Immediate, intimate, invisible: explorations in POV

I’m now on the fourth draft of a story I’ve been working on for the last few years. Once the characters, plot and theme stabilized, I did a round of fine editing and sent it out on submission. I got the same feedback I did on an initial version of Driving by Starlight — the voice wasn’t strong enough. For Young Adult fiction, where most teenagers are used to the breathless first-person present tense, writing in third person slowed down the pace and suffocated the voice. I changed it: the book sold.

But this book isn’t YA, and I don’t want to only write stories in the first person. I decided to spend some time debugging voice. I used to think there might be something inherently distancing about the third person. What I found was far more nuanced and interesting. The third person can actually feel really, really close. Closer even than first person. There’s a reason why most fan fiction is written in the third person: it’s easier to empathize, to stay in your own body and feel into an emotionally complex or intimate moment in the third person than in the first. But it takes skill on the part of the writer to achieve.

Here is an early draft from my WIP novel, written in what I thought was a close third person POV:

Erin brought the same aggressiveness to everything, including, to Laurie’s bewilderment, Vinyasa yoga. At first, Laurie had been excited at the thought of having a buddy in yoga class, since she hated doing these things alone. But after the first Vinyasa class, when it became apparent that Erin’s superior muscle tone didn’t give her an advantage against Laurie’s natural flexibility, yoga became a battlefield.

“I guess it’s because I’ve always been a dancer,” Laurie said, trying to explain her completely unintentional victory in the contest she didn’t even know they were having.

“I’m going to do the teacher-training retreat in Thailand over Thanksgiving and Christmas,” Erin said. “You’re welcome to join, but it’ll be two hundred hours of yoga in a month.”

It’s technically correct; the only emotions we know about are Laurie’s, since we’re in her head. But it’s not as close as it could be, and it does a lot of telling. Dismantling why this wasn’t working was nearly impossible. Eventually I made a drastic move. I rewrote the entire novel (80,000 words at the time) in first person. It took a few weeks, which seems like a lot but publishing moves in geological timescales so a few weeks is not really a long time. Written in first person, a lot of telling falls alway, or at least changes to be lighter.

Now, the scene above didn’t make it into the final draft, but here’s what it would have looked like in first person. Note that a lot of ‘telling’ falls away in first person, and Laurie’s character comes out more in her language, the way it only did in dialog before. We aren’t told about the scene, we’re in it.

Erin brought the same aggressiveness to Vinyasa yoga. Vinyasa Yoga! At first, I’d been excited at the thought of having a buddy in yoga class. I felt too self-conscious doing these things alone, as if I could hear people muttering reasons for my friendlessness. But after our first Vinyasa class, I could tell Erin would never come back with me, not after she’d toppled out of her Warrior Two trying to get lower than me. Now she stomped back in annoyance, and I had to run to keep up.

This can easily be sent back to the close third person now, without losing the intimacy or immediacy of first. One of the things to be careful of in doing so is not adding in too many instances of the characters’ names. Readers are actually pretty able to settle into a single point of view and decipher which she and which her are being referred to at any moment. It’s tempting to write something like, “Laurie could tell Erin would never come back with her, not after Erin had toppled out of her Warrior Two trying to get lower than Laurie.” But this is where (I’m still learning to) trust the reader, but this paragraph ought to be fully comprehensible:

Erin brought the same aggressiveness to Vinyasa yoga. Vinyasa Yoga! At first, Laurie had been excited at the thought of having a buddy in yoga class. She felt too self-conscious doing these things alone, as if she could hear people muttering reasons for her friendlessness. But after their first Vinyasa class, she could tell Erin would never come back with her, not after she’d toppled out of her Warrior Two trying to get lower than her. Now Erin stomped back in annoyance, and she had to run to keep up.

Using pronouns rather than names for the POV character (and names for non-POV characters) is more technically correct, and also makes the prose more immediate, intimate and invisible!