My partner Jeff Sexton (the word “eggs” ends on his shoulder above) sent the following email to his Wild Fiction classmates.  Their book of short stories will be published this Christmas.

Dear Fellow Pale Eggs,

Roy had mentioned a technique in passing that I wanted to follow up on.  What he said was that it's often easier to write in first person and then to transform that writing into third person perspective than it is to actually write in third person to begin with.  It's a brilliant piece of writing advice and one that a few authors have mentioned.  Colleen Mariah Rae comes to mind as the author who has given the best example of this technique.  This is from her (highly recommended) book, Movies In The Mind:

“Because first person does create a sense of being close to the character, a good technique when you want a sense of distance in a story but still want the intimacy of the first person voice is to write in first person and to shift it later to the third.  I'll use an example from Donald Barthelme's short story “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby.”  Here are the first lines of the story:

'Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving.  And now he'd gone too far, so we decided to hang him.  Colby argued that just because he had gone too far (he did not deny that he had gone too far) did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging.  Going too far, he said, was something that everybody did sometimes.  We didn't pay much attention to this argument.  We asked him what sort of music he would like played at the hanging.'

Now if I change the pronouns to third person, it reads like this:

'Some of them had been threatening their friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving.  And now he'd gone too far, so they decided to hang him.  Colby argued that just because he had gone too far (he did not deny that he had gone too far) did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging.  Going too far, he said, was something that everybody did sometimes.  They didn't pay much attention to this argument.  They asked him what sort of music he would like played at the hanging.'

Do you see how the intimacy has been retained even though the pronouns have been changed?  The choice of person determines the way we as authors capture the fictional world.  Changing the person after a piece is written gives it a certain skewed quality that readers can't quite put their finger on.  It can make for provocative writing.”

Hope you all enjoyed – and got as much out of – this passage from the book as I did.

– Jeff