John Hattaway

I discovered, the other day, that a lot of the hard case crime books that I’ve read, or come across, have all been written in the first person. With that in mind, as I went around randomly picking up suspense novels some of the modern versions of the pulps (hard case crime) novels are also told in the first person. Moreover, the Rachel Morgan books are also told, exclusively, in the first person. Harry Potter, though not first person, is told exclusively from the POV (point of view) of Harry Potter and is third person limited (e.g. you only see what Harry sees and can only know what Harry knows).

This is not new to me. However, I am writing something for my Honors 200 Writing class that is not what everyone else is writing, and, more, I was trying to be artistic or creative and tell the story in third person limited from five different perspectives. It worked and wasn’t working all at the same time. As a result of a one-on-one meeting with Bennion I decided it was time to rethink my approach to the story.

He said, at one point, “If you are writing to be artistic, don’t.” Well, maybe he didn’t say it exactly that way, but the meaning is pretty close. Bennion wanted me to know that the artistic elements, the elements that were being written for the sake of writing and not for the story or the plot were not necessary and, in the end, detracted from the overall piece. Truth told, at one point I thought about writing the entire story from third person omniscient but felt that it was a bad idea and didn’t pursue it.

The reason why I am writing about this, bringing it up, is because I’ve read in more than one book on creative writing and fiction that you should never fall into the trap of writing from first person limited. It’s improper to write that way. Go figure.

With that said, I was at a Society for Technical Communication meeting (www.stc.org where the presenter, a professor here at BYU, was discussing the differences between Theory (with a capital “T”) and theory (with a lower case “t”). In truth, what he was doing was talking about the differences between theory and practice, but since this is BYU and an academic environment, you can’t talk about the plain and simple and have to confuse things by designating that theory can be academic and practical.

Regardless, his presentation was on how people want you to be able to do something. The best case scenario. And how you actually go about doing it. In this case, technical communication.

However, I walked away thinking more along the lines of database design, and specifically relational database design in the technological environment. Relational databases, just so you know, are the quintessential design for a database. They are dynamic, they are portable, they can talk to other databases, there’s a list of something like 13 areas where the database has to match before it can be a true relational database.

I don’t really remember them all and haven’t dealt with the subject or theory in quite a number of years. You have to think that I am in my thirties, the last time I dealt with this on a real level I was traditional college age, traditional college age is between 18 and 23, I was on the top end of that scale, and so, end result is that it’s been like ten years since I’ve been active working on databases. I don’t remember a lot. What I do remember is that company’s like Oracle Corp. come close to the theoretical relational database design, but they can’t match all of the necessary attributes. Between the theory and the actual application of the theory there is a stop-gap. You can’t achieve one or the other. In essence, Oracle becomes a little “t” rather than the big “T”.

Writing is a lot like that. People want to give all sorts of rules. One author will say (and I agree with this, just so you know) that when writing dialogue people always “say” or “said” things, they don’t do anything else. You can add descriptive elements after, Jane said; but you shouldn’t write, Jane moaned in ecstasy. One man’s theory and then practice. I am sure everyone can find examples where, Jane said, doesn’t work or wouldn’t apply.

Conversely, I have a friend (maybe that is past tense now…) who said he hated reading books where the author lacked the creative drive to write more than just “said” behind a speakers name. He didn’t like it. It didn’t work for him. Theory, theory; theory, practice.

The list can go on. I am sure that most people, when they think about their specialty, can think of elements where big “T” and little “t” apply; where theory and practice are at odds with each other. The academic world is full of them. I am building a whole thesis based off of taking the dominant teaching of theory and moving to where theory is taught alongside practice in the real-world. Imagine, moving away from the crap and into what is actually applicable; making yourself almost immediately useful in a business environment rather than someone who will spend the next two to seven years learning what you went to school to learn.

But that’s not what I started writing about. First person limited. I plan to rewrite the entire piece I’ve been working on for a semester in first person limited. I would imagine that this will probably be a little hard as I’ve been trying to find answers through various characters eyes; and yet, this is the direction to go. It is how most books, in the genre that may be intended, are written. It’s following a path, a course, that is already trodden rather than trying to beat another path through territory rarely challenged. Okay, that doesn’t work for me, but you get the idea.

First person, limited. That’s the way to go. Leave it limited.