Guest Entry by H. Ravenholm
Having dissected all those potential pitfalls that await an author in this complicated world, let’s now look at the styles of writing and which person you write in.
It’s probably safe to say that most people feel happy and comfortable writing in the third person, and that majority of books are written that way.
The third person is the person of an observer. It’s something we are very familiar with, because we go around all the time looking at things, hearing things, smelling things, and generally doing the observing with all the possible senses. Furthermore, it is the person of empathy.
Empathy is our capability of walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, to put it short. It’s the reason we wince when someone else stubs a toe, or when we see a wounded animal. It’s our wish to help relieve pain and hardships that we ourselves would not wish to suffer through.
It is also our capability to be happy when a person we love is happy, and to wish to cause happiness (so to speak) in others (species etc. regardless… the moment you apply if-clauses, you are dealing with moralism, which is a totally different, and mostly far more harmful, kettle of fish). In short, we draw parallels between us and the world we observe in real life and on the page.
There are many ways one can go about writing in the third person. And before you start to wonder, we are absolutely not trying to tell you how. There is no magical formula… the writing, as we’ve said before, is something that happens between you and the readers… and the characters in the plot, come to think of it.
But if you look at history, you will find that there are plenty of ways one can approach the third person. Sir Walter Scott, for example, is one of those who have gone (although not consistently!) for the omniscient story-teller. You could almost say that, during some periods of history, that approach prevailed over the simple, third person observer tactic.
This particular approach (so the observer) is quite popular now. Majority of the novels these days are written with the simple observer approach, and the most we can say is that the omniscient story-teller really does try to moralise all too often (which, by the way, was the whole point of the classical social novel… to be totally disrespectful, but way more truthful than a lot of classes on this would be, it was a bunch of guys saying “this is how the world is, it must be”, writing a novel to confirm their own ideas and clapping either themselves or each other on the back. Really really.). You really can’t do that if the story-teller is barely there… that way, the story becomes more like a film that the reader observes before them, without the addition of the would-be-Sunday-school version of the author’s personal issues.
The next most popular style is probably the first person. Writers like Victoria Holt used it, and, to name a name far more famous, so did Sir Conan Doyle, in his work on Sherlock Holmes novels.
The point of that style is the personal approach. Especially in the female novel of Victoria Holt-type writers, the novelist tries to (sometimes more or less successfully) identify with the character to “be” in the actual centre of events.
The snag? It’s not a style many can pull off, and it’s all too easy to slip into moralising again, because this way, the author conveys “the truth” or “the real version of events”… while totally forgetting that even if the events are actually happening to you, they are still seen from a personal perspective.
Chances are that even two people who are close and therefore may have a very similar view of life may not come up with completely the same story about the event or the events that they have witnessed, let alone several people who are not connected. The very reason Doyle’s Watson’s perspective does not altogether flop is that there is a very strong awareness of the fact that this is, in fact, Dr. Watson’s perspective, and that Watson attempts to convey the events, while still writing in the first person, in almost a third person, hoping to be as impartial an observer as possible.
Also, the first person style may be more difficult to make interesting as a story. It may be easier to become one with the observer in the third person than with the first person. First person may become too difficult to follow, because plenty of authors attempt to draw in either too little or too much from their characters’ environment while trying to be very personal. And of course, the first person and the reader may just not click. Whereas the overall story, told from a perspective of the third person, while perhaps containing a character or several characters that a reader may not like might still be more readable… possibly because the level of personal contact with the person you may not like is less.
This does not mean you should avoid the first person like the plague. If it works for you, then you are likely to do it well. It is always best to experiment, and in the end, most of the books really have, if we go very philosophical about this, a mixed style… the main bit of the story, so the background, the setting and whatnot is given via the third person, while the dialogues are actually given in the first, and even the second.
If there is a novel written fully in the second (so you) person, we are currently unaware of it. But there are many poems that address someone, which is, technically, the second person. If you can write a novel, a good novel, this way, by all means, send it, we would love to read it. (Some of the team have read kids stories aimed at you writing your own story, within the given options, so to speak… so correction, there do seem to be novels, sort of, written in second person… but these sort of puzzles are usually short and while they can be amazing, they aren’t exactly novels… if this strange logic actually leads anywhere. They’re more adventure kit in a book. Which is fine by us. But a real novel, written this way…? Please. )