Day 16: Preferred POV in a story

[bluflamingo]

pacificngal asked me about my preferred POV in a story, reading or writing, and I foolishly didn't ask her if she meant first/third person, or characters, so I'll just babble a bit and hope I hit what she was looking for (or, if I don't, that she'll poke me!)

I definitely prefer writing in third person - it's been a looong time since I wrote first person, even in original fic - and usually in limited third person from just one character in the story. In fanfic reading, first person isn't my thing at all, I think because it's much more in that person's head and somehow it never quite gets close enough to how I hear that person to work for me. Original fic is different, though anything longer than a few thousand words I prefer third person - and definitely for sex scenes.

My preference by character pov... in Stargate, John Sheppard, Cadman, Lorne, Keller, in Numb3rs, Colby Granger, in H5-0, McGarrett or Kono, in Firefly Inara or Zoe, in Avengers, Clint Barton... I don't know what conclusions, if any, you can draw from that list, but there we have it.

Do other people decide who's pov the story will be from in advance, or just see what happens? The story I'm writing now, and the one I just submitted, the prompter requested a specific pov, which was unusual for me, especially since neither one is someone I write all that often, but generally, I'm not much of a planner when it comes to writing, I just get an idea for a first line and go from there. Doesn't always work, but pretty often for me, and also skips conveniently over 'who's head am I writing in?' so I don't think I have anything wildly exciting to say about how I decide, unless it's because I know it's a story about that person, like my Avengers reverse bang, or a lot of my Cam/John stories, which tend to be as much about John as the pairing.

So there we have it. Now you all talk about point of view characters :)

Comments

[domarzione]

With my MCU stuff, I've had to make a conscious choice beforehand because who it is decides what they see and what they know and what sort of insight they can provide. There are tradeoffs -- I've chosen a not-obvious POV character because while he isn't as personally vested in the plot as others are, he's my best choice to get insight into those more-vested characters and still have a clear-enough head to narrate the story. And I've also had to 'train up' being able to write characters so that I can use them for POV because the story works best through them.

[sid]

When I first became aware as a newbie writer about POV issues/choices, one thing that really shocked me was when I discovered just how many of the books on my shelf were written in first person! A lot of those books were detective novels, and that POV works pretty damn well for that genre. Here I was, thinking that other fanfic writers were doing something weird when they chose first person, but I'd never even noticed in all these books I'd read. The difference was that someone had pointed POV out to me, and now I was aware of it.

Most of my Jack/Daniel or team fanfic is Jack's POV. I find his voice comes the most easily. Maybe I have more fun inside his head! I like doing Cam's POV, too. Whatever happened to the Cam!trope ficathon? I really enjoyed writing for that. I got to make Cam pregnant and everything! :-D (ETA: I'd completely forgotten you were the mod over there. I was just reminiscing, not hinting!)