Anyone who's survived high school English has received the lectures on the use of passive voice and first-person perspective.
Anyone who's done any writing after high school knows that both those standpoints are crap.
In all fairness, it's more accurate to say that both arguments are simply oversimplified. Passive voice in the wrong scenario can take all the impact out of the case you're making. First-person perspective in the wrong hands turns your short story into little more than an extended blog post. It's easy to see where they're coming from.
The lesson they should be teaching is that voice and perspective help shape the whole tone of your work, and ignorance of either can lead to stiffness in the best of cases. Unfortunately, most high school teachers barely have time to cover half a sonnet before students lose interest, so I suppose it's an understandable oversight.
Voice first, since it's the easiest to misuse: passive voice, for those fuzzy on the details, is not just a liberal use of the words "There" and "It" at the start of a sentence. Don't feel bad, even Strunk & White bombed identifying passive voice three times out of four.
Passive voice is a flipping of the traditional sentence, usually with a helping verb involved. It places the recipient ahead of the action being done to him, her or it, which can change the stress of the phrase. "I was cheated by my bookie" places the emphasis on the "I," while "My bookie cheated me," the active voice, focuses your attention on the bookie.
Understanding what that inversion does will help you spice up your style and bring the readers' attention where you want it. "I was cheated" makes the narrator sound any of: self-centered, pitiable, gullible or paranoid, depending on the situation. "My bookie cheated me" has more chance of making the reader angry at or suspicious of the bookie, and takes the focus off the narrator and onto the bookie and the action performed.
You can use the passive voice to keep attention on a central character while they're being affected by several outside sources, giving the impression that they are in the middle of a storm of actions either good or bad. Avoiding passive voice entirely limits that focus control and can force you to wrap some very awkward clauses around an active-voice sentence just to keep the reader's mind on the character at the heart of it.
Perspective provides a similar function in both directions. The typical third-person limited puts focus on your main character without making them seem accidentally arrogant (or yourself accidentally a huge Film Noir fan) by overusing the first-person perspective. That said, once you've gone third-person, it's bloody hard to go back.
Third-person is the most mobile and flexible perspective, which is why it's legitimately the most popular, and why first- and second-person novels will often stand out boldly if they can hold the reader's attention and beat down their knee-jerk reaction to the more intimate attention.
To keep your third-person viewpoint fixed purely on your main character makes it seriously "limited." While you can use third-person perspective to write a first-person novel with a bunch of he/she pronouns instead, there's a great deal of power unique to the third-person angle that should not be overlooked.
Consider the poor analogy of a camera crew. The action on which everyone is focused tends to go through one particular lens for much of the program. You can start with the high angle shot that zeroes in on the more localized focus of your story, but the motion doesn't stop there. Switching between lenses provides not only a fresh angle on the subject, but a noticeable shift that can generate all manner of emotion, even in a written work.
In a typical 3PL gambit, when your protagonist ends the night of her awkward date with a clumsy kiss before the door to his apartment shuts, leaving her out in the cold, she sulks off downtrodden, assured she has ruined her chances with the love of her life for good.
With a more flexible third-person take on the same scene, you can let your protagonist slink away, and then flip to the far side of the door where her date is slowly smiling to himself, unable to think anything further than "...she kissed me."
Separate takes on the same combat or political equation can lend an entirely too-true shape to an otherwise flat us-versus-them scenario, humanizing both sides so that the reader is forced to consider the implications. Alternatively, you can show what a rat bastard the bad guy really is as he works his way through the countryside, delighting in his reign of havoc as he watches the villages burn with a sadistic grin.
Don't feel like your narration is velcro'd to the back of the hero's head. Take your perspective for walkies from time to time, it could use the exercise.
First- and second-person get a little more dangerous, but that doesn't mean they're out of the question. Just understand what they do to your reader's sense of comfort.
Third-person is passive and voyeuristic, arguably a kindred companion to the readers themselves. It rests alongside them, unaware of their presence and dictates to the room at large the tales of Sir Whatsit of Woebegone.
First- and second-person address the reader directly. First-person may be talking about herself, but she's talking to you, and second-person cuts out the middle man. Both have the potential for evoking strong emotion, which in turn means that both have the potential to scare off or annoy your reader. Use with caution.
First-person is best kept to the sort of diary-style monologues people actually find titillating: the sin-rich detective who doesn't yet know she's searching for redemption, the well-meaning scientist who is dictating his final moments while the product of his inventions claws angrily at the door to the lab, the unexpectedly-personified narrator (see: housecat), and so forth.
This is, by no means, a comprehensive list, but consider the sort of stories where the captivation and necessary focus of first-person perspective lends something extra to the work that helps draw the reader in. If it sounds more like the 40-something bachelor with a comb-over reliving his glory days, chances are you're doing it wrong.
Second-person is by far the most dangerous, as even casual statements can be taken as accusatory depending on your reader. Any therapist will tell you the danger in using "you" over "I," so be cautious of the type of box you may be seen as standing on.
Second-person tends to be best kept to more friendly narratives. The tales of a local hero from the perspective of a man sitting in a rocking chair on your grandmother's porch is just one example. Another could be a series of letters from a lover (or would-be lover) kept distant by duty, describing their adventures with the pang of longing and familiarity.
As with anything, have a reason for doing it (something other than "but I like these pronouns...") and be aware of the consequences to your reader. Those effects can be what makes your story more than just words on a page. And never listen to anyone who tells you there's no place for the second-person take in real literature.
Clearly, they need some perspective.
No comments:
Post a Comment