#34: Creative Writing Techniques - Getting the Most Out of Third Person Point of View

Today’s show explores the use of intimate third person narrative, and how to wind in a mixture of mystery, distance and closeness to enrich your storytelling.

After some deep insights, have fun with some fresh rounds of Exquisite Corpse word play for some seriously weird story ideas!

Hello imaginative people! I’m Anna Tizard and this is episode 34 of Brainstoryum.
Before we get started, yes, the Alice in Wonderland mini-series is over – but not if you haven’t listened to it yet! It’s timeless and will always be out there. And I’ve now put up transcripts of each of the Wonderland shows on the Brainstoryum page at annatizard.com, so if you want to go back and read my insights about Wonderland or listen to them, you can do so on a dedicated page. But the game play in the second half of each show is not transposed, as the process of actual magic is not reducible in that way.
 
Now, I haven’t talked about it for a while, but I am now in the editing stage of my short story collection, which is to be the third volume in The Book of Exquisite Corpse. Originally, perhaps foolishly, I thought I might be publishing it this summer, but it’s clear now that it’s going to be more like the autumn.
 
It remains a mystery to me how some stories just flow out straight away and hardly need much editing at all, and others take up a lot more time and have to be rewritten from scratch.
 
But I do like a meaty short story; I like to pack a lot in, and so some of the tales that will land up in the collection are more like 8 or 9K words long as opposed to a more standard length of 2- 4k. There’ll be a mix.
 
But whatever length a story might become, one of the main decisions that we have to make when we first start drafting is whether to write it in first or third person. To express the character’s viewpoint as “I”, or as he or she.
 
I’ve noticed I often hesitate at the beginning of a new draft, unsure which to choose. One story I’ve been working recently about an alchemist who makes a discovery right before he’s meant to retire, I originally wrote in third person, then rewrote completely in first!
 
Plus I have a longer story that’s in 2 parts, where part 1 is from a third person point of view for one character as ‘she’, who’s quite evil, and then the second part shows the perspective of another character, in first person. This is an aspect of writing that is very much on my mind at the moment!
 
So today I’m taking a look at the advantages of writing in third person, using my most recently published book, the award-winning I For Immortality, as an example of how you can use third person to balance intimacy with an element of mystery, and to maximise on the benefits specific to that technique.
 
Grab a cup of tea – we’re going in deep, people!
 
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I used to be most comfortable, by far, writing in first person. It’s what came most naturally to me, like a diary or the feeling of someone talking to you, directly. It felt natural. And this is pretty unsurprising, since most of the time, when we’re in conversations, we talk about ourselves and our experiences in the first person. We say “I did this and I thought that”, so of course, it will feel natural.
 
But some years ago, when I first started trying out third person narrative in longer pieces, it amazed me how much more flexibility this gives you. You’re not stuck inside that person’s head all the time. Not every sentence is something they think or do or have done to them. In third person, your mental camera lens can more easily pull away, take in other details, and details that your character might not don’t see. The action doesn’t have to be happening to them. You can pull in again – in third person you can interject with their thoughts, describe their feelings and reactions, but you can also describe what happens in the sorts of words they might not use; although I prefer to use the sort of language that the character might use, and stay close to their personal experiences, even in third person. You have that flexibility, according to your own style, and according to the needs of that particular story – what suits it best.
 
I’ll give you an example of how to use a character’s own language in third person, to flavour the narrative and make it feel more intimate. I For Immortality, the second volume in The Book of Exquisite Corpse, is in what I’d call ‘close’ or intimate third person. The protagonist, who’s called Flo, is an artist who loves to paint. I used this to literally colour her experiences; she often thinks of emotions in terms of colour; and colour, in the form of emotions, because to her, as an artist, they’re very much intertwined. I also used plant imagery sometimes, to describe her feelings, partly because plants were among the first subjects which Flo learned to paint, and they’re where her inspiration to become an artist was first sparked. In Flo’s mind, there’s a real cross-over between textures, colours, emotions and experiences. And it’s part of my style to find an overlap, perhaps a magical overlap, between physical and psychological. It’s just what I love to do.
 
I’ll just read a little bit to you from p9 where Flo recalls how she first discovered painting:

"Flo had spent the whole, endless summer swimming in daydream-lakes of colour, textured strokes of oil paint, watercolour that blossomed on the page like clouds, acrylics thick with the bite of a new apple. Beauty and strangeness filled her mind, and she realised all she wanted in life was to be an artist like her Grand-Mara; a grand purpose she fantasised about daily. Then, the news of her mother's passing, like the beat of deepest indigo, the pain of it tiger-lily sharp: the petal rolled tight, gathered and coiled into a knife-point in her heart.

Flo breathed and blinked slowly, letting it pass. This was why she didn't like to think too long on that summer."
 
So just pulling back at the end there; you go in deep, you come up close to the character’s feelings, and everything is vivid and thick with meaning. Then you pull back, so you don’t overload the reader with too much ongoing description - or emotion. We see her pull back as well, trying to move on, rather than dwelling in her thoughts or painful memories too long. And that way, the story can move on into action. It’s a kind of dance; drawing closer, pulling away, keeping the story moving but touching it with colour and psychology. Or literally colour as psychology, if you are Flo in I For Immortality.
 
If you’ve read the book, you’ll also know there’s more to these plant analogies as a central theme. The idea of plants having a consciousness that can speak to us, commune with us, is something that, shall we say, blossoms gradually throughout the story with some menacing implications.
 
With Flo in "I" For Immortality, I liked having just that little bit of distance from her, in third person. She had that little bit of mystery in her; there was a part of her that I knew I couldn’t, and didn’t want to, fully express. A little nugget of mystery, a sort of unanswered question. And it made me feel that all things were possible. She might do anything.
 
Holding something back was also part of how I built up suspense and tension. When the story reached extremes and drew close to horror, Flo’s feelings would have become overwhelming to write, and in third person I felt I could really maximise on the things you don’t say. When she reaches a kind of black hole of emotion, I could more easily express that sort of blankness that came over her, when her consciousness just couldn’t cope with what was happening to her. To have written that in first person would have been really difficult. And if you express an extreme part like that too much, too well, certainly in first person, where you’re hearing all their thoughts, unless you pull back, it might be too much for the reader. It might put them off and make them close the book.
 
Effective writing is just as much about what you don’t say, than what you say. In both first and third person you can find ways to retreat from emotions and focus on the action, leaving certain reactions to be guessed at – for we never want to be told absolutely everything – but in this instance, considering where I wanted to take Flo’s character, it worked so much better in third.
 
Why should the mystery of a story be just within the plot itself? We all have a bit of mystery inside us. The potential to be altered by an experience, or to do unexpected things.
 
Third person invites us to use that bit of space, that wiggle room for the character. To withhold and not describe an intimate reaction or feeling, letting the reader fill in the gaps – or be surprised.
 
What I’ve been describing is intimate third person, also known as limited third person, when you stick to one POV character at once, and you remain close to their impressions and experiences. There’s also third person omniscient voice which can dip in and out of different points of view, but this has to be handled carefully because if you are expressing the characters’ thoughts, and then you dip into another character’s point of view, the reader will go “Hey! What’s going on?” It breaks the tension and jolts us from what was flowing freely. So if you want to experiment with different points of view in one story, it’s best to change POV when there’s a new scene or new chapter, and make it clear what you’re doing so the reader doesn’t have a dizzying moment of, “Who is this now?”
 
There are other disadvantages to omniscient third person POV because you also have to insert tags like “he wondered”, “she thought”. These phrases can clutter your writing and they also create a separation from the characters’ feelings. We feel like we’re being held at arm’s length if we keep reading “she thought” when what we really want to read is just what she thought.
 
Maybe next time I’ll talk about the advantages of 1st person, because there’s a mix of first and third person stories in my upcoming collection. And of course, there is that alchemist story I have just rewritten from scratch, changing it from third to first person, so that will be a good example of why I would choose to do that – what was my thinking in doing that, considering all the brilliant advantages that third person point of view gives you.
 
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In the meantime, while it’s true that I am in the editing stage of the collection, I’m only part way through the drafts and I’m not yet completely certain that I will use all of the drafts I’ve lined up. This is one of the reasons I let story drafts ‘rest’ for at least a few weeks each. I can’t really be sure of the quality of a story or its true potential until I’ve spent time away from it, and then come back to it fresh. With the alchemist’s story, there was enough in it to spark me off to want to rewrite it completely and in a different narrative style; but I don’t know yet if there might be other story drafts that make me go, “Hm, really not sure about this.” So in general, you know I’m always open to new story ideas, but there is the potential, still, for a plot idea that emerges in today’s brainstorms to end up in the 3rd volume of the Book of Exquisite Corpse.
 
It is time to see what new ideas crook their fingers at us from the socks of destiny…
Listen to the podcast recording above to hear the story brainstorms - actual magic is not transposable!