from a place of wrath and tears
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Marshall Payne wrote (28th June):
First person narratives have their own problems. Have you ever noticed (and I'm sure you have) where the overuse of the word "I" snakes down the page like a testament to the Me Generation? Often you have to accept this as a convention of first person narrative, but as a writer it's something I try to watch out for.
I haven't, because most books out there aren't 1st but 3rd person, preferably multi-headed because in this day and age of internet brainshrink, nobody seems to be able to stick to one head.
N.B.: everybody now blames the internet for the brainshrink, but I remember the early 90s when the internet was still far too clunky to influence young brains and Google wasn't even invented: everybody blamed TV, couch-potato zap-culture and MTV's blitzkrieg on young minds (incidentally this is also before neo-R&B or urban pop or whatever you wanna name it made music channels, videos and artists uniform. It was a real blitzkrieg, like Celine Dion followed by Metallica => *head explodes*). And I still think US-styled advertisement littered television holds more responsibility in brain-fatigue issues than the internet. From experience I know that when I haven't watched BBC or a rented DVD for a while but stuck to whatever's on the tube, I notice an increase in brain-fatigue while watching a movie ("where's that damned ad break?"), and the added quirk of a conditioned bladder ("dude, pause this shit because I really have to pee").
Now, back to that remark on 1st person: As a writer I feel more at ease with 1st person than 3rd, I don't like the limitations and the choices you have in 3rd. I understand that you can do 1st person badly (and I'm certainly not saying that I do 1st person particularly well, or write well at all), but considering the "I vs. s/he ratio" in published stories/novels, for every one done badly in 1st person I can show you three done badly in 3rd person (where probably the same error, of overusing "s/he", pops up).
Now one of the main difficulties of 1st person is the need to establish your character's identity separate from the reader's identity, while or just because a reader naturally identifies with your main character. This might require some more "I" than a 3rd person character would demand. Another difficulty is that reading being an individual business, the reader is geared to the self. So if the 1st person ticks off the reader's internal critic (who'll become confused between the real and fictional "I") your story/novel is screwed. That's the problem this new main character that popped up for my new project poses: 1st person and extremely unpleasant. That's gonna be real difficult.
As a reader I like 1st person, even done badly, better than 3rd person. It's one of the reasons that kept me glued to Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms:
a) the first 1st person I've stumbled across in a long time
b) it was done well
c) I really liked the voice
and a + b + c = love on first page
I'm certainly no fan of multi-POV, because in most instances it's used as a simple device to create tension, switching heads per chapter and having cliffhanger after cliffhanger after cliffhanger. It's good for one book, maybe two, then I tire of the carrot. Which is one of the main reasons I've fallen out of love with Peter F. Hamilton: too much carrot, not enough real content. Still read him, though, sort of like thinking fondly about the good times you had with an ex.
Multi-POV is also overused, in my opinion, because it is what sells in this brainshrunk market, which means stories that do not even need the reader to be inserted from different angles or different places into the story use multi-POV. Sometimes it is done well, usually when the rigidity of structure goes.
For instance, the first head-switch in Newton's Nights of Villjamur had me frown my annoyed frown and sigh my annoyed sigh (over the last 15 years, I've seen a surge in the use of multi-POV in the genres I tend to read, so it's become some sort of nervous tick). But by the second switch my nervous tick had gone to sleep, and by the end of the book I was under the impression of having read a single POV, which is how multi-POV should work: tell one story, highlighting different angles or places, but stick to one story that flows nearly continuously. Don't be tedious and have the different heads do stuff simultaneously unless it has a function ("Oh no, dude's gonna be in the corridor that other dude's about to blow up!" Agony! Tension!). And keep those instances short. Why?
Well, long chapters with different heads all running around doing stuff (near) simultaneously ("Dun dun dun! Meanwhile ...") work the first time you read it. Next time you pick the book up, you skip everything you know wasn't either super pivotal to plot, or described or characterized extremely well.
Or maybe that's just me. But there's this choir of extras in my mental background ready to yell "Oh get on with it" whenever I even come close to thinking "'Oh no, we're switching to that stupid git/annoying twit again". I can't help it. Tad Williams and Peter Hamilton love to work with this kind of multi-head tale, and somewhere during the reading I always get this feeling the story gets subjected to the rigorous structure they've set up.
I've reread everything of Hamilton a few months ago and must say there was much skippage once past the Mandel stories. Same for Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. I've been toying with rereading Otherland, but then I figured I could better keep my forces? patience? for the rest of Shadowmarch.
And I do like rereading and finding new nuggets of beautiful language or ideas or themes that I glossed over the previous read. I don't like rereading and having to plough through superfluous pages and go SKIM! and SKIP! And I believe most of those superfluous pages are created by using another head when it's completely unnecessary.
Another recent multi-POV that I was extremely pleased with as reader was Stephen Deas' The Adamantine Palace. The slightly more structuralized POV-switching certainly had the potential of making this a wall-collision book (as in "Not again! Harrumph!" and book colliding with wall), but Deas made it work by keeping the reader's interest on what might happen with characters while you're not following them, instead of trying to write up every little bit that happens to them MEANWHILE or working with explicit cliffhangers. If I remember well (and see, now I'm thinking of rereading a book I read only a few months ago, how about that?), he even plays around with the POV enough that you're not really head-switching: you're camera-switching, and sometimes following one character, then another, in a particular setting/group. And right up till the end I was sort of wondering/hoping/fearing (all confused) that the next switch back to the mercenary, the scene would be one with the mercenary absent and the dragon belching.
I'm having difficulty with finishing Eric brown's Necropath (I still have 5 chapters to go). The mystery is solved, what's left is a bit of thriller loose end (will Vaughan manage to find the Vaith before his nemesis finds him?). The set-up with the multi-POV has kept Vaughan at a distance, and it is clear that the nemesis will find Vaughan through Sukara, so I don't feel particularly involved in the resolution. The only reason I push myself to finish the read is because I want to find out if there is anything in the ending to justify the use of multi-POV. Up until now I have the feeling the story would have been better and stronger when told simply from Vaughan's POV. I'll come back to this when I do finish the book.
Edit 5th July: So, to conclude my reading of Necropath, I stay with my initial opinion: the story would have been stronger if Brown had stuck to the 3rd person POV.
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