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

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

Hey, coming across this from a long way into the future. Well, not coming across so much as pearl_o and I were talking about the issue and she was all, "Someone had a cool post about this a while back," and Lo, she soon found it.

Personally, I've used "Benton" the one time so far that I've written in third-person Fraser-pov. I was writing a Benton. I think it depends partly on how you view how he views himself. If I think that he thinks of himself as 'Benton', I'll write a different story than one where he thinks of himself as 'Ben' and a vastly different one where he thinks of himself as 'Fraser'. But as long as the name choice is used as part of the characterization, I'd be fine with any of them.

The name that you choose to write with says something about how the character views himself in the story -- because if it is in their point of view, then it's their perspective, whether first, second, or third.

Many of the people from his past call him 'Benton'. Victoria called him 'Ben', as did Quinn in Easy Money and his dad when emotional (the rest of the time, he used 'Benton' -- and I love the way they tend to say it, very weighted on the 'Ben' part. Bennn'tin.). But he introduces himself as 'Benton Fraser' to Quinn in the Easy Money flashback. He always introduces himself by his full name, and he never asks anyone to call him 'Ben' that I can recall (in Pizza and Promises, he does ask the criminal to call him 'Fraser' but he was working undercover and probably wanted a little distance in any case).