, you've had your little peep show. Now where's Harry!?"
Voila! You have no mere scene, but an entire story in highly concentrated form.
*bows*
Can you tell I've just read CLS's Fashion Sensibility?
Message from a self-confessed first-person POV whore.
Ahem.
Fortune smiled on me when Albus Dumbledore's brother was Sorted into Slytherin. As he walked over to take his seat with us for the first time - to groans from the Gryffindors and silent horror among the Slytherins - I was already considering how this situation might best be turned to my advantage.
I glanced over at the Gryffindor table, where my cousin Valery sat directly opposite Dumbledore. The elder brother was calmly watching the next student under the Hat.
From the head of our table - the place I had held for near a year now, against all challengers - it was hard to see anything of the new boy other than his fair hair. I leaned back in my chair, folding my arms over the anticipation building within me. Dumbledore's brother. Now a paradox: a Mudblood in Slytherin. Success in the game of status required one to be alert for opportunities.
I knew exactly what I was going to do.
Run, or read on? *evil giggle*
Re: Message from a self-confessed first-person POV whore.
Normally I hate first person too, for many of the reasons that Icarus mentioned, but ...
your story officially Rocks and uses first-person in all the ways that are most effective and interesting.
brodie
Thanks!
Mission in life: sneaking up on people who claim to hate first-person POV and/or OCs; introducing them to Voldie's grandpa. Muahahaha.
Re: Message from a self-confessed first-person POV whore.
I've also written 'Beg Me for It' from Ron's inside the Death-Eater run Ministry first-person POV.
But it works when you need distance...
Your character needs ironic distance, and your first-person actually acts as character development. You immediately hear how self-absorbed and smug your character is. Which would not have been apparent in third person, in fact this character and the Slytherins would likely have been completely unpalatable in third person.
Likewise, in 'Beg Me for It' Ron's cheerful asides at a bad situation give you distance from the non-con scene.
First person creates distance from the immediate scenery, and you react instead to the character's attitudes. By writing it in first person, your reader responds to your character's dry wit enough to 'handle' their blatantly self-serving actions.
Cybele's 'If You Are Prepared' also is in first-person. In that case you need that cushion of the characters' perspectives, because it's very intense (and not a happy ending in sight. I greatly fear that not only will Harry die, Snape will suicide).
Neither your story, Cybele's, or (I dare say) 'Beg Me for It' fall into the traps of losing the timeline, fogging the events with lack of visual description, and mind-numbing repetition. Nor is the subject banal and therefore made distantly bland by misuse of first person.
Likewise, Anne Rice's 'Interview with a Vampire' and the humour piece among the Hell's Angel's, god what was his name... was it Ralph Steadman? ... where the Angel's beat the holy shit out of him in the end? -- use first person to great effect.
Lighter examples are everything ever written by Patrick McManus... and Dave Barry. There it's ironic distance. First person used appropriately, to point out the absurd.
The most common misuse of first person is what I call "angst in the washing machine": realllllllly dull events, made duller by distance. Then the whine starts....
~Icarus
Re: Message from a self-confessed first-person POV whore.
How differently we see things. I should never have considered distance as one of the advantages of this POV. [/Jane Austen mode]
First person creates distance from the immediate scenery, and you react instead to the character's attitudes.
I see it rather as taking on a character's attitudes for the duration of the story, and being seduced into sharing that character's reactions to the "immediate scenery".
Distance my left paw. It's all about closeness - give me total immersion, baby! Fine enough when it's a character I like, but IMHO the height of an author's skill and evilness is demonstrated when I'm sucked into the first-person perspective of a character I loathe.
If I surface from a book/fic whimpering like an orphaned kitten, if I'm stuttering something like "Oh you bitch from hell, I despise this character - but you've made me live in his brain for hours because I simply couldn't stop reading your damn story!" - then I will salute the author and shower her with chocolate, even as I'm shrieking Eeeww! and scrubbing my senses clean of ghastly character.
A sequence of first-person narratives can be even better. Being dragged out of one character's head and immediately assimilated by the POV of her/his arch-rival, parent, lover - oh, this can work wonders. *cheers unreliable narrators and perspective shifts*
I like being mind-fucked by POV. I want to do it to others. Hee.
The reviewers who really make me grin are those who admit to hating my narrator - or love/hating him. (e.g. "He's a completely ruthless bastard, but I still find myself cheering whenever things go his way." or "Slytherin, manipulative, status-obsessed, stopping at not a lot, vengeful, cruel, likable.") And then there are those who don't comment on the narrator himself, but show evidence of being swallowed by his perspective: for instance, my narrator hates Albus Dumbledore rather a lot - and I do crack up when reviewers admit to hating Albus. *high-fives the OC*
More of my babbling about first-person POV may be found here (http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=mctabby&itemid=8008) and here (http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=mctabby&itemid=15283). And last year there was a FAP thread that made me grit my teeth and throw things: On why I detest first-person POV (http://www.fictionalley.org/fictionalleypark/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7531).
realllllllly dull events, made duller by distance. Then the whine starts....
This is not merely a misuse of first-person POV. It's a misuse of keyboard and neurons.
Anyway, you seem to enjoy first-person POV when it's done well - though we might disagree on why or how it works. But please don't run as soon as you see "I" at the start of a story. That's so... sad.
Re: Message from a self-confessed first-person POV whore.
Ah! We are using the term 'distance' differently. Forgive me for being vague. By distance, I am referring to 'distance from the events, scenery, et al.'
By using first-person narrative the reader is removed one step away from the action. Instead of directly perceiving 'there was a white cow' and having their own response to that, you have 'I saw a white cow...' (here the reader waits for the meaning) '...and it made me think of my grandmother's farm. God, I loathed that place.' The reader doesn't directly experience the white cow, rather they experience it second-hand through the character's reaction to the white cow.
The skillful use of that filter is crucial.
The character itself has to be interesting enough to make second-hand observation not only bearable, but entertaining. Boring people are dead boring if you're forced to live in their heads.
The events have to be exciting or strange enough to survive being filtered and distant, not be overwhelmed by personality.
Plus the filter has to be used very skillfully. The writer can't forget time and place, which is all too easy to do in first-person narrative, floating around in that brain.
The misunderstanding about this second hand experience and 'distance', causes people to abuse first person in stories that would have been perfectly effective in third person limited, or charmingly fairy-tale-like in third person omniscient.
Simple stories, about ordinary people and things, become impossibly dreary by the application of first person narrative because the uninformed writer is unaware of the distance from physical reality they have created. It grows worse, as they forget to place the events in scenery and time. The result is a horrible swim through a cesspool of random mind. Then, invariably, they begin to whine....
~Icarus