When we posted our series of posts on viewpoint (first person, third person limited, and third person omniscient), I mentioned that third person omniscient is often my favorite viewpoint to read, but that I have a bad habit of slipping into third person limited when I try to write it. The reason for this, I recently recognized, is that I have not spent enough time rigorously internalizing how to present character thoughts in different viewpoints, which results in my third person omniscient perspectives beginning to look more like third person limited based on how internal dialogue is presented. The other problem is that I sometimes struggle to devise a distinct narrative voice separate from the characters’ worldviews, but that’s a subject for a different post.
The most obvious presentation of internal dialogue is similar to that of external dialogue, with dialogue tags involving words like “thought” instead of “said.” These are often presented in italics, sometimes with and sometimes without quotation marks (it’s a stylistic thing – I’ve noticed that older works are more likely to use quotation marks, usually without accompanying italics, for their internal dialogues, while newer works, especially in genre fiction, are more likely to do italics, sans quotation marks). Regardless of the specific formatting, the effect is much the same, giving the reader clear markers that separate a character’s active thinking from something presented in their perspective (third person limited) or from what the narrator is presenting (third person omniscient). This tool is also useful in first person, but for this post I will be focusing on the two sub-types of third person. Especially in third person omniscient, when the narrator can be jumping around and presenting information from the heads of multiple characters within a given scene, this method of presentation is distinctly helpful.
In third person limited it still has a place, but the nature of the limited viewpoint, where the entire narration should be occurring from the perspective of the character, gives the author access to another tool, which is technically referred to as free, indirect speech. It’s a technique in which character thoughts are integrated into the text itself, without being distinctively offset or called out as in the internal dialogue mechanism. In other words, the narration might be humming along, and then you plop within the objective narration something that comes from the viewpoint character’s thoughts, but without anything specific to highlight it from the rest of the text. This might be best understood with an example. I could say “Raven inhaled, and the scents of crushed grass and just-harvested vegetables reminded him of his youth.” Or, with free, indirect speech, I could instead say “Raven inhaled. The scents of crushed grass and just-harvested vegetables were of home.” The same information is conveyed, but the latter does not require a callout that this is from Raven’s perspective.
This presentation does not just affect conscious character thoughts. As a tool for writers, it also allows us to control the reader’s distance from the action. Do we want the information presented to be filtered through a character, or do we want the reader to experience it for themselves, as it were? Offsetting Raven’s inhalation in the latter example allows the second sentence to stand on its own, making it more intimate and immediate for the reader to experience, whilst the former example filters the moment explicitly through Raven’s perspective, creating a distance from the reader. This is something I need to work on as a writing, because I have a bad habit of too often creating that distance by filtering events and moments explicitly through a character’s perspective, when that may not be the effect that I desire.
To some extent, you lose the free, indirect speech technique when you write in third person omniscient, which might seem like an enormous disadvantage, but that depends on the narrator that you choose to implement. Yes, you don’t have the luxury of free, indirect speech from a character’s perspective, but you can actually include more free, indirect speech from the narrator’s perspective, without distracting from the story, while providing the thoughts of multiple characters at any given moment through deliberate callouts. Depending on the story you want to tell, this can be a particular advantage. In the last third of Impressions, when Raven and Adria are adventuring together, I kept wishing that I was writing in third person omniscient, so that I could present both of their thoughts and perspectives on a given interaction, instead of being tied to Raven’s perspective. Frankly, the whole story might be better off in an omniscient viewpoint, so that is a revision that I will be considering, despite the significant amount of work it would require.
If this seems like a minor point, well, it sort of is. To a reader, this is the sort of technique that, when it’s executed properly, you shouldn’t notice. Even as a writer, it’s the sort of technique that, if you’re doing it properly, you probably won’t be consciously thinking about while you write. However, knowing about it, understanding it and how it affects a piece of writing, can make you more aware of the tools at your disposal as a writer, and more conscious of the options available to you and how you are implementing them. Just thinking through them, as I did in this post, may be enough to improve your writing. I sometimes feel that there are too many techniques and considerations to ever hold them all in mind while I write, and even too many to remember to examine during revisions, but by pondering them, by noticing them in others’ writing, and by maintaining some notion of them, the idea is that they will become something we implement subconsciously. Or so I think.
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