I’ve been working on my fourth novel and also some short stories recently, and I’ve found myself gravitating to to third-person narration, after mostly writing in the first person for years and years. Almost two years ago I finished writing the first draft of the book I’m working on now, a draft that was in first person. I am very un-precious with drafts and my novels change dramatically from the first version to the final. From first person to third person came a shift of sorts: a feeling that I was observing more keenly than before, making my case for an audience I didn’t yet know.
Last week I was in Scotland, where I tagged along as my boyfriend built a deck for a cottage in a place so remote we had to drive fifteen minutes for milk. I felt very indolent sitting inside in the warm and the dry as he sawed wood and wheeled cartloads of gravel. The first line of a short story came to me as I washed up, watching him through the window as he worked without realising I was watching. The sheeting rain. His look of concentration. For a moment I stepped outside of myself and was someone else, a visitor to the cottage maybe, seeing him for the first time. How long would it be before he noticed me watching? I wondered, but he didn’t notice at all.
The car started making disturbing noises when we drove around, but we had no choice but to continue to use it. Because I was writing all these stories in the third person I found myself imagining scenarios and narrating them to myself. The car lost control and fell into the loch. The grinding of the metal on metal was a prescient sign that she only noticed once they were suspended in the water, too quickly for her to react.
A relationship is a story two people are always building. A relationship is a small religion you both have to believe in with fervour, or risk it falling apart. This is the premise of my novel, underneath the other premises of my novel. It requires analysis, a dispassionate chronicler. When I write in third person I am finding I can be more precise, even clinical, like I am explaining something to myself. I am less melodramatic, bogged down in whichever character’s self-pity, or my own thinly-disguised. I am able to step outside from the scene and view it from a height and see the pieces working around it, the friction and ease of whatever machinery it exists within.
I used to want to think of voice as something religious, something speaking through you, when the reality was I was making it up, I was always driving the narrative. I think now there’s little divine in writing except from the mysticism of feeling attuned to your own self, that you’re not being a conduit but instead are in conversation with what you feel and what you love. Really that’s better, even if it’s fleeting and difficult to do so.
When I narrated the scenarios as we sped around the water I imagined that I was inducing them, or seeing them in advance, some latent psychic power. I worried, vaguely, I was articulating my own doom. But really I had just been in the house too much. The car turned out to be broken, but it was fixable. We didn’t fall into the loch. No disaster was forthcoming.
"A relationship is a small religion you both have to believe in with fervour, or risk it falling apart." This is a beautiful sentiment, and put me in mind of a fascinating column I read recently by Lillian Fishman called "The Holy Evil" in which she explores the idea of inequality and love. In it, she quotes Phyllis Rose, who wrote that in happy relationships both partners “agree on the scenario they are enacting”—even if the scenario they imagine they are agreeing to enact is “totally at variance with the facts.” Perhaps this is what love is: a shared belief in the relationship, a religious devotion to it, and importantly, a kind of mutual madness...
(The full article is here if you would like to read it: https://thepointmag.com/advice/the-holy-evil/)