> Well said, Juro. Echo of something Hemingway was
supposed to have
> said about first person narration being diarhea of
the mouth.
>
Then again, maybe he was just jealous about Gatsby...
Hemingway had
his own methods for introducing internal dialogue - through
the
narrators voice or through 2nd person passages and so
on.
<snip>
> Limited third person is
> more dramatic and supposedly cools the author's
temptation to play
> god, or its modern variant, to play therapist. [Is
this so,
> writers? Does choice of limited third act as a
constraint?]
A lot of this would depend on how a writer sets up his/her
definition
of the point of view. Some people use limited third as if it
were
first, with a limited but internalized point of view. Others
are more
distant from the protagonist.
If you have a fairly distant limited third it can function as
a
damper on too much internal dialogue because the point of
view shift can
be quite jarring and because some of the sentence structures
trying
to set it up can get a bit tormented.
I have a friend who writes in a distant first person, and
it's very
effective. He never goes into his protagonist's head. I've
written in
a first person which uses both a character narrator and a
slightly
more distant first person voice when appropriate. I'm working
now in
a shifting limited third with some internalization.
For me, the purpose of internalizing is not to conduct "what
is
meaning of life" conversations with self but to give an
overlay of
attitude.
I think my theory is that you can write badly in any point of
view,
and well in any.
I agree with the comments that suggest the first person PI
has been
flogged to death and risks becoming a parody or pastiche.
Also that
people like Robert Crais have a refreshing new take that's
quite
effective.
I would argue that the health of HB literature would be
served by the
widest possible boundaries for the genre. That way we won't
find
ourselves trapped by the circular logic which says if it
ain't HB PI
it ain't HB and nobody writes good traditional HB PI
anymore.
> HOWEVER I have some sympathy for mystery writers who
want to build
> character from one book to the next in a
series.
I was talking to a cozy writer ( er...a writer of cozy
mysteries)
last week about the work associated with setting up a new
fictional
world with each new novel and she said that was the reason
she did a
series. If you want to write a couple books a year, I can see
her
point.
On the other hand, if you want extraordinary things to happen
to
your, characters they are going to seem sort of sociopathic
if they
aren't changed by it. One way Dellacorte managed this in his
series
Luna, Diva, etc. was that he made his protagonist a
sociopath.
I've always considered this a satire of the obvious
shortcomings of
the worst examples of both HB literature and drama in which
hideous
events seem to have no emotional consequences.
------------------------------
Fred Willard
fwillard@mindspring.com
http://www.mindspring.com/~fwillard
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