by Mike Klaassen

Created on: April 12, 2010   Last Updated: December 10, 2011

Writing fiction in third person is a lot more complicated than simply switching the pronouns from I to he or she.  The decision to narrate fiction in third person is just one of many choices an author should contemplate prior to putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. 

In addition to choosing grammatical person (first, second, or third), an author needs to make decisions regarding:

• Grammatical number

• Grammatical tense

• Author obtrusiveness

• Narrator obtrusiveness

• Narrator omniscience

• Narrator reliability

• Point-of-view character

• Reader involvement

Together, these choices comprise a narrative package that determine the style with which a story may be told in third person.

GRAMMATICAL NUMBER

Singular and plural are the basic choices in the English language.  The vast majority of fiction is told in singular, but a search of the Internet shows that some authors can and do experiment with 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-person plural.

GRAMMATICAL TENSE

The author has three basic choices for tense:

• Past tense

• Present tense

• Future tense

Some writers have experimented with stories using subjective, superlative, or imperative tenses.  An Internet search reveals examples of fiction written in the present and future tenses, but as observed by Orson Scott Card, in Characters and Viewpoint, "Almost every story you'll ever read or hear is in past tense." 

AUTHOR OBTRUSIVENESS

"In the long history of literature," notes Donald Maass in Writing the Breakout Novel, "the novel is a relatively recent development.  It arose during the Enlightenment, flowered during Victorian times, and in more recent decades has shortened and grown more intimate in response to our faster pace of life and in reaction to the dehumanizing aspects of our times."  Early in the development of the novel, according to Maass, the author's voice was considered essential.  "The novel today has downsized, grown more direct and has made characters supreme."

A novel with the "once-essential author's voice" mentioned by Maass could be described as having an obtrusive author.  While today's novels, where authors remain largely invisible, could be described as having unobtrusive authors. 

NARRATOR OBTRUSIVENESS

One of the most important decisions a fiction-writer makes is the role of the narrator.  A narrator is an assumed persona who may tell the story from his own point of view or from a character’s

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