The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: third person

  • Letting It Flow Naturally

    As with most things, I don’t think a lot about the mechanics of my writing — I just sort of put words down and figure out how it works later. This has lead me to abandon projects because holy shit, it needs wa~y too much mechanic work.

    By default for many many moons I wrote in what I sort of think of as the standard point-of-view: third person past tense. (I know there’s more than one type of third person, but go ask one of the English majors if you want more of that nonsense.) It came naturally, and I ran with it.

    Eventually, that changed.
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  • “Two” be Avoided at All Costs

    I have a policy about finishing every (fiction) book I start to read. In my life, I can only come up with a couple of instances where I just couldn’t force myself to the end.

    Perhaps I should clarify, that policy only applies to books written in first and third person.

    If I’m reading something written in second person, it is because some sadistic professor thought it was a good idea.

    Unless it is a Pick-Your-Own-Path adventure story, I see no point in second person. Maybe that makes me a bad English major. Maybe it makes me a bad person. I don’t care. Second person aggravates me. (more…)

  • Come to Your Own Conclusions

    I don’t like being told how to feel, and I don’t want to tell a reader how to feel. When I’m reading a piece of fiction and I feel like the author was trying to force a specific feeling on me, I get mad. I generally stop reading. I realize this is somewhat immature, because aren’t most stories built with the idea that they’re going to make me feel something?

    When I write, I write in third person. First-person works best, I think, when the reader is meant to relate to the word through one character. I recently read The Hunger Games trilogy, which is in first person. As the readers, we’re obviously supposed to feel the world through Katniss’ experience of it — we’re supposed to relate to the cruelty and kindness of other characters as she feels those things. It’s not wrong. Obviously, it works pretty well for Collins.

    But in the same way that I don’t want to tell the reader how a character looks — because it rarely has any bearing on the story what a character looks like — I don’t want to tell a reader how to feel about any character or institution in the story. Where I find a character to be a flat villain, another reader might see that character as a tragedy. I don’t want to force the reader to feel the same way about a character that I do. Maybe it means I’m doing it wrong.

    For my writing, third person is the most effective way to share a story without getting too wrapped up in a single character’s thoughts and feelings.

    (And much like with Highlander II, I shove my fingers in my ears and refuse to acknowledge that second person exists. Absolutely refuse.)

  • I only write in past tense, third person. That last statement is ironic, I know!

    Without a doubt my favorite point of view to write in is third person past tense. I especially like to write in the style where you can see inside one person’s thoughts, whoever the main character is. I know that’s not omniscient because omniscient is being able to see everyone’s thoughts. And I know it’s not limited because limited is where you can only see what people do, not what they think. So I’m not sure what this point of view is called, but it’s the only way I write.

    OK, I just went and looked up the wikipedia entry for Narrative Mode. It describes my standard point of view as being “Third person, subjective, limited.” Third person because my narrator never uses the words I or we. Subjective because one or more characters feelings and thoughts are described. Limited because the narrator cannot describe things unknown to the focal character. If someone has a different opinion on how the narrative mode of my writing should be classified, then I’m all ears.

    I have deliberately tried other points of view. For example, I wrote a pretty long piece of short fiction (around 10,000 words) in present tense. A lot of the feedback I got on that was that my readers thought it should be a screenplay. This feedback made me wonder how much point of view affects how the story is received by the reader. Maybe different types of stories would work better with different narrative modes. Maybe if one were writing a thriller, the present tense would help elicit the feeling that the events of the story are unfolding before the readers eyes.

    The idea that narrative mode affects how the story is received goes for point of view as well as tense. I did an experiment for a while where I only read memoirs. Reading that many memoirs in a row had a weird residual effect. Immediately after reading all those memoirs, I read a novel told in first person, Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk. Even though the story is completely unbelievable, and the characters are outrageous, I had a difficult time remembering that it was was fiction. I don’t write in first person but I suspect that it may engender more empathy in the reader kind of like how my use of present tense made readers think they should be seeing events in movie form.

    Hmmm. It would be funny to write an entire story in the future tense. But would it really be taking place  in the future or would it sound like a bunch of prophecies from the present? What about languages that have other tenses and perspectives which English does not have? Anyone have any experience with that? Are there any points of view which are impossible to translate into English?

    So, anyway.  I just don’t spend a lot of time thinking about that stuff. Maybe I should. I’ll set a challenge for myself to write a different flash fiction piece in each narrative mode anyone suggests to me. So comment away, here’s your chance to throw down the gauntlet!

  • My Point of View on Point of View

    As I’ve developed my writing style, I’ve played with several different points of view in order to figure out what works best for my way of storytelling.

    For a long time, first person was my poison. It was easy to write that way – it helped me relate to what happened to the character. Besides, when I first started writing, I was writing about all of the adventures I wished I could have myself, so I was the star in all of my stories.

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