Bradel Bookwork – Creative Writing with Brandon Sanderson (Viewpoint) · 3:21pm Apr 20th, 2013
Welcome back, for those of you playing the home game! It's round three at Brandon Sanderson's BYU Creative Writing class this week, and our focus is on viewpoint (e.g. first-person, third-person limited, etc) and description. If you're new and want to get started at the beginning, here's round one. And as always, if you haven't watched this week's lesson, you can catch it at the link below:
There's enough to say here that I'm going to split this week's lecture over two blog posts. This post will discuss viewpoint (or narrative mode if you want to go all Wikipedia on this). Look for the post on description a little later today.
So, without further ado, let's get into the muck!
3rd Person Omniscient (3POm)
I have to admit I've never been a big fan of 3POm, largely for the weaknesses Brandon mentions. I think it's harder to write relatable characters when you don't have the luxury of staying inside those characters' heads and seeing how they view the world. The 3POm perspective-switching makes the task of firmly establishing a character in the reader's mind much more difficult. And, of course, you can't keep things under wraps very easily when you're writing an omniscient narrative. If an on-screen character plans to turn traitor, the reader will know that well in advance. It's much harder to develop tension in 3POm. It can be done, and I think 3POm makes for a kind of interesting writing exercise, to help a writer play around with alternate ways of building suspense.
But I'd never want to spend my life writing in this voice.
1st Person (1P)
This one is a little weird for me. I'm a pretty dedicated 3PLi writer, so 1P always feels a little alien to me. It's certainly a workable viewpoint, and it's not structurally any weaker than 3PLi, just different. But my existing preference is based almost entirely on my experience as a reader and a writer, not on any logical evaluation of the merits of 1P vs. 3PLi. So let's eschew uninformed preference and dig into those merits a little.
As is mentioned in the lecture, one of the big advantages to 1P is that it creates relatability very quickly. In the realm of fanfiction, this isn't a huge deal unless you're writing an OC, and if you are writing an OC, 1P is probably more of a liability than anything else, since it will immediately invoke the image of a self-insert story. That said, I know Sunchaser has expressed his desire to try writing an unabashed self-insert story just to show that it can be done well, and 1P is probably ideal for a project like that.
Two of the big advantages to 1P that Brandon mentions are that it lets you play with unreliable narrator and it lets you cheat on info-dumps. Both of these strike me as serious benefits.
Personally, I always love a good plot twist – I liked M. Night Shaymalan movies all the way up until "The Happening", which was well past when most viewers got sick of him, I think. Unreliable narrator is a gold mine of opportunities for plot twists and other types of expectation subversions. For me, this is the single biggest reason to use 1P, and if I start making a concerted effort to use this voice, it will almost certainly be because of this single advantage.
Info-dumps are another area where writing fanfiction sort of undermines an advantage of the 1P viewpoint. In most cases, we don't need to do a whole lot of work to establish setting and we're not really confronted with the exposition problem. But yes, being able to put exposition into a character's perspective is a big advantage. It lets the exposition do double duty in building both setting and character, and that sort of efficiency boost can make it a lot more palatable for readers. The info-dump advantage also highlights something Brandon doesn't talk about much: the fact that 1P is also a form of narration. A first-person account is, by its very structure, meant to be shared. So the act of telling the reader about the setting is an entirely sensible act. When you move over to 3PLi, I think you really lose that narrative super-structure. At that point, you're inhabiting characters and letting the observed action tell the story. It becomes much more alien to have a block of text come along and tell the reader about all the information they need to know.
Oh, incidentally, if you want to get a look at how underdeveloped my 1P voice is, check out Twilight's story in "Purple Prose". I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with it, but I really don't have a handle on the use of 1P here. Those passages are basically just 3PLi with pronoun substitution, which is probably why the bits at the end of the story feel so alien to me when I read them. Fortunately, this hasn't seemed to bother anyone else.
And if you're interested, here's the short story mentioned in the lecture: Wikihistory. It's quick, awesome, and worth your time to read.
1P isn't all wine and roses, though. Brandon names a few downsides, though there's only one I find particularly problematic. First person can make it more difficult to establish the voice of characters other than your narrator, since your narrator's voice is so overpowering in the viewpoint. You still have access to all the tools available in 3P, so there's not really a difference in a writer's ability to deliver characterization, but since everything gets filtered through a narrative perspective, that characterization isn't going to stick quite as well. And it's also going to remain a little unclear whether the characterization of non-narrating characters is true characterization, or whether it's suffering from the unreliable narrator problem and only reflects the attitudes of the viewpoint character.
3rd Person Limited (3PLi)
And... how much is there to say about 3PLi, really? It's my default. It's almost certainly your default, too. But Brandon does point out a couple interesting things.
3PLi is good for managing large casts of characters. It's also good – and here's a point I hadn't considered before – for managing big set pieces. Just as characterization gets filtered in a 1P viewpoint, so does setting, and when there's a lot of action for the reader to observe, being stuck in a 1P viewpoint can be very constraining. It's easy to think about this in video game terms. Sometimes, seeing through the eyes of a character is nice. It helps build tension in games like Portal. But on the other hand, just getting a little bit of distance from that character can make the scene around them a whole lot more intelligible.
In a larger story, the 3PLi viewpoint also allows you to write throwaway viewpoints. These can be characters who show up and die, as mentioned in the lecture – but they can also be characters who provide a window into important action or information that none of your main characters is privy to. 1P gets to cheat on info dumps by putting them in character voice to make them more interesting. 3PLi gets to cheat on info dumps by putting them in throwaway viewpoints where what would pass for exposition elsewhere can turn into a real scene inside the story. What's more interesting, being told that an army is on the march or watching a scout discover a host of soldiers advancing on her position?
Also, because 3PLi lacks the narratorial structure of 1P, it is arguably more immersive and permits characters to have more faults and more depth. A first-person account is tied to our preconceptions about real interaction, and so if a 1P narrator openly expresses a bias of some sort – especially some sort of prejudice – it can become an overwhelming part of that character, since he/she is so upfront about relating that bias to the story's reader. We assume that a 1P narrator is self-monitoring while they relate their story. In contrast, if a 3PLi character is biased or prejudiced, it can still be kept largely internal and comes off as less damaging to the character and/or less likely to be an author tract. This is a point that really hits home for me, since "Bell, Book & Candle" deals with a protagonist with some prejudices. If the story were being told by Bellbray in 1P, that prejudice could quickly drive him into unsympathetic territory, I think. In 3PLi, there's a much better opportunity to nuance it. He knows the prejudice is wrong, both intellectually and emotionally, but he's still wrestling with it.
Other Viewpoints
But what about 2nd Person? Well, Brandon basically skips past it entirely. It gets a quick mention (and a horrified look) early in the lecture, and that's about it. And I'm cool with that. I went through my phase of wanting to try novel viewpoints for the sake of being different years ago. There is some interesting stuff you can do in 2P (above and beyond HiE clopfics), but it's such a difficult viewpoint to execute without alienating the reader that I really don't think it's worth the effort of pursuing much.
Nearly every great story you can think to tell in 2P can be told just as well in 1P or 3P. Why? Because in 2P, the central character is outside the writer's control. Unless you can somehow craft a story where the reader's own sense of self plays an integral role, and where that self isn't particularly different among a wide variety of readers, your central character in the story is going to wind up underdeveloped. One way around this is "choose your own adventure", where the text has progressively more information about the reader and can adapt itself accordingly. Another way is to write a story where you can reasonably expect certain large commonalities among your readers. And, oddly enough, I think it's worth pointing out that this is one are where 2P HiE clop probably succeeds. It's pretty reasonable to think that anyone opening a 2P HiE clop story probably wants exactly one thing out of that story, and so writing a 2P central character would be fairly doable. If the reader's motivation in picking up a story translates directly into a character's motivation within that story, 2P becomes a somewhat reasonable choice for viewpoint.
So, um, good for you, 2P HiE clop writers?
Lastly, I'm a firm believer in adding one more viewpoint to this list: 3rd Person Objective. It doesn't see a lot of use, and it's a very limiting voice to write in, but it does allow for one or two things you can't do very easily in the other voices.
What do I mean when I say 3rd Person Objective? 3POb is when a story is told in third person, but instead of giving the reader access to the thoughts of all the characters (Om) or one character at a time (Li), the reader is thrown into the role of an observer.
So, what does that look like? Well, it's pretty easy to wrap your head around, actually. We get 3POb all the time, just not in literature. 3POb is our viewpoint for nearly every film and episode of TV we watch. Which, unsurprisingly, means 3POb is exceptionally well suited to script-writing. And it gets the benefits of some narrative devices that work better on screen than in other viewpoints, most prominently The Reveal.
In 1P, 3PLi and 3POm, it can be hard to keep your viewpoint character's plans and motivations off camera. Thinking about Brandon's work on the Wheel of Time in particular, the second-last book of the series only gives perspective to the series' central protagonist once, and for only a couple pages, right at the end of the book. Now, am I saying the Wheel of Time would have been better written in 3POb? God no. It's a difficult voice to write, and in long form I think it creates far more problems than it solves. But keeping the reader in the dark about your protagonist's plans can be difficult, as the Wheel of Time shows on more than one occasion. In shorter formats, where a writer may want to play primarily toward a big reveal, I think that 3POb shouldn't be overlooked as a potential writing voice.
Which is exactly why I tend to be annoyed by fanfiction websites' "no scriptfic" rules. And why I've been known to break those rules for the express purpose of demonstrating that scriptfics can actually be very entertaining, when you make the peculiarities of 3POb work in your favor.
Previous Lesson: Building Plot
Next Lesson: Description
Perspective is a concept that fascinates me and seeing it mishandled is one of the things that will make me stop reading.
I'm glad Brandon distinguishes between omniscient with hidden narrator and omniscient with body hopping. I actually find hidden-narrator quite cool for creating certain effects. It's good for telling legends and or making things feel like a bedtime story. It works well for comody too. For example:
Silent Bell also uses it to interesting affect in Scion of Chaos, which I read recently. Even though the obvious choice would be limited 3rd, the story is in omniscient third with narrator but still feels focused on Sweetie in a limited 3rd kind of way.
I feel I could probably write an entire blog post on the intersection of 3rd limited and lavender unicorn syndrome because you can the substitute nouns you use in place of the character name or he/she can really tell you much about how the perspective character views the second character. Many writers don't seem to realise this.
For example, purely superficial substitutions ("orange earth pony", "the unicorn") generally suggest unfamiliarity (because the viewpoint character knows little else about the second character). Substitutions relating to job titles ("Princess", "librarian") again suggest a certain focus on the part of the viewpoint character. Substitutions such as "her friend", "her sister" etc. again indicate yet another focus.
First person. There a lot you can do with first person. In a way, it shares traits with 3rd omniscient with hidden narrator because there's a character speaking. In both cases, you can get away with going off on asides. In Contraptionology!, Skywriter gives us this entire massive aside to set up a joke:
You'd never get away with that in limited 3rd.
PS: omniscient third body hopping I do not get, I'm afraid. I have no clue how to write in it.
1022165 I agree, the narratorial style does open up a lot of fun avenues for telling a story. It's not something I've got a lot of experience in writing, but it can be some pretty cool stuff, as your examples show. That'd be a fun exercise to work on for a story.
Hmm. Actually, if I were to try Sunchaser's idea of Self-Insert Done Right, that'd be a particularly nice way to go about it – create a very engaging 1P voice and then do some narration. I have to admit I've been a little tempted by the idea, though I keep wondering how well it can really be done. There's some value, I think, in trying to subvert expectations and go against type. But sometimes, those expectations exist for very good reasons. I've read at least one other person trying to do a "Rainbow Dash writes bad fiction" story, and while their take on it clearly showed some decent writing chops, the (intentionally) bad writing was bad enough that I just couldn't bring myself to keep reading it, however well the author was accomplishing what s/he set out to do. Self-Insert feels similar to me. I'm sure it can be done much better than it's usually done, but I'm still not convinced that it can be done well enough that someone would actually want to read it.
As for LUS, I don't remember what it is I read, but LUS has really been setting me off lately. I agree that there's a lot of good work that can be done in picking your identifiers to reflect which of a character's hats is most important in a given situation (or most relevant to how the perspective character is viewing them), but I've had to wade through a little bit too much undirected identification lately, and every time a non-name identifier doesn't serve to stress a character's narrative or perceptual role, it really rubs me the wrong way.