Leaderboard

A number of best novels in history has been written in first POV. Stories like “Jane Eyre”, “The Catcher in the Rye”, “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Hound of the Baskervilles” are famous examples. From another point of view I saw a list of the 50 best first POV from the last 20 years. I recognize a number of the authors but none of the books. Highly successful authors, but they are well known for the books when they did not use the first POV. I suspect the first POV books are also good but it is damn hard to get it right. It is not like it is impossible to write good first POV, but unless you are willing to devote the time it took to write the famous books above, the likelihood is great that your story would work better with another POV. I had exactly this experience with my story Carmen Elisa Needs to Die (https://original.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600109195) were I used first POV since I wanted the character talking to the audience. It is really funny at points when the narrator is obviously hiding awkward truths from the reader, but in hindsight the value of those scenes is very shallow to the effort it took to make the other scenes work. I have lost count of how many scenes I tried to write but rejected since they were to hard to write in first POV without the scene getting too long and awkward. I am really proud of the story, but it would not be the first I recommend to a new reader.

Hi, Thundercloud, and all. I read Chapter 1 of Carmen Elisa Needs to Die. It’s now the second of your stories to make my “recommended reading” and “currently reading” lists, for what that’s worth. Both it and your current story With The Mirror Came… will give me the occasional (and hopefully only the occasional) break from my own original current work, Riding the Lincoln Way. I’m currently working on Chapter 36. In the past week or so, I’ve also given at least light “clean-up” and revision to the first fifteen chapters. With no beta reader and only one one review, that wasn’t easy. As a side note, To Kill a Mockingbird was effectively two stories in one. Her other novel, Go Set a Watchman, was actually written first. When she submitted it, her publisher basically responded, “Great story, great characters, but I can’t print it. Do you have something ‘lighter’ and more “redeeming” with these characters? Maybe you could polish up and knit together the childhood flashbacks?” Thus, Lee wrote her Pulitzer Prize winning first novel. I’ve yet to read Go Set a Watchman, but I have every intention of doing so. I truly enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird when I read it for high school English, unlike some of the dreck that was also assigned. Watchman is the “other half” of Mockingbird, though both are complete novels. Most of the controversy surrounding the late publication of the earlier Watchman centered on the fact that Lee had only relented to publication at the end of her life, well beyond her ability to further refine Watchmen, and according to a few observers under pressure that Lee previously resisted while in her full vigor. Watchmen had also been relatively untouched since the late 1950s, when her editor at Lippincott steered her away from it towards the extracted flashbacks that became Mockingbird. While the literary reviews criticized the work more for the less flattering portrait of Atticus Finch at 72, the fact remains that in 2015, Lee was no longer able to edit and revise the work, which she had put aside untouched and desperately needing revision over fifty-five years previously. Had she polished and published in 1970 or so, I’m sure that Watchman would have also won the Pulitzer Prize. Cheers!

Oh by no means am I feeling bad about writing in First POV or anything. I just often dislike the imposition of “rules” about how you’re supposed to write something. And I know many people say that there aren’t any rules, but most of those people are successful because they followed certain rules, while claiming that there aren’t any. I wasn’t so much killing the story. I’d reached the end of it. It was a trilogy that ended in a very natural place for the story. But like most things, the idea of an epilogue kept nagging at me and I had to write it. Then it ended on a cliffhanger and I thought I was done. I started writing an entirely new story, but as this new story was going along, I noticed that where it was going could explain what happened in the cliffhanger ending of the epilogue. So I just naturally did that. When I first started writing, I was very economical in my writing. I only wrote what I absolutely had to so I could get the story across. Screenplays are very economical because you’re focused on telling actors and directors the minimum they need to get things on screen and let the actors decide things. I did the same with my prose writing so I could let the reader fill in the blanks. Now I’m getting much more detailed.

Yeah, I’m not going to consider my 1.1M potter fanfic “economical”. It very much wants to stop and smell all the roses along the path! TBH, I’m rarely at a lack of words when it comes to writing my stories. Anymore, I consider LOTR to be “light”.

It sucked...but served the same purpose as your “Buffy’s POV” heading. It’s simply a rule of thumb I’ve picked up on when to do a double-take, and try to hone in on issues; hence, my sharing of something I tried early on and subsequently abandoned. I’m a late bloomer in terms of getting hit by the writing bug. As mentioned, I’m learning while doing, because I’ve got the tales I want to express. Writing’s an art, so I typically consider rules as guidance, to be followed...most of the time. Though I do want to know when I’m deliberately breaking them.

Hi, Deadman and all. No problem. We all started writing at some point or other. And, we’re all still learning to write, too; at least on our better days. Steven King is still learning to write, even having done his self-imposed “10,000 words creatively written about something” mental bench press every day since the 1970s. And I too have my faults. Beyond pulling the occasional Dreiser and writing 5,000 words when 1,000 will work nicely, I sometimes have trouble making my characters speak in their own voices rather than mine, or at least my relative lack of self-confidence has me worry about that. I’m also working on my mechanics, particularly mixing character dialog with action. There is nothing wrong with “killing” a story if you kill it artfully. Just remember to leave yourself an “out,” in case you discover that you’re a later day Arthur Conan Doyle, and you are obliged to start the f???er up again. A “good” author can write both prose and plays. However, like I described in previous posts, prose and plays have different requirements. You can’t write a play “outside of dialog” in anything other than present tense, and other prose only works in past tense. If you start out with prose, you will struggle at least for a moment writing plays of any kind, because the actions of any play are always present tense. Likewise, if you cut your creative writing teeth writing plays, you will struggle with straight prose, since you’re used to describing right f’ing now; and in straight prose, they always had enough time to write a book about what happened. So, present tense in straight prose is right out. Prose will always have a narrator, whether it’s the first person, second (rare as hell, but some masochists do write in it,) or third. Since prose lacks either the moving picture, actor’s visible actions, or the “sound effects people” to portray the non-speaking occurrences, there is always a narrator. Never be ashamed of writing in first person POV. It’s both easier and harder to write well than third person. But if you write first person well, you can truly create something great. Perhaps, you might even write something greater than yourself or the genre in which you write. A comic book and science fiction writer wrote a short story in 1959 entirely in first person perspective, in the then still barely respectable genre of science fiction. However, that author worked with Stan Lee, and proved to be at least his equal, in at least one story. Whether the original short story, or the later full novel, Daniel Keys’ Flowers for Algernon is some of the most powerful prose written in the English Language. Don’t watch the film. I’ve seen better films on a cream-of-mushroom soup, which is truly sad. Read the book! You will either thank or curse me later. However, if you have any capacity for empathy at all, you will have been moved. Cheers!

Yeah see, my First POV stories are never done in narrator format. It’s usually the person’s reaction in the moment of whatever’s happening. My Third POV to First POV was actually the other way around from what you suggestion. I was writing about two people sitting at a bar where one of them is drunk but I didn’t want the audience to know who the character was. So I wrote it in Third POV. But it was intended as an epilogue to a story that was written in First POV. So the main action of the epilogue was happening in Third POV where the two characters were talking about why one of them is drunk. But they would recount the story of what happened so I just copy and pasted the sections of the story I wanted to tell as flashbacks, without rewriting it into Third POV. The flashbacks were in First POV. I did it mainly because I was mostly done with the story at the time and wanted to sorta wrap it up. But that just made me want to write a longer story.

Hi, Desiderius Price and all. Exactly. I have three WIPs on this site; all of them are in first person POV. Two of them won’t change the “first person.” The third has done so sparingly; once with the “battle of quotation marks,” and the rest with a full in-plot explanation of why the other POVs momentarily come in, and also being offset by reverse-italics. That one, while voiced mostly in near-present first person POV is actually being written by the protagonist at a far greater time distance than implied by the voicing. The narrators of all three stories are “first person and reliable,” as are the two “change-to” POV characters. Lincoln Way, the story with the POV changes, has the “main narrator” as one of the protagonists of the story. At several points, he quotes from a younger brother’s unpublished memoirs, and at two or three points the POV voice change happens for narrative clarity, since any reactions given to this character’s tale happen after he finishes speaking. The other “original” is first person reliable peripheral, since while the narrator is important, he is not the titular character, and the narrator concentrates more on telling the titular character’s story, even while his own is intertwined with it. Your exercise would restrict any and all changes of the first person. However, if your POV is alternating frequently and continuously, you just might want to change to a different perspective. Deadman, having a first person narrator “flashback” in a third person voice wouldn’t work unless your first person narrator is not only unreliable but borderline insane or at the very least has enough ego for a dozen “normal” people, such as Douglas MacArthur. The reverse of that, however, could work easily. “In hopes of solving the mystery before their friends were killed; Shaggy and Fred picked up Velma’s diary from three years ago, and began to read. ‘I told Fred...’” “A first person to first person flashback” is no more and no less than the first person narrator telling you something immediately relevant that happened at some defined period prior to story-current time, much the same way that you or I in real life would tell a time-appropriate anecdote from our own pasts, or would in moments (of real time) remember the entirety of an incident from some time in the past that causes us to take a “current-time” action in hopes of repeating success or avoiding difficulties. If your first person narrator only changes at the beginnings of chapters, you can always follow the example of George RR Martin, whose third person imperfect narrator routinely changed between chapters. In Martin’s case, he had to change narrators, since his story covered too great an area, and since he also had “plot anti-armor,” and killed off lead characters whenever the mood struck him. “Chapter 24, The Van (Velma); Chapter 25, The Van (Fred); and Chapter 26, I’m Dry Coming and I Need to Feed Scooby (Shaggy)” can provide an alternative to putting a POV Flag in the text itself.

Confusion’s typically my guide. If I’m having to state who “I” means, or step out of narration to explain, then that’s a hint something’s wrong. When I was using first POV, I’d write something like “I (Harry)” or “I (Ron)” which hints to the problem. Whereas, I’m now third (imperfect/limited) POV as a general rule, where it’s quick to tell who has focus in a scene. Take this exercise, open the book/story to a random page/line… know who “I” is?

Hi, Deadman and all. Your POV change “works,” but poorly. You can change the “first person POV” in just about any way except for that without looking like a “total beginner.” Changing the first person POV in your first person POV, like inserting a “flashback,” should never use the actual words [or acronyms for you pedants] “POV” or “flashback.” ““I can’t believe she did that!” I thought to myself as Buffy put two fingers up my womanhood without warning while everyone in history class watched. “She later admitted to Oz, “I didn’t know what I was thinking Even while I was so angry with Faith then, I had run completely out of words to express my love for her. So I went straight to fingers. Her femininity was gushing even before my cuticles made it in...”” The above will work much better than flagging a POV change in the middle of a chapter using POV Flags, with just a little more polishing. Likewise, the one cue you don’t use when switching to a flashback is the word “flashback,” unless the protagonist is remembering a flashback they had some time previous to the “current time” of the main narrative. “Buffy thought back to six years ago. She was only twelve then, lost her anal virginity doggy-style to Oz’s ‘eleven,’ and felt like number ten...” or “Oz thought back to that time little more than six years ago, and his first orgasm-induced flashback he had while “making Buffy into a woman...”” both work much better in the flow of the narrative than “Flashback!! Buffy was bent over the doghouse...” Coming up with a great story idea is the first thing you need to do, and without that all the mechanics in the world are meaningless. So far, you’ve done that. Now, with the good story in your mind and at your fingertips is where the mechanics start to mean something. Thanks.

Thank you for the encouraging review. If you liked the beginning I have good hope that you will that later part of the story to be good. I have learnt a couple of new things during the years I have been working on the story. It is not finished yet, but the endgame is getting close enough that I have started to map out how the story ends. I hope you will get the chance to visit Stockholm, it is quite a lovely place. Especially if you stay clear of the more scary places where the lead characters go urban exploring.

I’ve never seen anything like “I (Harry)” or “I (Ron)” done. I usually just put forward at the top of each chapter who’s POV it is. Although in later stories, I did entire stories from basically one POV of one character. I stepped out of that character’s POV maybe once to move the story forward. Then later on I shifted between chapters and POVs. Each chapter had a different POV but it was always in the same order. The main character was Dawn, the second character was Faith, the third was Buffy. So the first chapter was from Dawn’s POV, the second chapter was from Faith’s, third from Buffy’s, then fourth chapter from Dawn's again, repeating the cycle. More recently, like in Scooby Gang Time, I have switched back and forth between First POV and Third POV. For instance, the first three one shots were written when I wasn’t as comfortable with Third POV, so they’re from the perspective of the main characters. The fourth one shot was written more recently and featured two main characters. So I wrote it from Third POV so I could focus on each character when the story called for it. Like during their competition of who can suck the most dick, I needed to write about Buffy a couple cocks, then to Faith sucking a few, going back and forth. The fifth one shot went back to First POV because it featured Tara exclusively.

So I don’t do things the way you’re putting it forward. When it comes to First POV, I focus on one person at a time. I declare upfront, although occasionally I’ve done it differently, who the character is. In my example that you’re putting forward: I generally don’t do flashbacks. I did one and it didn’t go right because I wrote it in Third POV but used story that’s written in First POV as part of the flashbacks. As an example of how I would handle a dialogue scene. That’s generally how it would go. I would only really use the format you’re putting forward in a Third POV scenario, which I have.

Thank you so much! I visited the Cave of the Winds in Colorado Springs in early October, and we did the Lantern Tour. At one point during the tour, we all extinguished our lanterns and spent a few minutes in absolute cave dark. I have to admit, it was both eerie and wonderful, but really, the mind does play some fascinating tricks when you can’t see anything at all. Then I bought a novella, entitled “Pulling the Wings Off Angels” by K.J. Parker. I refused to read it until after I wrote my story, but the title alone was enough to send my thoughts back to the days when I argued theology with Jesuits for shiggles, including some heated (and boozy) discussions about the nature of angels. And there we are. My mind is a terrible place sometimes. Oh, and I highly recommend the novella, which I finally read.