So you’re writing a story and you know it’s a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, except that … it isn’t. In fact, it’s bad. But the reason it’s bad is NOT that you’re a bad writer. The reason it’s bad is because you’re using a technique that’s not familiar to you. What do you do?
Hamish posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:
Hello!
Ben reading your blog for around two years now, it has helped me greatly, thank you!
My question is this: I love first person, I despise third person. I love the knowledge of a single character, knowing them like the back of my hand, creating them however I want. I love being able to make my reader feel! Which, is something I’ve found I can’t do in Third Person.
This, however, is where I run into a problem. The stories I want to write my ‘staggeringly heartbreaking work of genius’ is best written in third person.
The real problem is that, when I write in Third Person I feels if my writing is poor of quality, and I hate it. So, how do I overcome this? When my story i best suited to third person? But, I myself am dismal when writing third person?
Apologies if this is a question asked many times.
Thanks.
Randy sez: Well, now, there’s a dilemma. You’ve got a story that’s screaming to be written in third person, but you are better at first-person than third-person. What do you do?
Tough question, and there’s no easy answer. This is why we call it a dilemma. This is a judgment call, so I’ll give you my judgment, even though I can’t prove it’s correct.
Let’s look at your options.
The Safe Road
You can take the safe road and write it in first person. This is what you’re familiar with. You believe you’ll do your best work in first person. The only problem is that you think the story would work better in third person.
There’s a possibility you might actually be wrong. It might be that this story would work just fine in first person. You could probably find that out by writing a few scenes or chapters and see how it’s working.
But let’s assume that you’re right—that the story would best be told in third person. If you take the “safe road,” what’s going to happen is that you won’t do this story justice because you’re using the wrong tool for the job. And that’s just not acceptable, at least not to me. I don’t want to work on a story unless I can do my best. So this is not the road I’d take.
The Unsafe Road
The unsafe road is to write the story in third person, even though you believe that you can’t do it well.
I suspect that if you give it a chance, you might find that third-person isn’t any harder than first-person. It’s different, but it’s not harder. You can give your reader a Powerful Emotional Experience in third-person just as well as you can in first-person.
Writing in third-person is not harder. It’s just less familiar to you, Hamish. Which means that at first, it won’t feel right. But I’d bet that if you try it for a few scenes, you might start getting more comfortable with it.
Third-person lets you do interior monologue and interior emotion just as effectively as you could do them in first-person. (These are two of the five standard techniques novelists use in writing fiction. All five techniques are explained in great detail in my book Writing Fiction for Dummies, so I’m not going to try to repeat all of that here.)
But in third-person, your interior monologue can be indirect—it doesn’t have to be an exact verbatim transcript of the character’s thoughts. Instead, it can be a summary of those thoughts, which is sometimes an advantage.
Third-person also has another slight advantage over first-person. In third person, your narrative voice can be different from the voice of the point-of-view character. This lets you, the author, use your own narrative voice when you need to. You don’t have to. You can write a whole novel in which your narrative voice is always the voice of the point-of-view character. In first-person, you have to do this. But in third-person, if you want to, you can pull back a bit from the point-of-view character and inject your own voice.
Hamish, it’s not my job to tell you what to do. But here’s what I’d do if I were you. I’d try this story in third-person and see if I can grow into feeling comfortable writing that way. Every writer needs all sorts of tools in his toolbox. One of the most useful is the third-person point of view. If you don’t develop this skill, you’ll be limiting yourself. In fact, you’re limiting yourself right now.
Try it. See how well it works. Study the works of other authors to see what tricks they’re using to make it work. Keep trying.
That’s how you learn in this business—by trying things. Whether it works or doesn’t, send me an e-mail in a few months to let me know.
If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.
You can be assured that I will, thank you!
Thanks for answering!
Hi Hamish,
I just wanted to take a quick moment to recommend a book to you that I’ve found helpful for writing third person prose (or just prose in general). It’s called “The NORTAV Method for Writers” by A. J. Abbiati. It’s available on Amazon. I highly recommend you check it out. It is full of examples and exercises. I hope it helps.
Sincerely,
Ken
Thanks Ken,
I’ll have to check that out! Thank you for the help, and the recommendation.
Thanks
Hamish
I have the same problem! I find the characters are far more willing to work with me if I write in first person. My personal solution to this problem? I simply write my first drafts in first person. Maybe even my second and third drafts. Until I feel I’ve really captured what the characters are trying to do and say. Then I transform it into third person. Which is obviously more involved than just switching “I” to “he.” But after all that work, I find that the “heartbreaking work of staggering genius” factor is right where I want it, AND the novel is written in third person. Best of both worlds! Works for me, anyway.
When I started my WIP I wasn’t sure which would tell the story to it’s best advantage. Since I had never written first person I wasn’t sure I could do it effectively. I decided to write the first chapter in both first and third person, which would allow me to compare the story from both angles.
It turned out that third person was best, but I also learned that I am ‘ambitextrous’! I can write in either and still connect with the POV thoughts and emotions.
I say take Randy’s advice. Try third person POV and you may be surprised at how well you’ll do.
Another excellent book, which is the best I’ve seen on this particular subject, is Self Editing For Fiction Writers. I know, I thought it was just about editing, based on the title. But it delves into interior emotion and dialogue, mostly from a third person perspective, in impressive depth and detail. There are tons of examples taken from writers both published and unpublished. My understanding of the potential power of the third person perspective has grown by leaps and bounds from reading this book. The flexibility you have to “pan in” and “pull back”, and how you can use that to create dramatic tension, is kind of a mind blower. They even have one example from a literary novel where the author started the scene in omniscient pov, moved slowly into third person, and then “panned” slowly from “distant” third person to “intimate” third person, getting deeply into the pov character’s emotions as the scene came to a head. Pretty cool really.
Hi Hamish and others
Just like you all, I had had the same problem for an apathy for writing in third person. I bought/read Randy’s book ‘Writing Fiction for Dummies’ and got some courage to switch back from 1st to 3rd person. I was so much in love with 1st person so it was a very difficult conversion decision for me. But it was a liberating experience for me once I practised a few times. Not because I love Randy as my [foreign] writing guru but what my own experience and experimentation taught me I can suggest to you that you would also be pleasantry surprised with your journey. Arun -a novice writer.
I enjoyed reading this; it is so important to have a direction in writing, even if it goes outside your comfort zone. Great fiction always starts with character. If you’ve got a character that sizzles, a character that fights back against all odds, a character that we are rooting for, or even rooting against, such as a serial killer, we don’t want him to succeed, but he’s so mesmerizing on that page that we keep reading. In first or third person, as long as that happens it doesn’t really matter in which POV it is.