Tight Third and Me

I wrote my first novel, Shadow Magic, in what I now call “sloppy omniscient viewpoint.” Most of the time, a given scene would have a “viewpoint character,” but whenever I thought someone else’s thoughts or feelings were more interesting, I just jumped into that character’s head for a few lines. I also backed off every now and then to say things like “Everyone felt saddened” when I wanted to look at my entire group of characters from the outside for a few minutes. I had no idea what I was doing, really; I’d never taken a creative writing course and my knowledge of analytical terminology was limited to a dim memory of my high school English classes, which had focused more on things like theme and symbolism than on stuff like plot and viewpoint.

By the time I finished the book, I knew something was wrong wrong wrong. I still wasn’t sure what, but I’d at least begun to look at other books with a writer’s eye, and I’d noticed that a lot of my favorites stuck with one character throughout, giving everything that person saw and thought and nothing that anyone else saw or thought. (I still didn’t have any terminology for that). So I decided, quite arbitrarily, that I’d do that for my next book, just to see if I could. And even though that was thirty years ago, I remember it quite clearly.

The first few chapters were tough. I hadn’t realized just how often I bounced around, or how convenient it had been to just say that so-and-so was angry or depressed instead of having to stop and figure out what “angry” or “depressed” would look like to my viewpoint character. Then I started to get the hang of it. It was kind of like method acting, I thought (not that I actually know anything about method acting). I just put myself into the viewpoint character’s head very firmly, and described what “I” saw and felt.

Then I hit chapter seven.

In chapter seven, two things happened: first, my viewpoint character was separated from the rest of the group, and second, she was drugged up to the eyebrows. She wasn’t going to be around to watch the exceedingly important things the other characters would be doing; she wasn’t even going to be in any condition to make reasonable observations of what she was seeing.

I stalled dead on that chapter for weeks. I desperately wanted to pick a different character and tell the next bit from his/her viewpoint (two characters, actually; one to watch what the rest of the group was doing and one to watch what my original, now-drugged, viewpoint character was doing). I knew how to do that.

But I couldn’t make myself do it. I’d set myself a challenge, and I really didn’t want to blow it. More important, every time I started seriously considering which of my remaining characters to use for my new viewpoint, I realized it felt wrong. I’d gone six chapters seeing things through the eyes of one and only one character; to switch to somebody else in chapter seven would be a huge jolt. It would throw the story off track. It felt wrong.

So, after much agonizing, I went ahead and wrote the next scene through the drugged eyes of my original viewpoint character. I had to stop and consider practically every sentence to make sure I was staying with the right feel and not showing any thoughts or reactions or giving any descriptions that my too-tranquilized heroine wouldn’t be thinking or feeling or describing. It was a big relief when she finally escaped and crawled into hiding to sleep it off.

Shortly thereafter, my POV reunited with the rest of the group. Everyone brought everyone else up to speed, and I found out something else. That scene I’d wanted to do so badly, the one my viewpoint character wasn’t around to watch? It worked just fine to have my other characters tell her all about it after the fact, in detail, because, you know, she hadn’t been around to watch. Oh, telling the story wasn’t as immediate or vivid as the actual scene would have been, but it worked…and given that I’d chosen a tight-third viewpoint, it worked much better than breaking the viewpoint to switch to someone else (so I could show the scene).

After that, sticking with tight-third for the rest of the book was…less difficult. Not easy, but at least I’d finally gotten it into my head that whenever I found myself desperately wanting to jump into some other character’s thoughts, I needed to think instead about how things looked to my viewpoint character and what conclusions she could draw from them. I didn’t always get to provide the thoughts and reactions I wanted to, because my POV character didn’t know most of her traveling companions very well, but I discovered that quite often, this was a Good Thing, because it let my POV character wonder and speculate and have her own interesting reactions, all of which ended up being even more revealing.

If I’d been a better writer, I might even have been able to manage showing enough of the other characters’ reactions for the reader to draw the right conclusions while still having my POV draw the wrong ones because of her background…but hey, it was only my second book and I was still struggling with sticking to one and only one POV character. I wasn’t up to anything more sophisticated.

Anyway, by the time I finished Daughter of Witches, I felt fairly comfortable writing single-viewpoint tight-third person. I even knew what to call it, because by then I was in a writing group and had other writers to talk to, several of whom knew a lot more about terminology than I did and were happy to share. I wrote my third book in first-person, which helped even more with the sticking-to-the-inside-of-one-head thing (because in first person, it is really really obvious if the writer slips and says something the POV wouldn’t know).

And that’s how I learned to write tight-third person.