Blog # 5: Jess Yaun: Ready for Third Person Omniscient?

My stories often begin in the first person. A story idea wiggles around in my head for awhile and when I sit down to write, “I” usually comes out first. By the second or third page of scribbled first draft I’ll know whether first person is working or not. I think beginning in first person allows me to get inside my protagonist’s head and know them intimately. However, before starting the MAPW program, I didn’t think too much about point of view. In fact, in one of the first stories I turned in, my classmates pointed out I had switched point of view at the end of the story. It was only two lines, but when I looked closely, I had indeed slipped from the main character’s head and into another’s.

Once I focused on point of view in a way I never had, I realized I could create distance between myself and my protagonist and steer away from creating a main character that was too much like me, by writing in third person. I also enjoyed discovering for another story that writing in first person made the action and emotion immediate and gripping.

I prefer third person limited only because I’ve never really tried third person omniscient. The power and scope of that point of view still scares me. My novel started in first person like most of my stories do, but long before I revised and submitted my first section to my fiction class I had switched to third person limited. My protagonist, Rebecca, is dreadfully alone for the first few chapters and first person felt claustrophobic – both to write and to read. But now that I’m about halfway through the story, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s time to experiment with third person omniscient. No longer alone, Rebecca finds herself thrust back in time to the days of the Cherokees, and she is surrounded by a large clan that claims her as family. Yet suspicion grows among the tribe about who she is and why she is among them, and although I haven’t written those parts yet, I may need the freedom of showing what the people around her are thinking and feeling. I liked third person limited because I wanted my reader to go on the journey with her, to experience her revelations along with her, much as the reader does with Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, but I fear her limited perspective might suffocate the conflicts and twists that could emerge with a broader telling of Rebecca’s story.