Navel-gazing

I was reading a fic in a fandom in which I don't do all that much reading, and hit the back button halfway through the first paragraph. Then, intrigued, I went back (i.e. forward) and checked myself. And, yes, the exposition-y nature of the opening kept up throughout.

I thought about it. Those opening sentences signalled to me two things: 1) that the POV was either 3rd person omniscient, 3rd person objective, or a 3rd person limited which didn't deeply penetrate at all, and 2) the author wasn't able to use the POV effectively.

There's no wrong POV in which to write (although one might be a wise or bad choice for a particular story), but 3rd person objective is a very tricky perspective. The actions in the stories have to speak for themselves. It's a particularly poor choice for a fic where the emphasis is romance and sex, in my opinion, because we don't care how much how it happens as to what effect it has on the charcaters.

For the other varieties of 3rd, omniscient and limited, it comes down to voice. I don't care if the narrative voice is that of the POV character or that of an omniscient narrator (wisdomeagle has done some great things with language using an omniscient narrator), but it needs to be distinctive, engaging--there has to be a personality behind it. There's a pretty significant difference between an objective recounting of what happened in the two years leading up to a fic and Faith remembering what happened in those two years. Faith is going to give it her own spin, make us care about it.

So I went through my own recent first lines to see how well I stand up to these standards.

From R3 2.3.16:

“They’re lying to us.”

This isn't really the actual first line, but the first paragraph is lifted straight from Orson Scott Card and italicized. So karabair's recent advice not to use dialogue to start a story doesn't really apply, I suppose. Although it does apply--because right above what I consider to be the first paragraph, there is an epigraph-ish thing which consists only of dialogue lifted from Card's novel. Now part of the intended effect is to recreate the feel of Ender's Game, because that's how he introduces the chapters in that book, with these giant chunks of disembodied conversation.

But karabair defends her choice to start a story with dialogue by claiming its "deliberately disorienting," which strikes me as one hell of a loophole. I like to start scenes and chapters with dialogue in part because of the disorienting effect: it throws you into a scene running, in media res. It's the literary equivalent of a fast cut. Which I suppose isn't a good idea when you're just fading in from black (indeed, the cinematic metphor doesn't even make sense), but as a transition I enjoy it.

And the fact is that in fanfiction there are no fade ins the way there are in original fiction. We are all already familiar with the universe, so a line like

"Jayne, if you don't put that down and get back on this ship right now we'll leave without you, so help me."

isn't really all that disorienting, is it?

From Five Views on Breaking and Entering:

It had been six years since Faith had seen the inside of a police station.

( Read more... )

My point being . . . well, I don't really have a point. I just like, like any writer(?), to talk about my writing. But, as everyone knows but some people still seem to haven't figured to apply, first lines count. So I try to make them as interesting, as do all of you on my flist. (Well, maybe you don't try. But you do it anyway.)