POVs—mixing first- and third-person points of view

This from Justin:

I'm intrigued more by your shift in POV... does your work utilize first AND third present? That's an interesting tactic.

Right now I'm editing a novel written in a shifting first person POV (very similar in style to Poisonwood Bible, or Hornby's newest work).

I guess my question for you is "What are the tactics for keeping a first person present account interesting?" In the past and in third person I feel it's much easier.

I recall Chuck Palahniuk warning writers not to get too deep into the "I" "Me" "I"s because they bore a reader... how do you feel?

And from Bernita:

How do you feel about using "* * *" to separate points of view?

In my current work in progress, I use the points of view of four characters: two protagonists and two antagonists. And yes, Justin, I am mixing a first-person narrative with third-person narratives. My primary protagonist, the person whose story I feel I'm telling, is first-person, and the rest are third-person.

Why? I "heard" her voice, and liked it very much. I also wanted to experience what happens to her as intimately as possible, from a psychological point of view. In addition, the story is told in present tense, which compounds the immediacy and intimacy.

Combining first-person narratives with third-person isn't new. One best-seller, James Patterson, uses first person for his detective hero, Alex Cross, and third person for the killer. In the books of his that I've read (I stopped a while back), Patterson was careful to keep his points of view in separate chapters.

I've done something different. In a single chapter I will sometimes shift from the first-person narrator to a third-person narration and back again. Or from one third-person pov to another. Does this work? I think so. In my critique groups there has been a person or two who was bothered by the first-third shifts at first, but then became accustomed to them. The final arbiter of whether it works or not is, of course, an acquisitions editor somewhere down the road.

Here's an excerpt from the work that illustrates the technique. Note, Bernita, that I use the "* * *" convention to separate the points of view and give the reader a clear signal that there's a change. I use the asterisks whenever I shift points of view, whether from first to third or from one third to another. For time lapses, I simply add an extra line break. This excerpt was used in a previous post, by the way.

So, here's the end of narration from one viewpoint and a shift into a second. This is from a scene in the second chapter. We are in the Chicago Art Institute. Some things you need to know: the first character wields a kind of magic to disguise herself with an illusion she refers to as a "glamére" because she and her race fear being discovered … and she's received unsettling attention from a man with what looked like a video camera when she entered the Art Institute. She can also "see" aura colors that reveal the nature of a person's thoughts, in this case, deception. Oh, and the protagonist is severely depressed and contemplating suicide (the reader knows all of this at this point).

Hurrying footsteps sound behind me and I turn and see a thick-bodied female museum guard hurtle up from the lower-level stairs. She stops abruptly, then sends her gaze on a hunt through the Art Institute lobby. I've never seen an Institute guard hurry -- they are usually older people who meander, wearing bemused half-smiles, lucky to be paid to spend their days surrounded by treasure.

This guard is far younger. Broad-shouldered. Short black hair. Pale skin. Now that I focus on her, I see that she radiates threads of deception. And she, too, carries a video camera. A guard with a video camera?

Does she seek me? Perhaps my leper glamére is too grotesque and the cashier alerted the guard. Maybe I went too far, letting the ugliness inside me show so malignantly.

The guard's attention unnerves me, so I hurry on, considering what countenance to adopt next. Something innocuous. I just want to be left alone.

* * *

KB sees a tall, hooded figure in a long coat heading away from her, down the hall with the knights in it. The person glances back, and then increases speed.

KB glimpses a brown-skinned face and swallows hard. Where a nose should be is a gaping wound, surrounded by angry lesions on cheeks and forehead. Nausea rises in her throat; she fights it off. The face is inhuman. Now fear prickles her skin. What if the Others aren't human? Nobody'd thought about running into ET.

She aims her thermal imaging camera down the corridor. A bright glow flares in the viewfinder. Gotcha!

Reflex sends her hand inside her coat; the Walther 9mm automatic is there, snug in its holster. She can handle whatever the Other is. She steps out in strong strides and hustles after her quarry. She'd like to run, but doesn't want to alarm her. It.

Here's what I feel this technique does for me…and the reader. To use an audio analogy, the shift gives the reader a "surround sound" experience of what's going on. And it provides two points of tension for the reader -- the pursued and the pursuer. It expands the reader's perceptions of the scene and deepens them in the way that she gets to "see" the pursuer and the pursued through two points of view, and understand the subjective impact of what is seen and what happens. The story becomes, in my view, richer, and the pace, tension, and suspense are enhanced.

This can be done whether the two points of view are both third person or a mix. However, I don't think going from one first-person narrative to another in this way would work very well -- too much potential confusion in going from one "I" to another. I think that's better left to chapter or section breaks.

You have to be darned careful with the transition when using this technique. I was careful to use action to take me from one pov to another smoothly. The first character hurries away from the second, and then the second sees the first character heading away. My notion is that the reader will see this with little or no sense of disruption, as if their mental camera is viewing the scene from one direction (the first character's) and then cuts to a reverse shot (the second's pov), a common technique in film. No reason, I think, it won't work here.

As for tactics to keep a first person present account interesting… Hmm. Frankly, I've never thought of this in an analytical way. My first response to the question is to avoid internal "navel gazing" by the character. By focusing on what is happening, including the character's reactions to what is happening in terms of both response and internal monologue, it seems to me that an interesting story will be interesting. I'll come back to this in another post because it's very much worth discussing.

I, too, am in the process of editing a novel told in the first person. One of the things I'm finding is that, in my view, the narrative is flawed by frequent philosophical side trips that take me away from a potentially riveting story. Another problem the author is going to have to deal with in rewrite is how to deliver exposition, especially necessary background information about the world the character is in, without the narrative reading like an excerpt from a travelogue. Exposition in a first-person narrative, I feel, MUST be delivered in tiny tidbits interwoven within a lively scene via action, description, dialogue, internal monologue, etc.

This post is getting sorta long, so I'll stop for now. But I'll come back to this subject some more, especially if you send me a question or two. On my editor side, I'm highly sensitive to point-of-view "violations" -- although, keep in mind, there are no rules. But there are techniques that work better than others in terms of making a story an experience versus an information dump, and that's what I strive for.

For what it's worth.

Ray

Free edit in exchange for posting permission. You send a sample that you have questions about and of which you'd like an edit. I won't post it without your permission.

© 2005 Ray Rhamey