First Person: The writer is, the Narrator: “I walked into
the smoke-tainted air of Murphy’s Pub and looked around for Johnny. The bastard
owed me money and I aimed to get paid.
Second Person: The writer, for some insane reason tells you
what you feel and do. If you’re guessing I’m not fond of second person, you’re
right. “You walk into the bar and nearly choke on the cigar fumes coming from
the manager’s stogie. Murphy’s has a strict no smoking policy, but you know
Murph never enforces on himself. There’s
a good chance Johnny is hanging around the place and doing his best not to pay
you.”
Third Person: “Dan walked into Murphy’s Pub and felt his eye
twitch in irritation at the vile stench of the owner’s cheap cigar. Murph
looked hi way and grimaced apologetically. It didn’t take a genius to know Dan
was on the prowl, and the manager was just glad the man wasn’t looking for him.
In the far corner, his back to the door, the target of his rage sat talking
with a few friends.
“Dan moved in the right direction and slipped the brass
knuckles from his back pocket. Johnny owed him a lot of money and payment was
due.”
That’s as basic a breakdown as I’m doing. Let me say first
and foremost that I can just barely tolerate second person as a perspective and
even when I am forgiving of that particular sin, my tolerance is limited. I
think the nature of that beast is flawed. Most might disagree, but no one has
convinced me that I’m wrong so far.
Now that we have that out of the way, let’s get on to the
real issue here: Which is better, First Person or Third?
With my usual grace I’ll answer that with a vague response:
It depends.
First person has some very good uses, especially for
suspense and for intimacy. On the suspense front if you’re reading a first
person narrative it’s easier to ratchet up the possibilities of a beat down.
Let’s take a look at the nemesis-du-jour, Bryce Darby.
The following first person scene is just off the top of my
head.
At seventeen years of
age Bryce Darby stood six feet, four inches in height. He had bright red hair
and pale skin adorned with a few constellations of freckles and a skin that was
either burned and turning into a tan or tanned and growing more burnt by the
second. His hands were both covered with an assortment of rings that were
adorned with skulls, a lion’s head, and what looked like three crossed swords respectively.
I’d had plenty of
chances to examine those rings in great detail, normally when he was holding me
off the ground with one of his ham hock hands and waving the other fist under
my nose. We had never been friends and I didn’t think that was going to change
anytime soon.
Bryce was leaning
against the brick exterior of the school, near the exit from the auto shop, and
slowly murdering a toothpick in a continual grind between his pearly whites.
His eyes regarded me with a sort of dead interest. There was no real expression
in his baby blues at all until he spotted me. Then his brows pulled together
over his broad nose and his mouth pulled down into a scowl.
I’d been planning a
nice, leisurely walk home and maybe a few minutes of flirting with Katie
Lowell. Just the thing to take the edge off a bad Monday. Now, with Bryce
looking my way, I was remembering that just the week before my mouth had gone
off half-cocked and said a few things about Darby’s heritage that he had not
seen fit to forgive or forget.
“Need to talk to you,
Corin.” The toothpick shredded between his incisors as he came my way.
I tried to think of
anything I could possibly say that would end this conversation with me not in
traction. Nothing was coming to mind. Darby took two more steps in my direction
and I felt adrenaline kicking into my system like nitrous into a high
performance engine. I hoped my legs were up to a hard run, because I knew my
face wasn’t up to getting rearranged.
This scene, in third person, is from my novel, POSSESSIONS,
in which our hero, Chris, decides to use the neighborhood bully as a means of
escaping the bad guys.
“Look, Brittany doesn’t know a damned thing.
I know, because I already asked her.” He looked around and saw still more
people. Bryce Darby was leaning against the corner of his mother’s house,
smoking a cigarette. The sun was bright and almost magnified as it cut through
the thickening clouds. The way it ran across Darby’s face, he almost looked
like a statue with bronzed hair. Darby lived with his father but still came
back to the neighborhood from time to time to see his mother. He was wearing
jeans and heavy hiking boots, both of which had seen better days a long time
ago. He was also wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Yosemite Sam looking
ornery and dangerous in a cartoonish sort of way. Darby and the cartoon
gunslinger had a lot in common as far as Chris was concerned. They both had
brutal faces, red hair and bad attitudes. The difference was that Bryce Darby
was real and fully capable of breaking damned near anyone he saw in half. Bugs
Bunny would have been rabbit stew inside of two minutes around the local terror
of Chris’s early years. Seeing him made Chris want to scowl and then to smile
as an idea finally came to his mind.
“Look, maybe if you described this key it
would help?”
“I don’t suppose it could hurt.” Crawford
shrugged and casually scanned the area. His eyes saw Darby and immediately ignored
him. That was better than Chris could have hoped for. “It’s a little larger
than a quarter, a gold coin with some fine silver filigree and the small gems
in the center. It’s old, too. The original coin is actually a little uneven in
shape.”
Chris heard the words but paid them little
attention. His mind was already working on the Darby angle. He waited until
they were even with his old classmate and then looked Bryce directly in the
face. Bryce’s wide, square face turned to notice him, the dark eyes under a
broad brow locked with Chris’s for a second, and he nodded almost imperceptibly.
Damn, he’s in a good mood. Now I have to go and piss him off. On the best day, with maybe a dozen friends
to help him, Chris still didn't like the idea of making the man angry. He
wasn’t really that much bigger than Chris, but he had an almost unnatural
capacity for violence and shoulders that made it nearly impossible for him to
walk straight through a door. The thought that he might actually get bigger was
enough to make most people gape in amazement. If even half the stories he’d
heard were true—according to Jerry and a kid they both knew named Tom Murphy,
Darby had once curb-stomped a grown man’s face for threatening to call the
police on him. He didn't know if he believed it, but he’d never heard Bryce
deny it, either—enraging Bryce Darby was probably a better way to get paralyzed
than the pistol shoved against his side. It went against his nature to even get
Darby’s attention. Actually deliberately making him angry? Well, that was
almost a guarantee of bodily injuries.
Chris gave Darby the finger. What had been an almost pleasant look on
his brutish face suddenly became a scowl. One corner of the red haired boy’s
mouth lifted in an almost feral way, and he suddenly wasn’t leaning against the
support post on his mother’s stoop any longer. He was standing straight and
tall and looking twice as ugly as an IRS audit notice. He lifted one leg and crushed out his
cigarette against the worn heel of his boot. His eyes never left Chris’s.
Chris made another obscene gesture in his direction and smiled.
Darby started walking his directing with a casual saunter that Chris
knew meant nothing but pure trouble.
Both of those descriptions
work well enough. They get the point across. But the first person can add a
level of immediacy that third can’t as easily achieve. I tend to think of it as
shorthand for the emotional occasions.
When should you use Third
Person? When should you use first?
That’s easy. Use the one
that works for the story. Listen I was 14,000 words into my latest novel and it
just wasn't working for me. I mean, damn, it was not going well at all. It was
going so badly, in fact, that I actually went back and rewrote/edited all
14,000 words from Third into First.
It was a damned big risk as
far as I’m concerned, but you want to know something? It’s working now. The
story that refused to flow for me is now working as well as anything I’ve done
in a while.
In this case it’s the
nature of the beast. I’m writing an apocalyptic novel. Things are going badly
for planet Earth on a massive scale. In third person a lot of what I’d written
comes across as statistics. This many bodies, over an area the size of that
item. But when you add in the first person emotion, there is a palpable sense
of dread offered in what would otherwise be a dry sequence. How can I tell the
difference? The story is moving at a better pace and my first readers have told
me very emphatically that first person works in this case.
And, because I am me and
therefore likely certifiable, I’ll point to my one exception to the rule.
Sometimes the answer is
BOTH works just fine.
In my novel SMILE NO MORE I
tell the story in three separate segments for most of the book. Two of them are
First Person. The third is in, no shock, Third Person, limited omniscience.
That is to say, there is a limited perspective per third person scene, but it
is definitely third person.
Scene One is told from the
perspective of Cory Phelps, remembering the events that led up to his death.
Scene Two is told from the perspective of Rufo the Clown—the corrupted spirit
of Cecil Phelps—fifty years later as he seeks to find the family he left behind
when he was murdered. Scene Three is from multiple third person perspectives
and examines the consequences of Rufo’s modern day actions. It was a nightmare
to write, but you know what? The story demanded it. The end result seems to
have been worth it. Reviewers praised the intimacy of getting to know and
sympathize with Rufo and also dreaded his very dark actions all the m ore
because they were cheering him, often times knowing they shouldn’t have. That
was what I wanted. That was what I got. It was worth the extra headaches of
switching perspectives constantly.
It was what the story
dictated.
I still maintain that
Second Person was designed by Satan to annoy me. But that’s a matter of
personal taste.
Until next time,
James A. Moore
