Alright, so I'm two chapters in, one written from the perspective of my male protagonist, one from the perspective of my female protagonist, both in the first person.
And now I've realized that in order to further the plot and set up things that are supposed to happen down the line, I need to write from the perspective of semi-minor character who happens to be a 500 year old android stranded on a low technology planet.
So, what are people's opinions on this?
Should/can I write from the first person perspective without it being horribly clunky and odd sounding? He's not a very "human" android, I mean he's good at pretending to be human, but he certainly doesn't think like one on the inside, and I don't know how well I could pull of first person from his perspective.
If I switch to the third person for this part, would that be way too jarring? I mean I'm already writing in the first person from 2 different viewpoints... adding third person just seems even more chucked together...
Thoughts? Opinions? Advice?
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30,018 / 50,000
Nov 8, 2009 - 02 41
Go for it. A good bit of first person from a non-human perspective is a wonderful thing, done right.
45,200 / 50,000
Nov 8, 2009 - 02 44
I have a few thoughts. :)
1. Writing from a third person's perspective doesn't necessarily have to sound chucked-together after writing from two first person viewpoints already. Try something out and see if it flows. If it feels like it works, go for it :)
2. Personally, I don't think it would be too problematic to write in regular English (rather than 'robot-like' English) from an android's point of view, especially for an android that is good at acting human. We human beings don't think in linguistic languages the majority of the time. Quite often, we will think with our senses (including memory of sensual experiences); but what's most common is for us to do our processing unconsciously. So, even though one may write from a first person's perspective of a human, what we write would more likely represent how that human would tell a story, and not so much how they would actually think (or how they thought) during their experiences. If the android can act human, they could tell a story as well. It doesn't necessarily have to reflect how they actually experience their world.
3. Writing from an android's point of view is probably a bit taboo because we tend to think of the consciousness of the character you're writing from as a major reference point for how you write. There are lots of arguments to say that androids could never be "conscious", and thus writing from an android's point of view would be problematic. Well, I'd disagree for two main reasons. Firstly because we tend to over-value consciousness (see my point 2 about unconscious processing, which does so much work for us and makes us who we are in more ways than our conscious does). Secondly, just because something doesn't have a human conscious doesn't mean they can't experience the world in their own way. Most androids would have internal computations going on all the time, just like us. Perhaps your android has a bunch of internal processing that is hidden away from his decision-making/time-experiencing/perception-receiving module (its own version of consciousness). Thus, it is conscious in its own way, although it would not "think" in English. But I think that's okay. You can write in English from the perspective of a non-English speaker, and I'm sure people would accept that. Writing in English from the perspective of an android that speaks in its own language (such as binary) may have some issues, but for the most part, and for the sake of story-telling, I don't think there's any major issues with it.
Essentially what I think it comes down to is - does it sound ok to you? If you're not sure, write a bit, and:
a) see if it's easy enough to write, and not completely forced (that's probably a bad sign); and
b) read it out loud, and pretend you're someone else, listening in. Does it make sense? Does it convey the message you want it to convey? If not, play around with it a bit, and see if you can modify it until you're happy with how it sounds.
Most importantly - have fun! This stuff is really interesting and reasonably flexible. No human knows what it's really like to experience the world as a robot (or as a completely different human being, for that matter). So I'd say you can pretty much go any way you like, as long as the story still feels good. :)
25,845 / 50,000
Nov 8, 2009 - 21 56
Thanks for the feedback, I've started into the chapter a bit now and it's *sort of* working, but feedback definetly helps.
This point:
3. Writing from an android's point of view is probably a bit taboo because we tend to think of the consciousness of the character you're writing from as a major reference point for how you write. There are lots of arguments to say that androids could never be "conscious", and thus writing from an android's point of view would be problematic. Well, I'd disagree for two main reasons. Firstly because we tend to over-value consciousness (see my point 2 about unconscious processing, which does so much work for us and makes us who we are in more ways than our conscious does). Secondly, just because something doesn't have a human conscious doesn't mean they can't experience the world in their own way. Most androids would have internal computations going on all the time, just like us. Perhaps your android has a bunch of internal processing that is hidden away from his decision-making/time-experiencing/perception-receiving module (its own version of consciousness). Thus, it is conscious in its own way, although it would not "think" in English. But I think that's okay. You can write in English from the perspective of a non-English speaker, and I'm sure people would accept that. Writing in English from the perspective of an android that speaks in its own language (such as binary) may have some issues, but for the most part, and for the sake of story-telling, I don't think there's any major issues with it.
is what I'm really grappling with. He/it is not really conscious in the sense that we are, he doesn't really have a sense of self, and it's hard to leave that out. He doesn't feel, he doesnt' really have opinions that are not related to his programming... It's like blank personality, but not. He has his reasons for doing things, but his reasons are basically 'I was programmed to do this, and follow these directives."
Maybe I will write his directives in there somehow, I'm not sure...
51,905 / 50,000
Nov 8, 2009 - 22 22
If I switch to the third person for this part, would that be way too jarring? I mean I'm already writing in the first person from 2 different viewpoints... adding third person just seems even more chucked together...
Thoughts? Opinions? Advice?
If your other two first-person characters are human (which I'm assuming since you said male/female), then using third-person for a nonhuman character could be a useful narrative device to differentiate him.
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72,474 / 50,000
Nov 9, 2009 - 08 10
From experience in writing emotionless or emotionally constipated characters, it gets pretty boring. A view point character with little emotion is just dull to write. I suggest going for another perspective, just to keep yourself interested in writing the story, but if you're managing fine then go ahead with the view point you already chose. It will prove interesting, I'm sure.
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25,845 / 50,000
Nov 11, 2009 - 22 36
I definitely agree that writing someone with no emotions would get old pretty quick. Fortunately the segments where my android is the PoV character are short, few, and far between... I just need to have him set some plots in motion that my other PoV characters weren't there to witness and describe, but which are rather important...
I actually started to get the hang of writing it... It's almost semi-third-person... the android refers to "himself" as "this body" or "the sensor array" or "the voice synthesizer" depending on what he's doing, and I spent a lot of time in dialogue...
So thanks for your thoughts everyone, it really was helpful :)