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Third person is like camera-work. Yes, I'm taking this analogy from Orson Scott Card's wonderful book Characters and Viewpoint. Also note that the analogy may not be exact, because I haven't looked at the book in five months and I refuse to buy Card's books.


Third person is like camera work. I mean, think about it- almost all movies are in third person the majority of the time. So you've got this camera and you can train it on your character and watch him or her do wonderful tricks and talk a lot.

But you get to decide how close to move that camera. Do you want the character's fingertwitch to be highlighted and followed throughout the story? Do you want to just show him or her from afar, or do you want to focus on his or her face at critical moments? What you choose to show is part of the difference between omniscient third person and limited third person.

At the same time, though, third person is much more than camera work, because in film you can't portray your character's thoughts and feelings. You can't convey senses besides vision, or perhaps one sense of "there's a funny smell here"/"I hear something strange'-- the audience doesn't get a feel for what the world is like.

This is where I'm going out on a limb: Lose the camera perspective.

Don't see your third-person narrative as some camera shot that hovers around your character all the time. See it instead as something seated directly inside his head, so that who he is influences what he notices, the entire narrative, and that we get appeal to all senses, not just to one.


Of course, it starts to get tricky right about here: "But Veive! Why don't I just write first-person?"

And why not? Because first-person does this, but to a greater degree. First-person narratives can be tricky when it comes to showing societies that you want to be slightly ironic- hell, anything you want to be slightly ironic. If you have a first-person narrator, you'll be stuck without certain descriptions and with others.

I think, though, the best reason is that first-person viewpoint swapping almost never works. Yes, I said it, being a past admirer of the first-person view: swapping viewpoints is tricky because you are SO ingrained in the character's head that you need a whole new writing style for a new character.

Consider the following paragraphs, from a minor first-person project that needs heavy revision, but really worked that whole first-person thing:



If I chose a new character as a secondary viewpoint character, I'd have to pick one whose mind is not so fanciful. Could I do it? Perhaps. Could I write them both in the same day? If I was particularly together. Might it put off a reader? Might I make a mistake? Oh yes.

This is also a good example for things you can get away with in first-person that you can't in third- if this was in third-person, it would read remarkably purple. And that's part of the point, while the benefit of third-person is that you can talk about the surroundings in greater depth, you can go through more exposition (be careful, of course), and it's a hell of a lot kinder to multiple-viewpoint stories.



"Goddamnit, Veive," I can hear you all saying, "Get to the point already."

So I will.

Compare the following two paragraphs. One is something I'm actually incorporating in my story. The other is how someone might write it if they weren't centered in the body of their character.







The first one is better, in my opinion. And it's the difference between writing from outside and writing from inside.


From the inside, things take on a more immediate, a more tactile view. Thus, it's easier for audiences to feel the sensation viscerally even if they have never been in that situation before.

So how do you do this?

Well, partly it's just a question of altering your viewpoint, but the other part is, really, "how do you write it?"

There is no question: writing inside the person's head is harder than writing from outside. We all know the external symptoms of terror. What about the internal ones? That requires a few moments' thought in order to come up with how it feels.

And that's what it's about, really. Use all the senses. Inside a character's head, it's less about sight than outside. You feel the taste of chocolate in your mouth as it floods your mouth with flavor. You can feel the sickening jerk as the sword sinks into the flesh of your opponent. Having things feel is the most important of all. When you've grounded us in the tactile things, we'll be sucked into your story like nothing else.


Of course, there are some drawbacks. My biggest problem is that the "depth of field" (to use a photography term) requires that I cannot write "she flushed" without immediately counterbalancing it with how she knew. Maybe the rush of heat dropped from her face to squirm around in her chest. Or maybe she just flushes so often that she knows when she does it- or another character remarks on it.

And this can be tricky. Try to avoid overusing "She felt herself ____", because that can clunkify your prose.


The other problem is that you need to at least ground part of your story in sight. I ran into this issue with my The House Vitali: people thought my main character, Nail, was partially blind for all that he received visual stimuli, because it was almost equalled by the stimuli from other sources. I had to add in more details, but too many felt wrong. How many times do we look at things and really see them? Not as often as we just let our eyes gloss over them.



And, finally, an example of tight third-person in practice:

I once came across a story about a guy who fought a boar. The author wrote about how his character flipped over the boar, using a hand on the boar's head for support, then landed in the mud and released an arrow from behind.

The writing was a lot better than I'm making it sound, but what it really missed was sensory input. While not quite a laundry-list of actions, it still went a bit oddly because the following had absolutely no mention:
-the (hypothetically) brief but intense feel of the boar's head under the hero's hand
-the sickening whoosh in the character's stomach as he flipped
-that moment of insecurity in which you have no idea if you're going to land or not
-the feel of his boots sinking in the mud.


When I pointed this out to the author, he very graciously said he hadn't thought about it that way and proceeded to ask me for tips on it. Later, his story had improved a whole lot, just by losing the camera and giving us virtual reality.


Edit: As Endrael queried:

Of course this type of third-person will not work for any story, but IMO, it works for any story except milieu stories. If the story is more about the world than the characters (and no, "Jimmy saves the world" doesn't count), then you obviously don't want to be as visceral because you can't get away with as many gaping descriptions of the world.

This is a problem I'm having at the moment, too; like I said, my Nail is very much written internally. Unfortunately, he's also an outsider being taken to a new land, which adds a large level of "milieu focus" to said story. But because the story is ultimately about how he changes and how he reacts, I ultimately chose to put it from his head, and not from a more exterior viewpoint.

I really liked where you were going with that until you hit the "sweating with fear" example. sweatdrop I do see a lot of use for pulling the "camera" in tighter. In my own writing (when I'm not slacking off, or writing screenplays), the line between narrator and MC is often blurred. I don't know if it's necessarily a good thing in my case, but with how tight the "sweating with fear" example is ... it's a little too tight.

I don't need to read all that detail about the MC's veins and what she's doing with her breasts at the time. It's TMI. Not in the "ew, gross" sense, but in the "saturation of information" sense. Of course, I didn't like the traditional example you gave for that one either. crying Sorry.

If you could take the "she felt" perspective from the first, and ditch the superfluous elements from both, I'd be a lot more comfortable with it.

One of the important elements of prose is making sure that you don't bog the reader down with so many details that they can't appreciate the emotion or flow of the piece.

Again, I do feel that bringing it in closer to the MC can be an important tool. One of the downfalls of modern popular fiction is that it is almost completely removed from the MC. The MC is there, but we can no more empathize with him or her than we can with the average pulp TV character.

James Joyce would be an interesting author for this line of thinking. He refrained from using quote marks, so even what the characters said was blended in with the narrator's comments, and so on. I know a lot of people didn't like it very much, but in my opinion it did accomplish what Joyce set out to accomplish.

It's also taken very much out of context. It is crucial to the storyline that there is a touch of the sexual there. It is a violent dream, but it is also one that messes with her mind very nicely because she is a Victorian lady, and Victorian ladies don't think like that. While not a source of angst, per se, it's a source of self-doubt and a growing conflict with her sexual side.

xd Such is the difficulty with snippets. I appologize if my 'critique' offended in any way.

Hah, sorry if I wasn't clear: I have no real issues with first person. Neither is wrong or right; it's just a question of what fits. Like I said, if you switch heads a lot, first person can be ridiculous- George R. R. Martin would fail mightily if he tried to write his Song of Ice and Fire in first person.