by Lisa Cron
In a first-person account, on the other hand, nothing is ever neutral, even for a moment. This means the narrator will never tell us about anything that does not in some way affect him. He won’t give us long objective passages about what the town looked like, what Edna wore to the office, how great the madeleine tasted, or how the Reagan administration ruined the country. Sure, he might tell us all these things but only because they have a specific effect on the story he’s telling. It might help to think of the narrator as a narcissist (but in a good way). Everything in the story relates to him or else why would he be telling us about it?
Thus the narrator’s thoughts are laced through everything he chooses to report, and he draws a conclusion about everything he mentions. But he doesn’t stop there. He isn’t the least bit shy about directly expressing exactly what he thinks about, well, everything. Of course, he could be completely wrong about everything he says—first-person narrators are often unreliable, and part of the reader’s pleasure is figuring out what’s really true.
The only thing a first-person narrator can’t tell us is what someone else is thinking or feeling. So if Fred is talking about his breakup with Sue, he can’t say, “When I told Sue I was in love with Joan, she felt as if she’d been gut punched.” But what he can say is, “When I told Sue I was in love with Joan, the color drained from her face as if she’d been gut punched.” Fred can infer or guess how Sue felt, but he can’t come out and say it with certainty—unless, of course, Fred is the type of character who always assumes he knows exactly how everyone else is feeling, in which case we’ll know that Fred’s assertion about Sue feeling gut punched is meant to tell us something about Fred, rather than how Sue actually felt.
But what if Fred feels nothing? Because, you see, he’s in denial. So naturally he doesn’t react to Sue’s rapidly escalating hints that she knows all about him and Joan. Right? Sounds like a real Catch-22, doesn’t it? After all, if you know you’re in denial, the cat’s sort of out of the bag. So, when writing in the first person—or the third for that matter—how on earth can you convey all the things Fred is not thinking?
It goes without saying that the one thing you don’t want to do is have Fred think nothing. Instead, the way to convey that he’s in denial is to show how he interprets all those hints Sue’s giving him. In other words, how does he rationalize them? Being in denial isn’t as easy as it sounds. It’s not a “blank” state; rather, it takes a good bit of work. When it comes to maintaining our coveted sense of well-being, each of us is a quintessential spin doctor.7 This means that Fred will work overtime to make sense of things that, to the reader, clearly have an altogether different meaning than the one he’s just assigned to them.
To sum up, when writing in the first person, it helps to keep these things in mind:
• Every word the narrator says must in some way reflect his point of view.
• The narrator never mentions anything that doesn’t affect him in some way.
• The narrator draws a conclusion about everything he mentions.
• The narrator is never neutral; he always has an agenda.
• The narrator can never tell us what anyone else is thinking or feeling.
Conveying Thoughts in the Third Person
One of the beauties of writing in the first person is that you never have to worry whether the reader will know whose thoughts you’re trying to convey. Every thought belongs to the narrator. But writing in the third person is another story, especially because there are several variations. First, here’s a quick rundown of the three most frequently used:
1. Third-person objective: The story is told from an objective external standpoint, so the writer never takes us into the characters’ minds at all, never tells us how they feel or what they think. Instead, as with film (long rambling voiceovers not withstanding), that information is implied solely based on how the characters behave. If you’re writing in third-person objective, you’ll show us the protagonist’s internal reactions through external cues: body language, clothes, where she goes, what she does, who she associates with, and of course, what she says.
2. Third-person limited (aka third person close): This is very much like writing in first person, in that you can tell us only what one person—almost always the protagonist—is thinking, feeling, and seeing. Thus the protagonist must be in every scene, and aware of everything that happens; the only real difference is that you’re using “he” or “she” rather than “I.” And as with first person, you can’t tell us definitively what anyone but the protagonist thinks or feels unless that person pipes up and actually says it out loud.
3. Third-person omniscient: Here, the story is told by an all-seeing, all-knowing, objective and (traditionally) trustworthy narrator (you), who has the power to go into every character’s mind and tell us what they are thinking and feeling, have done, and will ever do. The trick, of course, is to keep track of all of it. And to stay behind the curtain at all times. Even a fleeting glimpse of the puppet master completely ruins the illusion that there are no strings attached.
Okay, so how do you convey thoughts when writing in either third-person omniscient or limited? You do this by using something that, as far as the reader is concerned, is akin to telepathy. Good stories do it so well that we don’t even notice they’re doing it. In fact, I’d venture to say you’ve probably read hundreds of books written in the third person that clued you into what the characters were thinking so deftly that when it comes to figuring out exactly how they did it, you’re still wondering whether you should italicize or put quotation marks around sentences that must then be clearly tagged as thoughts. The answer is, none of the above. No italics. No quotation marks. No tags.
Once you master the art of slipping your characters’ thoughts onto the page, the reader will be able to automatically differentiate a character’s inner thoughts from the narrator’s voice. Readers intuitively expect the protagonist to have an opinion, whereas you, as narrator, don’t even exist as far as they’re concerned—that is, as long as you keep your opinions to yourself. The narrative voice is almost always neutral, meaning that as omniscient narrator, you’re invisible and just reporting the facts. Your characters, on the other hand, are free to express their opinion on whatever they so desire. As long as the reader knows whose head we’re in—that is, who the point-of-view character is—you rarely need a preamble at all. For instance, this is from Elizabeth George’s Careless in Red:
Alan said, “Kerra.”
She ignored him. She decided on jambalaya with dirty rice and green beans, along with bread pudding. It would take hours, and that was fine with her. Chicken, sausage, prawns, green peppers, clam juice … The list stretched on and on. She’d make enough for a week, she decided. The practice would be good, and they could all dip into it and reheat it in the microwave whenever they chose. And weren’t microwaves marvelous? Hadn’t they simplified life? God, wouldn’t it be the answer to a young girl’s prayers to have an appliance like a microwave into which people could be deposited as well? Not to heat them up, but just to make them different to what they were. Whom would she have shoved in first? she wondered. Her mother? Her father? Santo? Alan?8
Brilliant, isn’t it, the way George uses a mundane event like deciding to make jambalaya as the leaping off point into the heart of a decidedly different matter? Notice how she does it by giving us a ride on Kerra’s train of thought as it pulls out of grounded reality and heads into metaphor, where microwaving people sounds like a good idea. Notice, too, how we instinctively know that it’s not George who is asking these questions but Kerra herself. In fact, both the “she decided” and the “she wondered” could be eliminated, and we’d still know.
Often, a character’s thoughts help establish voice and tone, thus setting the mood—beginning on the very first page. Here is the second paragraph of Anita Shreve’s The Pilot’s Wife. All we know thus far is that the protagonist, Kathryn, has been awakened before dawn.
The lit room alarme
d her, the wrongness of it, like an emergency room at midnight. She thought in quick succession: Mattie. Then, Jack. Then, Neighbor. Then, Car accident. But Mattie was in bed, wasn’t she? Kathryn had seen her to bed, had watched her walk down the hall and through a door, the door shutting with a firmness that was just short of a slam, enough to make a statement but not provoke a reprimand. And Jack—where was Jack? She scratched the sides of her head, raking out her sleep-flattened hair. Jack was—where? She tried to remember the schedule: London. Due home around lunchtime. She was certain. Or did she have it wrong and had he forgotten his keys again?9
Notice how every fact in that attention-grabbing paragraph has meaning that compounds in light of each new detail. In other words, it adds up. What emerges is a candid portrait of Kathryn, her family life, and how she processes information as she struggles to quell the growing suspicion that something is very wrong. It’s not just her thoughts, which are very simple, but her thought pattern—staccato, ragged, confused—that drives the scene forward. The minimal tags Shreve gives us—“She thought in quick succession,” “She tried to remember the schedule”—serve to highlight the thoughts themselves, establishing a style, and a voice, that is fresh, compelling, and hard to resist.
But is a tag really necessary? Do we need the author to tell us that we’ve slipped out of the narrative voice and into the character’s head? Nope. In this snippet from Elmore Leonard’s Freaky Deaky, there is no tag or signifier at all:
Robin watched him drink his wine and refill the glass. Poor little guy, he needed a mommy. She reached out and touched his arm. “Mark?” Felt his muscle tighten and took that as a good sign.10
Is there any doubt that it’s Robin, rather than Leonard, who sees Mark as a poor little guy in need of a mommy? Yet there are no quotation marks, no italics, no “she thought,” “wondered,” “realized,” or “mused.” There is nothing at all in the text that flags this as Robin’s opinion. Why? Because none is needed. We get it. Just as we understand that it’s Robin’s opinion that Mark’s muscle tightening is a good sign. As far as Leonard is concerned, she could be totally wrong—which is one of the things that keeps us reading. We want to find out.
Notice that, as when writing in first person, a character in third person can’t make a definitive statement about how anyone else feels or what they’re about to do. Just as in life, characters can only assume. And very often that assumption then tells us something about the character making it, as evinced by Selevan and his self-possessed goth granddaughter, Tammy, again from Careless in Red:
She nodded thoughtfully, and he could tell from the expression on her face that she was about to twist his words and use them against him as she seemed only too expert at doing.11
George is not telling us that Tammy is going to twist Selevan’s words. Rather, it’s Selevan who is drawing that inference from her expression. From this we learn three things: that he’s positive it will happen; that it might not; and, most revealing of all, that he feels she misunderstands just about everything he says. So since Careless in Red is written in third-person omniscient, if George wanted to make it clear that Tammy has, in fact, not misunderstood Selevan, could she reveal it in the next sentence by taking us into Tammy’s head?
No, she couldn’t, because that would be committing the sin known as “head hopping.”
Head Hopping
No matter whose point of view you’re writing in, you may be in only one head per scene. Thus, since George began the scene in Selevan’s head, there she must stay. Why? Because switching POV in the middle of a scene is often so jarring it instantly breaks the flow. It looks something like this:
Ann paced, wondering when Jeff would snap out of it and tell her what happened. Had he finally told his wife Michelle about them? Why did he look so heartbroken? She wanted it to be a good thing, but try as she might, she couldn’t come up with a single hopeful reason why he would sit hunched in the corner of the couch, staring at the frayed rug that, she realized, was in dire need of cleaning. When she could stand it no longer, she turned to him, “Jeff, what is it? What’s wrong?”
She knows, Jeff thought. I can feel it. Sure, I told Michelle about her. Who knew she’d laugh and say, “Go ahead, run off with that loser. I bet she’s the kind of woman who has a houseful of dirty rugs.” I’ve been such a fool. But how do I tell Ann it’s over? Maybe if I just sit here and stare at the rug, she’ll figure it out. Women are pretty intuitive that way, aren’t they?
When Jeff didn’t answer, Ann’s heart sank. It could mean only one thing: he’d told Michelle, and she’d mentioned that dirty rug thing again. She’s been obsessed with it, ever since she opened that rug cleaning business back in March. God, Jeff is such a fool!
Disorienting, isn’t it? So why do writers do it? Because they see it as the only way to convey information that is crucial to the scene. But is it? Not exactly. There is, in fact, a language that speaks louder than words. Let’s have a listen, shall we?
Body Language
Imagine you’re walking down the street; you turn a corner, and two blocks up you see a figure ambling away. Although from behind it could be anyone, you instantly recognize your best friend. How? By his gait.12 Welcome to the world of body language.
Body language is the one language it’s impossible to really lie in. As Steven Pinker says, “Intentions come from emotions, and emotions have evolved displays on the face and body. Unless you are a master of the Stanislavsky method, you will have trouble faking them; in fact, they probably evolved because they were hard to fake.”13 In other words, body language is the first thing we humans learned to decode, because even back in the Stone Age we knew that what a person grunts and what he really means might be two very different things.
The same is true of your protagonist. In a story, the goal is to show us how a character really feels—especially when there’s a big discrepancy between what he wants to say and what he can say—through his body language. The most common mistake writers make is using body language to tell us something we already know. If we know Ann is sad, why would we need a paragraph describing what she looks like when she’s crying? Rather, body language should tell us something we don’t know. At its most effective, it tells us what’s really going on inside the character’s head. This is why body language works best when it’s at odds with what’s happening—either by telling us something that the character doesn’t want known
Ann pretends to be completely calm but can’t stop her right foot from nervously jittering.
… or by dashing a character’s expectations:
Ann expects Jeff to be glad he’s finally left Michelle; instead, he sits there, hunched, staring mournfully at the embarrassingly dirty rug.
We feel Ann’s pain, because the author made sure we already knew what she expected—that Jeff would return grinning, with luggage. Instead, he’s come back frowning, with baggage. Unless we’re aware of both what Ann wants and what she then gets instead, all the body language in the world will be rendered mute. This sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how often writers forget to let us know what a character hopes will happen, so that when it doesn’t, we have no idea their expectations have been dashed.
With that in mind, let’s revisit Ann and Jeff, this time using body language to convey the information:
Finally, when she could stand it no longer, Ann turned to him. “Jeff, what is it? What’s wrong? Did you tell Michelle about us or not?”
Jeff said nothing, slouching further into the sagging couch, eyes downcast as Ann paced back and forth with such force that dust flew from the mangy rug. She saw him glance at her face, his eyes quickly darting away, and quickened her stride.
Ann’s heart sank; she knew Michelle must have mentioned the dirty rug thing again. Why else would he just sit there, staring at the damn carpet, the coward. He was probably waiting for her to figure it out and send him packing. Jeff’s such a fool, she thought. I’m better off without him.
In this version,
even though we don’t hear the exact details of what Michelle said to Jeff, Ann’s insights go a long way toward filling us in on their dynamic. And see how clearly we understood what Jeff was thinking simply by reading his body language? Since we know what Ann wants (Jeff), and what she’s realizing she’s not going to get (Jeff), her body language told us what was going on in her head as she paced. Just as Jeff’s body language reveals his reaction to hers. It is purely visual. It works because, story-wise, we know what it means, emotionally, to both of them. Otherwise, the scene would be opaque. Sure, we’d know something intense is going on between them, but we’d have no idea what.
But wait. Instead of all that, couldn’t you just leap in and tell the reader how they’re feeling? And while you’re at it, give us the heads-up on who’s right and who’s being a little bit of a jerk? I mean, what if the reader gets it wrong?
And that brings us to another common pitfall: editorializing. It’s what writers resort to when they don’t trust the reader to get it.
Hey, You’re Not the Boss of Me
Make us feel, and believe me, we’ll know who’s right and who’s probably not. Tell us what to feel, on the other hand, and what we’ll feel is bullied. That’s why when you’re checking to make sure you’ve conveyed how the action affects the protagonist, you want to resist the urge to jump in and take it a step further, by telling the reader what to think or feel about it as well. Editorializing is perfectly fine in a newspaper (remember those?) op-ed piece, where the whole point is to tell readers what you believe they should think or feel. In a story, telling readers what to feel not only annoys them but pushes them right out of the story. The reader’s goal is to experience the story on her own terms, not to have it explained to her or be herded toward a specific hard-and-fast conclusion. This even applies to something as seemingly benign as exclamation points. They’re almost always distracting! Really!! What’s worse, they pull the reader’s brain right out of the story by giving her an overt order rather than trusting the story to trigger her reaction all by itself.
