Hmm.

[katallison]

OK, I'm still trying to write a Vividcon con report, with marked lack of success, but in the meantime -- I'm very curious about something I've come across a couple of times lately in LJ comments, and that is the issue of the name you use to refer to a character when you're writing a close-3rd-person-POV story about that character.

Ahem. Let me see if I can be clearer. Say I'm writing a story in 3rd person about Fraser, where he's the POV character. I always refer to him as "Fraser" because that's, y'know, what I call the guy. But I've seen a couple of people lately saying that in such situations the name used should be the one that the character himself uses when he thinks about himself, so the question is does he think of himself as Fraser, or Ben, or Benton, or whatever?

See, in my head this is kind of, sort of, related to the issue flambeau was talking about a while ago (here, to be specific), where you can't sneak in descriptive stuff by having the POV character musing about his own tautly muscled abs or emerald eyes or whatever, or on the other hand providing detailed descriptions of scenes he regularly moves through and is familiar with to the point of obliviousness. You have to maintain the authenticity/integrity of the character's own awareness. And one could argue, I guess, that using the name the character would use about himself inwardly is part of that authenticity-maintenance, except -- I dunno, I just have never thought of it that way. It feels strange to me, and I'd love to hear others' views.

Comments

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

I think there are two forces at play here, and for good fanfiction, I think you need the conflict between the two forces, rather than for one of them to win.

Force One: The POV character should refer to themselves by the name which they think of themselves. So for example, if you are writing a story in which Methos is the POV character, if you wish to write him referring to himself as "Adam Pierson" (or any other temporary name) you have to be conscious that you are writing him as someone who steeps himself so deeply in his current character that he does not think of himself as anyone but his current character.

Force Two: The wish to use the name by which the character is commonly known to fans, by which they will expect to see the character named. If you avoid using this name, I think you then have to work twice as hard to make sure that the character is visibly, audibly, at all times, in character* - that even without the known name in use, a casual fan reader would still know who the character was.

To a certain extent (this is the only thing that explains the success of bad fanfic, IMO) people read fanfic for the names. Maybe Fraser does think of himself as "Ben", but if you write a Fraser POV story where "Fraser" is only used when someone in the story is speaking to Ben or referring to Ben... well, the POV character is going to have to be very notably Fraserish, and even then, some readers are going to complain.

Which is why I think the interplay works. Figuring out why a character will switch from one name to the other - how David Newman can be peaceably reshelving books in a university library somewhere, when he feels the buzz and Methos makes a quick dash for the nearest group of students and spends the next two hours sitting in a crowded student canteen pretending to read a book and surreptitiously trying to spot the immortal who was in the library.

*and really, we should strive for this anyway.

[jacquez.livejournal.com]

how David Newman can be peaceably reshelving books in a university library somewhere, when he feels the buzz and Methos makes a quick dash for the nearest group of students

Words cannot express how much I hate it when authors do this. It feels wrong - it's a kind of epithetism masquerading as exposition, and it's something that nearly always makes me bail out of a story as soon as I encounter it.

I'm not saying that the tension shouldn't exist, but I think this particular use of the tension is abhorrent.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Much though I hate to disagree with you, I think there is no technique that would automatically make me bail out of a story the instant a writer used it: only whether or not a writer used a technique well or badly.

[jacquez.livejournal.com]

Well, it's not like I'm going to suddenly declare you anathema just because you disagree. :)

My issue with this one is that it is almost always used badly, and is almost always the sign of a poor writer. Not always, but close enough that it's a bail-out sign for me. I don't know if you're on Prospect-L at all, but I sometimes do something called "Bail-Out Theater" on there, where I go through the last 7 days of archived stories and read them until I have to bail out. The reasons for bail-out are many and varied, but many of the triggers are certain techniques - because good writers don't usually use those techniques.

Not that good writers can't, or absolutely don't, but they *usually* don't, so the technique becomes (to me) a marker of an author whose work I will almost certainly not enjoy.

[katallison.livejournal.com]

You know, I keep thinking I should join Prospect, not because I have any particular interest in Sentinel, but just 'cause cool stuff seems to go on there at times.

[jacquez.livejournal.com]

Occasionally, yeah. Sometimes it's nothing but stupidity day-in and day-out, though.

While searching for back issues of Bail-Out Theater, though, I found an interesting essay by <lj user="cesperanza" on queerness, and a bunch of other interesting discussions, which I will not reproduce here. It's kind of a crapshoot, though.