In this week’s episode, we take a look at third person narration versus first person narration, and consider the pros and cons of each when writing fiction.
Once again it’s time for Coupon of the Week!
The audiobook of GHOST IN THE ASHES (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is now available on my Payhip store! You can get it for 50% off with this coupon code:
JANASHES
The coupon code is valid until February 15th, 2023.
https://payhip.com/b/JXW0t
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 145 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January 27th, 2023, and today we’re going to talk about third person versus first person for fiction and whether one is better than the other. Before we get into all that, let’s say have some updates on my current writing projects.
For the LitRPG ebook, I am 63,000 words into it as of this recording, which means I’m about 2/3 of the way through the rough draft. Hopefully progress will continue to be good and I would very much like to get that rough draft wrapped up in the first week of February and then I will announce the title, the book description, and the cover so you all can see exactly what it’s going to be about. I’m also working on Silent Order: Thunder Hand and Cloak of Dragonfire in the background as my main focus is on the LitRPG book and I am about 2,000 words into both Cloak of Dragonfire and Silent Order: Thunder Hand.
I did have time for Coupon of the Week this week. This week’s coupon is for the audiobook version of Ghost in the Ashes, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy, which is now available in my Payhip store. You can get it for 50% off with this coupon code: JANASHES. That’s JANASHES again, that’s JANASHES. The coupon code is valid until February 15th, 2023 and I will include a link to the Payhip store and the audiobook in the show notes.
00:01:35 What is LitRPG?
Since I’ve mentioned I am working on a LitRPG book, a few people have asked what LitRPG is as a genre, so I thought I would attempt an explanation here. Basically, it’s a story about a fantasy video game, usually using elements from both fantasy and science fiction. It’s not surprising that a genre like this should have evolved. Recently, a New York Times article was roundly mocked for stating that until fairly recently, video games were a niche hobby typically associated with children. Now, this may have been true in 1980, but as painful as this may be for some people to admit, it hasn’t been the 1980s for a while now and the 1980s aren’t coming back anytime soon.
In 1980, it would have been very unlikely for a group of middle-aged professionals to discuss their favorite video games over lunch. In 2023, this is so commonplace as to be unremarkable. Even people who don’t think of themselves as playing video games will often play stuff like Words with Friends, Wordle, Boggle, and Candy Crush on their phones. Anyway, given the cultural penetration that video games have achieved, it’s not surprising that fiction and novels will start to reflect that. There are several novels that can be considered proto-LitRPG, but it didn’t really evolve into a distinct genre until the 2010s.
To speak broadly, LitRPG tends to break down into four main types of stories. First, the plot revolves around the players of a video game controlled by a large and ruthless business, reflecting how in real life, much of the game market is controlled by occasionally unscrupulous mega corporations. Often the game will involve virtual reality or some sort of immersion into the virtual world like The Matrix. Usually the stakes in the game world and in the real world are equally tense and significant and often end up connected and feed into each other.
The second type of LitRPG is the protagonist is kidnapped by aliens or gods, or some sort of interdimensional beings, and taken to a world or a pocket dimension set up to function exactly like a computer game, which the aliens or gods or interdimensional beings have created, for reasons mysterious, benevolent, or malevolent. The characters must often either win the aliens game, find a way to escape, become the masters of this pact dimension, or some combination of all three.
The third type is apocalypse. Earth is afflicted by some sort of massive event or catastrophe, like nuclear explosion, asteroid impact, quantum singularity, or something of that nature and that rewrites the rules of reality and causes the Earth to become like a computer game. The characters must navigate this new reality. The fourth type is dungeoncore stories. The protagonist is transformed into the master of a typical RPG dungeon and must build the dungeon, stock it with monsters, and defend it against adventurers. I think the original genesis of this version was the Dungeon Master games from the ‘90s, where you play as the evil overlord of a dungeon and fight off invading adventures, though nowadays Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft are probably bigger influences.
Obviously there are overlaps between the four main strands and they have other influences like Chinese progression fantasy style stories have a big influence on LitRPGs, and all the different strands tend to have base building stories where the protagonist gains control of a stronghold or a town and must collect resources and build it up, which is of course the premise of many games. A little preview, my LitRPG book is almost entirely in category one. However, I think I’ve managed to create a satisfying twist on the premise and we’ll find out if I’m right soon enough.
00:05:02 Reader Questions
Now, before we get into our main topic of the week, let’s have some questions. Our first question is from Anthony, who says: I am an avid day one reader of your Frostborn and Dragonskull series and have been since book 3 or so. I’ve been looking to start a new tabletop RPG campaign with some friends, and I think the world of Andomhaim is a great place to set it in. Many layers of history built on top of each other make for a great sandbox setting. I was planning on going through the books again, rereading and taking notes on locations, monsters, and creating a sort of world Bible for the campaign. I thought it might be worth asking if you had a document with all that information that you would be willing to share before I did all that. Thank you for your writing. I love reading through them whenever the books come out and they’ve been inspirational with their creativity.
Thanks, Anthony. I’m glad you have enjoyed the books. In answer to your question, I don’t really have a sort of master world Bible document. The closest I have would be the glossaries at the end of the Sevenfold Sword and Dragontiarna books. Probably the most complete glossary would be the one at the end of Dragontiarna: Warden, if you want to use that as a reference. I thought in the past about doing like a world of Andomhaim source book with, you know, a lot of information and background on the setting and tips and tricks for adapting it to the various dominant tabletop RPG systems out there.
The trouble is I just don’t have the time to do it. Like this podcast. I’m recording this at three in the afternoon. I got up at 6:15 this morning and I’ve kind of been going full blast all day and I still only had time to get 100 words of new book written today, but hoping to get another, you know, 2,900 after recording this. I would have liked to have gotten more done, but 3,000 words is all I think I’m going to manage today. So I just don’t know what I would fit in the writing of something like a world bible. But I’m glad you have enjoyed the books.
Our next question is from Becca who says: Does this mean another of your wonderful mystery novels is coming soon? Thanks, Becca. I’m glad you like the Cormac Rogan books, which are the ones she’s referring to. In answer to your question, unfortunately no, I don’t have any plans to continue that right now. The reason is the last time I wrote a mystery novel, it was Covering Fire. Covering Fire’s entire first month of sales came to about 60% of what Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer did on its first day, versus the entire month. So it seems like it’s a better idea to write more Dragonskull books than Cormac Rogan books, but maybe I will have time at some point in the future. I just don’t have any immediate plans to continue.
Our next question is from Colin who says: I just finished rereading all the Nadia books. Any more coming soon? Any more Cloak and Ghost? I am 2,000 words into Cloak of Dragonfire and that will come out sometime this year. Maybe in the spring, maybe in the summer. Depends on how the next couple of months goes, but I am starting. It will come out at some point before the end of 2023. I’m not planning to do any more Cloak and Ghost books because the crossover confused people and I got a lot of very confused emails about it. While I appreciate the people who did enjoy those books, they were too much hassle so I stopped doing them.
00:08:22 Main Topic of the Week: Third Person or First Person Point of View?
Now on to our main topic of the week: different point of views. Is it better to write your book from a third person or first person?
First, let’s define our terms. Writing in the third person is when you are writing using the character’s name and their specific pronouns. For example, Ridmark did this, Ridmark did that. He did this, he did that. That’s third person. First person is when you use the first person pronoun of I, like I did this, I did that and so on. Second person is when you use the you pronoun. You did this, you did that. That’s a lot less frequently used in fiction, though. We’ll touch on that in a bit.
There’s three different kinds of third person. All the different types with the third person or first person have their own pros and cons. There’s not really a right answer or a wrong answer, but we’ll go through them here. Third person omniscient is where you are telling the story from the third person, but you aren’t restricting yourself to the interior of a single character’s head. Sometimes writers use what’s called third person limited, where it’s written in the third person, but it’s just entirely from the point of view of one character. For example, to use a common example, George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire books, that uses third person limited. Each chapter is from a specific viewpoint character and then he rotates through them as the book progresses.
By contrast, third person omniscient will jump from the head to head of each of the characters in the same chapter, or sometimes even in the same sentence. Like they could say something like “she thought he was an idiot, but he also thought that she was an idiot” in the same sentence, and that would be an example of third person omniscient. Now this approach is not so popular nowadays, but it does have its advantages. One of the big advantages it is very easy to tell a story and you can cover a scene from multiple perspectives. Agatha Christie did this a couple of times, and it’s very common in older books as well. Tolkien did this in Lord of the Rings as well, and because he was Tolkien, he was able to pull it off. In the various chapters, because of the way he has the book divided, we’ll spend more time with one group of characters and then switch to a different group of characters and we’ll be able to get glimpses from inside the point of views of the various characters. Some of the chapters with Frodo and Sam switch between Sam and Gollum’s viewpoint pretty frequently.
However, I should mention these examples of third person omniscient I’ve mentioned so far are involve Agatha Christie and J.R.R. Tolkien, who are considered to be some of the best writers in the English language, which means when they set out to do third person omniscient, they knew exactly what they were doing and why. For newer writers, it’s very easy to accidentally cause the reader to get lost trying to keep track of whose point of view we are currently in. It’s also easy for all the characters to end up sounding the same because since third person omniscient easily jumps from perspective to perspective. If you’re not careful, all the characters will end up having internal monologues that sound close to the same and that is not helpful for storytelling. So as you see, third person omniscient has both pros and cons.
The other variant of third person is third person limited, where unlike third person omniscient, you are sticking entirely within the head of one character. This has many advantages and one of them is that it’s easier to focus and you don’t have to worry about getting your characters muddled together in their internal monologue quite so much. I would say that this is probably the best approach for beginners. You can use third person omniscient if you know exactly what you want to achieve with it. But if you’re just starting out and you’re not entirely sure of yourself and if you want to use third person, it’s probably best to stay to a third person limited. It’s a common technique.
We mentioned already that George R.R. Martin’s used it in his books, Wheel of Time used it, and you can probably think of many other books that use third person limited and then rotate between the different point of view characters. The weakness of this is you need to be careful that the point of view character doesn’t know things that he or she shouldn’t. Like if you’re writing in third person omniscient and you’re writing a mystery, it’s possible to have you know, the murderer and the detective in the same scene without either of them realizing it and thinking their own internal monologues and not worrying about, you know, the other overhearing their thoughts. With third person limited, you do need to keep track of which character knows what, and you also need to make sure that you try to develop a distinctive voice for each character, because obviously a housing contractor wouldn’t talk the same way as a professor of professor of literature. And so if you have like those two characters in your book, you need to make sure that their point of views, if their point of view characters are distinct.
Before we talk about first person, to maintain a strict numerical order, we should probably talk about second person first. Second person is when you use the pronoun you to narrate the story. Like you say in the story you did this and then you do that and this is probably most commonly used or at least most used in a form where people will encounter it in video games and usually like the narrative cutscenes between a video games or in like the quest log of a video game where it wills say, you are standing before the gates of the fortress or the quest log will say you have accepted this quest from the lord of the fortress to go out and get this and so forth. In fiction, to be blunt, second person tends to be kind of weird. It’s usually very stream of consciousness. It often appears in like dream sequences or like drug flashbacks, that kind of thing. It’s also very commonly used in present tense because the third person omniscient and third person limited are usually past tense like he said, or she said, and so forth. But second person, when it shows up, tends to be in the present tense. Like you stand at the edge of the precipice and you walk through the valley of your dreams, and so forth. So this can work for flashbacks or for any sort of scene where you want to convey a sense of surreality, like a dream sequence or the character slipped into another world that the human mind can’t process, that kind of thing, but otherwise, unless you have a specific need for second person, it’s probably best to stick to either third person, either limited or omniscient, or first person.
So with that in mind, let’s talk about first person. First person obviously is where you write the story from a single character’s perspective using the pronouns I and we, like I did this and I did that and so forth. This has many advantages. For one, it’s very easy to focus because then since you’re writing entirely from this one character’s perspective, you don’t have to worry quite so much about the other characters perspectives as you write, but you do need to have a very specific voice. When you’re writing in first person, sometimes it’s good to use like a framing device for why the book’s in first person, like someone’s writing a memoir or telling the story of what happened, which means that gives you a useful framing device for why the book is written in first person. Again, you have to be very aware of the character’s specific voice and what they know and when they know it because the difference between this and third person admissions is that first person is inherently limited. Since your writing will only know what the character at that time knows. If your first person character suddenly knows things that he or she couldn’t know, the reader will be annoyed and feel cheated. There might not be a point to writing it in first person if you’re already better served by third person limited.
I have seen examples of first person where two different characters will be telling the story and the chapters alternate back and forth between them and that can work, so long as you clearly indicate at the start of the chapter which character is currently telling the story. You can also combine first person with third person limited. I have done that several times in the Nadia books. The last couple of Nadia books have had that, and it seems to have worked well and people like them. At least I haven’t had too many complaints about the way it works. Some genres in particular seem to prefer first person like urban fantasy, which the Cloak Games books are, has a lot of first person. It’s almost like a genre convention at that point and a lot of mystery novels have first person as well. Private eye novels in particular prefer to use first person, dating all the way back to the time of Raymond Chandler when he was writing Philip Marlowe.
So those are the various pros and cons and advantages and disadvantages of writing in third person, second person, and first person. It boils down to there is no right way or wrong way. It’s just whatever you feel comfortable writing and whatever serves the story best. We writers like to talk a lot about the various rules of writing or do this or don’t do that, but it ultimately comes down to just one rule that overrides everything else: don’t be boring. So pick whatever point of view method that you feel helps your stories to be not boring.
So that’s it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
