McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

1st vs 3rd

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Quantus:

--- Quote from: the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh on July 02, 2012, 04:47:03 AM ---I think part of my issue here is that I am having great difficulty coming up with a reason why, in a principally first-person story, such a piece of information could exist.  Would anyone care to offer me an example ?

--- End quote ---
It would be a rare occurrence to be sure, and very situational.  I can think of examples in certain contexts, but for most of them I can think of some other ways to inform the reader after the fact if necessary.  Like if you have an MC that really needs to go unconscious, and thus events must happen in the interim; but in that case it would make sense for another character to catch him up after the fact.  The only really binding situation I can think of is when you are specifically wanting the Reader to see things coming before the MC does.  But clever foreshadowing should be able to pull that off, without the need for a perspective shift.

Winter_Knight:

--- Quote from: Quantus on July 03, 2012, 01:11:22 PM ---It would be a rare occurrence to be sure, and very situational.  I can think of examples in certain contexts, but for most of them I can think of some other ways to inform the reader after the fact if necessary.  Like if you have an MC that really needs to go unconscious, and thus events must happen in the interim; but in that case it would make sense for another character to catch him up after the fact.  The only really binding situation I can think of is when you are specifically wanting the Reader to see things coming before the MC does.  But clever foreshadowing should be able to pull that off, without the need for a perspective shift.

--- End quote ---

True. In my case, however, I wanted a supernatural event to take place on the MC's television just after he left the house. It was meant to occur without anyone being present. So I switched to TP for that scene alone, if I recall correctly.

OZ:
Although this is something that may rarely done well that doesn't mean that it can't be done or that it is always bad. It just means that it is difficult and that most people can't pull it off. It also may mean that some writers have tried it unsuccessfully. I wouldn't do it unless you have to but if you feel it's essential to the story then give it your best shot. In a first person POV there are always techniques to giving the reader whatever information you want them to have but they may not always let you give it to them at the most dramatic moment. I would much rather read a well handled shift of view point than the very common technique used by writers of first person POV that I call driving the plot by stupidity. In this the author , inorder to give the reader the information, allows the MC to see it but to always be too stupid to know what it means even though it's obvious to the reader.

Of course the usual way to handle this is, as mentioned before, to write the story in close 3rd person perspective so that the shifts are less jarring but there are sometimes that this just may not work.

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:

--- Quote from: OZ on July 03, 2012, 06:36:00 PM ---I would much rather read a well handled shift of view point than the very common technique used by writers of first person POV that I call driving the plot by stupidity. In this the author , inorder to give the reader the information, allows the MC to see it but to always be too stupid to know what it means even though it's obvious to the reader.

--- End quote ---

Obvious to the reader is not really predictable across readers, though.  Some people will pick things up from subtle implications whereas others will get a wrong implication and go haring off on all manner of tangents unless stuff is spelled out in whatever works for them as "clearly".  Plus, you know, if the central puzzle of your mystery depends on some bit of genetics, I may well find it unduly obvious to me as a professional in that field (or else subtly wrong in ways that will irk me a lot) while still being unduly cryptic to people who aren't specialists, and the same would seem to apply to any other area of specialised knowledge.

Idiot plotting is a bad idea, but if you as author are writing something where protagonists and antagonists are trying to outsmart each other at some levels, you're likely going to have to spend a fair bit of time on scenes where a viewpoint character has to not immediately figure out something that's obvious to you, and that's a difficult thing to get right.  One of my favourite examples of that actually working well is how long it takes Harry to figure out about GPS co-ordinates in DB; it's the kind of thing where it makes sense to me as a reader that that's what that set of numbers are, but with Harry set up from the beginning as having the effect he does on technology, and as ensuingly not being closely familiar with some forms of technology, it's perfectly plausible that he doesn't get it.

OZ:
I probably should have explained better. I am not saying that the MC should know everything that the reader knows. There are sometimes that it works very well to let the MC see something that he/she does not understand but that the reader grasps instantly. Other times, as you mentioned, you as a reader may have specialized knowledge that the MC lacks that allows you to figure out what's going on even while it is perfectly reasonable that the MC does not. I am talking about the character not knowing things that they should. An example of this would be a murder mystery. If the main character is a waiter at a restaurant in Chicago who is on vacation to the Grand Canyon and finds a dead body, I would expect him  to overlook a few things. If the main character is an experienced, brilliant homicide detective working a serial murder case and the same bystander is at three of the murder scenes with blood on his shoes, I expect her to notice,and do something about it. especially since in the first person POV she had to notice or we the reader wouldn't know about it. I am using a bit of hyperbole to make my point but I have read a surprising amount of first person POV (or even close 3rd) that is about that bad.

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