“Darby almost always writes her stories in the third person,” she said.
I find that the third person point of view tends to be the safest. Readers can, more often than not, relate more to the story. This is, of course, a generalization.
My Strategy:
When I’m writing a novel or short story, I tend to have an omnipresent narrator who knows and sees all. It is very old fashion, but I like it. Most of my favorite novels are written this way. There are two main reasons why I choose to write in this style.
- I can follow many different storylines and have multiple main characters. This can be somewhat more difficult to do in first person (unless one writes in the braid style) and is damn near impossible to do in second person. Talk about confusing.
- This style makes the narrator unbiased, making it easier for the reader to form his/her own opinions about certain characters and actions. I don’t necessarily want to tell my readers what they should be feeling. For example: “My dog ran off into the woods and was never seen again,” vs “Sally’s dog ran off into the woods and was never seen again.”
If Sally tells me that her dog ran away, I will most likely feel more sympathy towards her than I would if a narrator told me that her dog ran away. Maybe I don’t like Sally. The all seeing narrator allows me to choose whether or not I want to invest these feeling into this moment of the story. It also allows the story to then shift to the point of view of the dog, whereas first person would be stuck on Sally. ‘I’m so glad to be away from that bitch, Sally,’ the dog thought.
The idea of a third person narrative is to give more freedom to both the writer and the reader. This is why I prefer it. Apologies for the short blog post, but I wasn’t really into the assigned topic this week.
Kisses from Hollywood!
-Darby
J. Jobe 