Hi, I was thinking about writing a story soon and I love your writing style in your POALOF fics. Wanted to ask, why write in third person limited instead of first person? I love how you describe Marianne’s reactions and feelings and Héloïse remains mysterious, but why third person? Not criticizing—I think it’s fascinating. Just wondering what I should/could do.
Hi! I played around with lots of different writing persons with my POALOF fics. Thread was in first because the film suggests that POV so strongly. We are in Marianne’s eyes constantly until she is almost violently forced to confront that she is also seen. Sort of the point of the film to me, which heavily suggested first person so I stuck with that for my ‘sequel’.
I wrote FftT and In the Green in third for a few reasons. For a change, first of all. I was writing pretty back to back at the time and I wanted to switch it up.
Secondly, for audience taste. I had never written fanfic before Thread and the feedback I had from it was that many readers enjoyed it DESPITE the first person. Apparently some fic readers dislike the ‘I’ voice so much that they would close a work instinctively if a writer used it (which I think is sad but heigh ho). So I tried an alternative.
Thirdly, given they were AUs, I was kind of refining who these Mariannes were as I went. Maybe she would need to have something in reserve. Héloïse needed to be a mystery, yes, but these Mariannes could also do with backstory that the audience don’t know about. I think of in the film the moment where Marianne reveals she has been pregnant before. That is a third person moment when the audience goes, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that about you. And why would I?’ That distancing is very interesting to me and limited third is great for that.
Also, in both FftT and The Green, the environment, the setting is the main character for me. It was useful to be able to describe subtle things that Marianne didn’t or couldn’t have known in order for the worlds to feel complete.
And The Game we Played is in first, alternating chapters between Marianne and Héloïse’s POV, for radical funsies. I wrote it in five days flat as a challenge so didn’t really take full advantage of the switching POV: two different people seeing the same events very differently etc. I am writing something of my own in this style at the moment and feeling the pressure almost to write in lies and deception to give the shifting voice a purpose. I don’t like it much tbh but we persevere. My Thelma fic is another experiment in this: if the film was Thelma’s POV, thinking that she was manipulating everything around her almost supernaturally with a power she could barely control, then the fic is Anja’a POV, where she, as another young woman, was thinking exactly the same thing about the same events.
Anyway, I hope that is useful! Have fun writing!
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