Activity

Bouncing off of our first week’s exercise on Character Voice, I thought it would be interesting to look at how to do that in 3rd person POV.

Being able to write in 3rd person as well as 1st person is a useful skill to have, so I don’t want to focus on either one of them overly. But just for this week we’re going to take a closer look at the ins and outs of making 3rd person just as engaging and personal as 1st.

Because 3rd person is using all he/her/she/him/etc. it’s naturally more distancing and harder to write in as personal a way as 1st person is. However there’s some books and characters that just work better in 3rd person.

So, how do we get character voice in third person? How do we put the character’s head in there so that the reader gets sucked in?

 

In principle, it’s basically the same as 1st person. Take these snippets for example. I’ve rewritten the beginning of one of Week #1’s examples and changed it to 3rd person.

 

ORIGINAL:

I pushed my sleeves up, cracking my knuckles for extra effect. Here’s to there being a special on today. I raised an imaginary glass in toast, then pushed through the door. The smell smacked me as soon as I stepped in and I groaned.

Why did fast food places have to smell so much like hamburgers? I paused, frowned at myself, then coughed. Well, obvious reasons, of course. Duh. But that’s all beside the point.

 

3RD PERSON:

Sebastian pushed his sleeves up, cracking his knuckles for extra effect. With any luck, there’d be a special on and he could get a meal half price. Good food, less cost. Win-win. He raised an imaginary glass in toast, then pushed through the door.

The smell smacked him in the face as soon as he stepped in, and he groaned. Why did fast food places have to smell so much like hamburgers? It was sheer torture.

 

That little 3rd person example is a good picture of how that POV style can still be used to open up the character’s mind to the readers. It still has Sebastian’s personal voice — ‘Good food, less cost. Win-win.‘ — and it still has his thoughts — ‘Why did fast food places have to smell so much like hamburgers?‘ — without the phrasing being jerky or awkward.

Character voice gets into third person it pretty much the same way as in 1st person. It can just take a little bit more practice.

 

Thoughts in 3rd person are a little harder. Some people like doing direct thoughts, e.g.

Why do fast food places have to smell so much like hamburgers? he thought.

Some people prefer to just dump it into the description.

Fast food places always smelled so much like hamburgers.

 

Direct thoughts are okay, but they can sometimes pull the reader out of the story a little because even the basic formatting of the thought can be hard to manage.

On the same line, dumping the ‘thought’ into the description (as I showed in the latter example) isn’t so good. It’s boring. It doesn’t give the readers any new information about the character’s personality. It doesn’t engage them.

 

Personally, I prefer to put the thoughts into the prose. Not as a direct thought, and not just as a flat description. The phrasing I used (‘Why did fast food places have to smell so much like hamburgers? It was sheer torture.’) is more of a past tense/indirect thought, and a ‘statement’ (‘It was sheer torture.‘) that shows how Sebastian feels about the situation.

 

THE ACTIVITY: write a scene (or rewrite your Week One scene) in 3rd person, including some indirect thoughts and making sure the character voice comes out nicely. Keep in mind that you want to draw your reader in so they experience the scene through the eyes of the character.

As our very own Esther Sears once said, ‘If you don’t like or relate with any of the characters there’s not much point.’ So you have to make the reader like and relate and really connect with your character otherwise…they’re not going to enjoy your story very much.

 

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