The old adage of “show, don’t tell” is most applicable to third person narration, because it is here that writers most often make the mistake of reporting events in an especially monotonous fashion rather than illustrating them. Utilizing a variety of sentence structure, intentional vocabulary, and engaging pace/tone is the key to pulling your reader into the story rather than simply dictating a series of events. Third person point of view can make it difficult for a reader to connect intimately with the story, as the more objective voice or subtlety of the narrator’s bias can translate in a less personal manner than first person. It’s imperative to receive feedback on how well your use of alternative methods is drawing the reader into the story throughout.
Including Backstory & Context
Backstory is more convenient with third person POV, because you’re not limited to the knowledge of a single character. (Of course, this is assuming that you’re writing in third person omniscient, rather than limited. There will be a follow-up article all about limited POV in the near future, but for the purpose of this article, this focuses on omniscience.) You can utilize information, memories, and backstory of your entire cast or world, and furthermore give your reader insights into the characters’ actions or world building that they would not have in first person. Take advantage of this allowance to create a rich narrative with clear connections between characters, plot points, and information.
Developing Secondary Characters
The ability to further develop secondary characters is a major advantage of utilizing third person narration, because you are not so limited in the scope of information being revealed to the reader. You can shift the focus of the narrative to situations that solely involve characters other than your protagonist, and this offers the unique perspectives of characters outside or on the periphery of the main conflict. You can develop subplots more efficiently, offer the reader information your protagonist isn’t aware of to create suspense, and enrich your world outside of their limited perspective. This makes third person an optimal point of view to utilize when telling a particularly complex story or one that is set in a quite complicated world.
Distinctive Voice
When one is writing in the third person, it can be easy to fall into the habit of filling the pages with paragraphs of unnecessary description in order to achieve goals of length or in emulation of a particular writing style. This is often also the result of maintaining a needlessly objective narration. It is reasonable to write in the third person with a particular slant or bias. It gives the narrator their own voice, and makes the writing more engaging. Not just in the way of an unreliable narrator, where the bias in narration distorts or exaggerates the essence of the plot. You as the writer or narrator should have a voice that is just as distinctive as any character would have, although it’s generally agreed that a third person narration should be more subtle than a first person narration.
Practice & Adjustment
Third person point of view can be difficult to get accustomed to. It is a more impersonal style of writing. When writing about intimate or meaningful messages/events/characters, it can feel more natural to adhere to a first person perspective, even if third person better serves the story overall. It’s important that you actively practice if you’re unfamiliar with writing an entire story in third person. Getting used to approaching certain events or depicting certain emotions from a third person perspective is immeasurably helpful to the process of creating an engaging story. It can also help to practice thinking about events from that perspective if you’re prone to switching perspectives reflexively when you’re trying to articulate emotion or tone, which is a struggle I see often with new attempts at this POV.
Common Struggles
~ When dealing with multiple characters that have they/them pronouns, what’s a good way to keep the reader from getting mixed up? I assume that you would want to try and rely on a different sentence structure that allows you to clarify whom you’re referring to with context clues, rather than pronouns. It may seem less clear or accessible, but it’s very possible to write in a way where each sentence doesn’t start with “he said, she said, they said”. It’s also important that you master the way in which you write about each individual character. This will help your reader to correctly anticipate who you’re writing about and when.
~ When writing third person POV, how do you write multiple people’s emotions and perspectives at the same time? Focus on how they express their emotions rather than communicating exactly what they’re feeling and why. If the reader needs to comprehend the ins and outs of their thought process, perhaps third person isn’t suitable for the story.
~ And if lots of people with the same pronouns are in the same scene, what are useful ways to distinguish between the characters without using their names all the time? Clarify who you are referring to whenever “the camera moves”. When the focus shifts in space rather than subject, you must signal to the reader that this has happened. The use of dialogue tags is not an efficient way to do this, and many writers will often make the mistake of leaning too heavily on them. Instead, give your characters “stage business”, or an activity that they’re engaging with while dialogue is happening, and when they become the center of attention, refer back to the activity in a subtle way. Move the camera. Although, it is important to note that you rarely need so much dialogue in a scene to communicate information to the reader that you would get lost in the crowd of involved characters. Consider what you could better share through description and action, rather than dialogue.
~ How do you make sure you don’t use too many pronouns in a paragraph to refer to a certain character? Consider whether your descriptive style is too procedural. Natural writing flows without an abundance of clarifying pronouns, and if you start every sentence in a paragraph with “she did this, she saw that, she noticed, she heard, she felt” your writing will fall flat. Experiment with sentence structure, descriptive style, and perspective in your writing. At a certain point, your reader should be in a groove where they can keep up with who you’re referring to, even through context clues having to do with a large cast in the same scene.
~ How do I maintain momentum and clarity when writing in third person limited POV? For those who may not know, third person limitation is the narration of a single character’s perspective (at a time, if the story focuses on multiple characters). This point of view can be tricky because the limitation requires you to differentiate what each character knows and when they become aware of things that may already be known by other point of view characters.
The best advice I can give when attempting this is to be very diligent in keeping your characters’ stories and inner monologues straight. Keep track of who knows what, when they found (or will find) out, and refer to this timeline regularly as your story progresses. It’s also worth your time to strategize with your key pieces of information. If your reader has already learned this information through another character’s perspective, then reviewing this through the eyes of another must be illuminating in a different way, or the process of the other characters’ discoveries of what we already know must add to the suspense/emotional build/payoff. Pieces of information are the fireworks of your story, and you need to release or repeat them with great care for the greater show.
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Me: *comes up with a cute subplot for reece and juno so they can also have development*
Also me:*vibrating intensely because I don’t know if talking about it would be spoilers*
Ookay, so I will be making a spoilers tag, just in case they ever come up - but to break it in, here are some screenshots from my Very Professional Definitely Not Written in The Notes App Script. Enjoy some light spoilers ✨
Some more script moments ft. A little of of Reece and Juno’s story at the end
Anonymous asked: “Most of my sentences start with the word ‘I’ or a character’s name. It makes the writing feel monotonous, but I can’t seem to fix it or change my habits. Any tips?”
What is most likely the issue is that your scenes contain only action. “I do this” or “he does that.” That’s not so much of an issue, but once you include more exposition and especially since it’s first person, the thoughts and feelings of the main character, the issue will likely resolve itself.
Chances are, if you are writing a story longer than 2000 words, characters will move from one location to another. Sometimes this will mean that they walk into the next room over, in which case it isn’t too hard to describe. But if they are going on a long journey, or hopping in the car to drive to the town 30 minutes over, or if they are flying on an airplane to another country, the transportation question gets a little bit tricky.
The central challenge is this: How can I effectively and logically show that there is a transition in location without boring the reader and slowing down the plot?
So we’ll break it up into some questions to figure out what is best for different types of transportations!
1. Does anything important/notable happen during the travel?
If so, you should probably include it and talk about the scene. In this case, you don’t have to write the whole scene out. It can go like this:
“Jim was silent for two hours as he drove us across the desert. Then, out of nowhere, he said, ‘I’ve seen those aliens before.”
Let’s say that the information Jim talks about is important to the plot. You can just introduce the setting as “during the travel” just like how you would introduce the setting of any other important scene.
If nothing super important happens, that doesn’t mean it is irrelevant. It just brings us to the next question:
2. How does the travel reflect the characters?
Let’s say we’re still on that desert drive, and there is a new character sitting in the backseat. This is a good time to show their—or any other character’s—traits though the way they respond to traveling. Maybe the new character is an annoying backseat driver, or maybe they are so funny that the whole car is entertained for the rest of the drive, or they say nothing because they’re too busy reading or studying up on aliens. Each of these says something different about the character, and is a good way to create natural “showing” of character traits and personalities.
But let’s just say it’s going to be a boring car ride without any character development. Then that brings us to the ultimate question:
3. Would it change anything if you skipped it?
That is, you could always say, “After a four-hour-long drive across the barren desert, we were finally here. ‘Welcome to Las Vegas’ said Jim as he slid out of the driver’s seat.”
There’s nothing wrong with skipping the scene. In fact, I usually recommend that if you can skip/shorten it, you should. If there’s nothing of note that happens, don’t tell us about it! Some writers might worry that readers will get confused with a lack of information. But if you say “We drove across the desert,” a reader will assume that everyone got in and wore their seatbelts and maybe took a bathroom break. And even if that didn’t exactly happen in your head, as long as it doesn’t matter urgently to the plot or characters, you can leave it up to the reader’s interpretation.
Skipping transportation scenes or summarizing them with only a few sentences will speed up the pace of your story, keep it interesting, and typically not confuse the reader as long as there is some explanation.
My final tip is to not drastically change locations too often. The more you do, the higher risk you run of slowing down the story and confusing the reader. It can also lead to blank settings or all of the settings blurring into one background. Of course, there are exceptions: adventure stories, or other stories that require constant travel. But this is just something to keep in mind: if you can keep it to only 3-4 general locations throughout the story, try to do it!
FURTHER POST to say that even though it’s tragic that we didn’t get any gen pov in the final book, the fact that the last of gen’s pov that we DO get is at the end of the queen of attolia, and the last scene of that book is when irene finally accepts his proposal.. like literally the last time we are WITH gen is at the moment he becomes king… and so like of course we can never have his pov again, because the fate of kings is to seen always through the eyes of others, to never be alone with their own thoughts, to never be free of the distorting powers of rumor, myth, and legend…. and so we are with costis as he learns the king, and then sophos, and then kamet and then pheris… but all of them have different relationships with the king and different stories to tell about him… and even when, as in pheris’s case, their accounts are specifically about the king, they are also using the king as a mirror through which to reflect themselves… it’s so interesting how mwt plays with gen’s power and agency throughout the series bc like. yes history is written by the winners and so return of the thief is written by the king’s historian because gen ultimately succeeds in uniting the nations of the peninsula, but the king’s historian is not the king himself… the only time gen tells his own story in his own words is when he is the thief… whereas when he is king he has the power to shape nations, to command armies, but he can no longer give his own account of himself, because he has become something more than a person, and his office and his mythos are both co-created with people outside of himself,,, and so he gains all this power but he is no longer his own person and as such cannot tell his own story…. and how the fact that we never return to gen’s pov implies that whatever he gave up in becoming king he can never get back….. loving it here
I’ve talked before on the merits of a shifting pov in my last POV post, but I wanted to go on a bit further about the topic. Broadly speaking, multiple POV works best when a single character cannot possibly know everything happening in the story, the world and story is too large for one single character to care about everything, or you want the readers or viewers to be personally invested in a complex narrative of interwoven stories.
Interwoven Narratives
In shows like Game of Thrones, Once Upon a Time, or the 2nd season of Why Women Kill, there may be a central narrative, but each character for the most part has their own story. In an interwoven narrative, each character is going to have their own arc and story. Each story is going to have its own call to adventure, darkest hour, rising action, etc. Depending on how closely interwoven these stories are, a single story’s climax can very well be the climax of multiple storylines within the narrative. You can even spice this up, where the Point of No Return for story A is simultaneously the Call to Adventure for Story B. In an interwoven narrative, several stories may be ongoing, but certain characters will rarely if ever interact. This is why it feels uncanny for Missandei to sit in the same room as Sansa Stark. Their narratives have been so disjointed that seeing them together feels odd, even though they are from the same show and have appeared separately in other episodes. Game of Thrones takes this a step further by having 3 major overarching narratives: King’s Landing, the Knight’s Watchmen, and Essos. Objectively speaking, there is a protagonist and something of an antagonist in each setting. King’s Landing has Ned Stark, later Tyrion and then arguably either Brienn or Jaime, with Cersei as the big bad. The Night’s Watchmen has Jon, with the Night King as the big bad. Essos has Daenerys, though she doesn’t really have a singular antagonist the way the other two do. Her antagonist is Essos itself. Essos is like her training area. The tutorial on how to rule before she stops playing in the sandbox to go get the real thing over in Westeros. Her hurdles, such as the slave masters, the dothraki warlords, and the many assassins all prove to place various kinds of obstacles in her way that she would need to face as a queen. These stories work best in drama with large casts of complex characters with complicated relationships and competing desires. Game of Thrones wouldn’t work if Ned or Daenerys was the sole protagonist because limiting the scope to a single protagnist would rob the story of what’s happening elsewhere in the world, and hearing events second-hand as gossip and rumors isn’t as fun as seeing it. George could have given the story an ominsicent narrator who could see everything (such as the Three-Eyed Raven), but this would place a barrier between the audience and the action, as events would feel less personal and in-the-moment. Shifting POV was the best choice for this story because the world and cast is too big for any one narrator to suffice, and because the civil war of shifting alliances is a perfect fit for different characters giving the audience their personal insights into the ongoing events of the story.
Parallel Narratives
Similar to, but distinct from the the Interwoven Narrative, the Parallel Narrative is a story where there is only a few POV characters, most likely just two, although it is possible to do more than two. Shows like Avatar: The Last Aribender, She-Ra: and the Princesses of Power, and Xiaolin Showdown take the time to give the villain faction screen time, allowing the characters to have their own stories, arcs, and characters. Some shows may show what the villains are up to, but checking in on the villains is different from giving them large swaths of the narrative. These stories are best with complex or otherwise entertaining villains. In Xiaolin Showdown, most of the villains fall under the Saturday Morning Cartoon variety, with only Wuya and Chase being actually interesting. But all of the villains are rather charming, enough that stopping by to see what Jack Spicer, Evil Boy Genius is up to in his mother’s basement is entertaining, if nothing else. Xiaolin Showdown doesn’t showcase the villains as heavily as ATLA and SatPoP do, but I felt the Haylin forces get enough focus to warrant counting them on this list. Meanwhile, Zuko and Iroh from Avatar get the same level of devotion as the Gaang does, as do Catra, Scorpia, and Hordak in She-Ra. Zuko is a narrative foil to Aang, making him the Deuteragonist. Catra serves a similar role, being the foil to Adora. Aang and Zuko are on parallel journeys. In a sense, both are seeking redemption for past mistakes. Zuko believes he must regain his honor for disgracing his father, while Aang feels guilty and responsible for “abandoning” the world for 100 years, and not being around sooner to put a stop to the Hundred Years War. Catra and Adora foil off one another as both respond to emotional and mental abuse from Shadowweaver. Adora had it drilled into her from a young age that she is responsible for what Catra does, meaning that she thinks she has to be responsible for everyone and everything. Meanwhile, Catra has grown up with Adora always being responsible for her actions and has no idea how to take accountability because if she messes up, it’s Adora’s fault. Parallel narratives are perfect for creating a juxtaposition between conflicting sides, ideologies, or other dynamics. Showing how these sides differs is what makes them interesting. They don’t have to be Hero/Villain. Romeo and Juliet is a prime example. We get insights into both the Montagues and the Capulets, and neither side is inherently painted as the good side or the bad side.
Ensemble Narrative
In an ensemble narrative, there may be multiple POV characters, but they are all united in a single story. They may have their own arcs and goals, but going from a chapter or episode focused on Character A to one focused on character B will still be advancing the overarching narrative instead of being disjointed. Heroes of Olympus shifts between narrators, but the overarching goal of stopping Gaea is the collective goal of the entire team. In TV shows, this manifests in what I would call The Team shows, where there is no central main character, but each major character gets their own arc or episodes dedicated to them. Teen Titans, Avatar: the Last Airbender, and Voltron: Legendary Defender are shows where there may be a “Cyborg Episode” or a “Raven Episode”, but the show is about all five of the Titans, and each gets their own turn in the spotlight with the story focused on them. Unlike other multiple POV stories, you can switch up the focus character without disrupting the flow of the story, and allow each character to feel more important. The cast doesn’t have to be together for the full story to work either. For the first two books, the Heroes of Olympus has two sets of heores, with Jason, Piper, and Leo in book 1, then Percy, Hazel, and Frank in book 2. Percy and Annabeth also get separated from the rest of the party when they fall into Tartarus, leaving those two to have their own disconnected storyline. Likewise, Keith spends time with the Blade of Marmora away from Team Voltron, and Zuko goes on life-changing field trips with Sokka and Katara in book 3 of Avatar. The Teen Titans spend most of season 5 separated or in smaller groups, and Beast Boy is left all alone for most of the finale, having to scrounge up a ragtag team of minor super heroes and old allies to bring down the Brain and his legion of doom. An Ensemble Narrative is best when you have a collective of equally interesting heroes all working together toward a common goal, and especially in television leans toward being an episodic format with an overarching plot, rather than a highly serialized plot. A serialized plot leaves too little time for character-driven episodes where each team member gets a moment to shine and be the central character for that episode, though some shows like Once Upon a Time accomplish similar things, where one episode will be about Snow White, and then the next might be about Belle and Rumpelstiltskin or Little Red Riding Hood. It’s definitely more serialized than the cartoons I listed, but it will still take a given episode to put the spotlight on a particular character or a particular storyline. Some characters, like Aurora or Snow White, get full season-long arcs, while characters like Cinderella and Ariel get an episode to their stories, making Once Upon a Time a rather interesting mix of Ensemble and Interwoven.
Fractured Narratives
Stories like Once Upon a Time and the 1st season of Why Women Kill use utterly disconnected multiple POV stories to tell completely isolated stories that follow a theme, or connect back to one another in poignant ways. Why Women Kills uses its first season to tell 3 disjointed stories of affairs and relationship drama, all tied together by a single house, even connecting the stories in one episode by showing a neighbor who saw all three murders in the house, from the time he was a little boy in the 60s to being an old man in the 2010s. Aside from this one neighbor and the house itself, there is no connection between any of the stories. Once Upon a Time uses a different approach, splitting the story between the current events in Storybrooke, Maine, contrasted by the backstory events in The Enchanted Forest. Many of the backstory scenes are used to give context clues or flesh out motivations, and are mirrored and repeated in the mundane world. The backstory elements are also not told in chronological order, freeing up the writers to add as much convoluted backstory as their hearts desired. In the second season, Mary Margaret and Emma get sent to the Enchanted Forest, and this creates a story where Mary Margaret and Emma have their own side plot, but functionally the story still only has two fractured halves, because the past events of the Enchanted Forest don’t ever connect with ongiong plotpoints in the Storybrooke timeline. Emma and Mary Margaret may be in the Enchanted Forest, but they are still firmly in the Storybrooke timeline. The Enchanted Forest Timeline is still in Mary Margaret and Emma’s past. In both of these stories, the fractured multiple POV is used to tell a story across a wide stretch of time, separating the past and present, while highlighting recurring themes, motifs, symbols, and imagery as they repeat again and again. These stories excel when history repeating itself or destiny being impossible to escape is a recurring theme. Movies like Titanic are similar to this, but fail to properly become a Fractured Narrative because even though there is a story set in two different time periods with different characters, the ones in the modern setting aren’t developed enough to have similar arcs to the characters in the backstory, or to play out similar events to those found in the backstory. It’s a wonderful movie, and I will fight to get Rose DeWitt Bukater recognized as an action heroine, but the characters in the modern day timeline don’t get enough time to shine to really say that the story is split evenly between two parallel stories with recurring themes or ideas. It’s a story set in the past with a modern day framing device.
Patchwork Narratives
This is what happens when you combine the Fractured Narrative with the Interwoven Narrative. Cloud Atlas is the only example of this that I know off the top of my head, as each story is its own self-contained narrative, but then, certain stories will overlap as well. The narrative of Sonmi ends up connecting to the postapocalyptic story as the speech she gives from her part of the story ended up becoming the holy doctrine of this new society in which she has become a goddess. There’s also an ongoing motif of a birthmark that resembles a shooting star or comet. In a patchwork narrative, context for one story is found in another disjointed part of the story, where all of the parts come together to tie everything together, making a story of sewn-together components that, together, tell one whole story. Like with the Interwoven stories, this is better for grandiose ideas and large casts, and like with a Fractured narrative, it allows the story to jump across time and space to put emphasis on themes, motifs, and symbols. Because I can only really name one story I know that does this story structure (and quite well I might add), I can’t really highlight any further advice on how to construct such a narrative, except to tell you to pop in Cloud Atlas, turn on subtitles to understand the post-apocalyptic part of the story, and take notes.
Hopefully, after looking at a few examples of multiple POVs and the ways they’re used, this can give you a better sense of how you want to structure your own stories, what you should aim to do with the story, or reference materials for you to check out if you want to learn a certain storytelling style. There is no one single perfect point of view, but I like to think the shifting POV to be one of the most challenging and interesting when done correctly.
An audiobook project we’re setting up a Kickstarter campaign for that I’ll be narrating! The campaign hasn’t been launched quite yet, but there’s a link for you to be notified as soon as it goes up. =)
