In the third person

One of the reasons I enjoy writing in the first person is that it allows me to leap into a story feet-first with a clear voice. A first-person narrative seems immediate. It can be as personal as a long letter from an old friend, and as intimate as listening to someone talk about his life late at night, while you lie side by side on a mattress on a hot night. There’s no mistaking what’s to come when one encounters a first-person narrative like this:

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

All of Holden Caulfield’s disaffection with his life, his jadedness, his education, his precociousness—it’s all there in that lazy conjunction of strung-together phrases that opens the book. Whether or not you like him is a different matter. He’s laying it all out as plainly as possible, in the most intimate narrative manner possible.

What many new writers don’t often realize is that third-person chronicles have their own voices as well. The narrator is usually unnamed. He or she rarely appears as a character in the story. It’s therefore easy to assume that all third-person stories are much the same, dispassionately relating a tale without intruding.

This narrator, from For Whom the Bell Tolls, keeps his distance on the book’s first page.

“He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.”

There’s so much distance, in fact, that the reader doesn’t even learn the name of the ‘he’ until four pages later. What we have is a flat description of place and action. It couldn’t be more different from another famous first line, from Pride & Prejudice:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Both Hemingway and Austen employ the third person. Austen’s narrator is blatantly cheeky, though, forthright about both her own prejudices and those of her era, and as chock-full of personality as Hemingway’s is carefully devoid of it. You might hire Hemingway’s narrator for a reporting job, but Austen’s is the one you want gossiping next to you at a party.

One of the difficulties I originally had when I started The Buccaneer’s Apprentice was that I couldn’t get the narrative to flow. Using the third person seemed to impede my progress, rather than help me make any. After a couple of abortive pages, I had to stop and do a little exercise. I closed my eyes and tried to picture my narrator—to make him an actual person, rather than a simple device. I settled on the image of a crusty old mariner with weathered skin, surrounded by curious listeners. He carried a pipe, plenty of tobacco, and had nothing but time on his hands to share his tale. He would have a tendency to be garrulous, omniscient, and utterly in control of how he spun his story.

Once I abandoned my initial start and let him start talking, the story started to flow. And flow. His voice carried me through the book’s tougher-to-write stretches. I let him dictate the story’s pace. The decisions of what scenes to portray or elide were his. He’s a strong personality, and as a result, the narration is confident and vigorous.

Like any good narrator, my crusty old mariner might not have played an actual role in the novel’s action. He might be invisible to most readers. But he’s as important a character as any of the protagonists.