I looked at all the YA SF nominees in the Locus Awards...
I looked at all the YA SF nominees in the Locus Awards...
The Locus Science Fiction Foundation announced the winners in each category of the 2023 Locus Awards on June 24, 2023, during the Locus Awards Weekend. Maggie Tokuda-Hall MCed the awards ceremony w…
...I went to the Kindle pages and read the opening chapters, just to see. And ALL TEN of them are written in first person POV. This boggles me. A couple decades ago when I was reading a lot of "how to write SF" advice, the most consistent message was "1P is a trap for noobs, don't use it!" Now it is apparently required to get a YA novel nominated. Amazing.
Obviously I can't talk for everyone, we all have brains that work differently, but I never got much help from "how to write" books. Lot of times they're wrong, and a lot of times they abstract things at a level that I can't actually absorb until I've done my own leg-work growing and learning anyway...and at that point, I'm beyond where I need any help from how-to books.
For me, the best teacher was going to novels and stories in my genre that were actually being published, reading them, and observing my own internal reactions to them. And I never saw any internal difference between how I reacted to first person or third. (As a reader.) Like, there really wasn't any greater or lesser "worth" to them. It's just a technique.
Generally, I think observing what is actually going on out there is more valid than what someone else has taken away from it and tried to codify in a how-to book. And yeah, if all YAs this year are first person POV, it perhaps suggests that there's nothing "newb" about first person at all, if you have a professional level of writing skill. Real-life data trumps what a how-to book says.
To be fair, this is YA, right? It's not just a recent trend that YA is often first person. Adult SF on the other hand...