The Third Person Jedi Mind Trick

I'm going to kick this off by plugging a book which I didn't write by someone who does not know me from Adam.

The book is called How Fiction Works, and it's written by someone named James Wood, whom I assume is a professor of some type. I assume he has a Ph.D., so I'll call him "Dr. Wood" for the rest of this post.

Dr. Wood's book studies some of the greatest examples from literature, and he drives his point home with more examples than I have room for here, but he makes a few simple points that I believe can make any writer's work better:

• Third person can get your reader closer to the character than first person.
• Third person allows you to play a cool Jedi-Mind Trick on the reader.

Huh? Third person is closer than first person? Really?

Really. Here's why:

When the narrator speaks in first person, it is true that they can share their inner thoughts as the story unfolds. But as they do so, they also bring their own biases and filters to the storytelling.

Let's face it: People almost never say exactly what they are thinking in real life. They filter, modify, and edit to make what they say more acceptable to those who are listening and (more significantly) more acceptable to the ways in which they wish to see themselves.

So when you're reading a first-person account of anything, you are naturally running everything they say through that filter...second-guessing their motivations for saying what they are saying.

But third-person intuitively feels more authoritative to the reader. We tend to think of the third-person as an all-seeing reporter, a voice of God, if you will. So we are more likely to let our guards down when reading the third-person account. We're more likely to take it at face value.

But how do you get the inner action of the character in a third-person voice? How do you make the reader feel as if they are sitting on the character's shoulder, seeing the same action, thinking the same thoughts, and feeling the same emotions that the character is experiencing?

This is where Dr. Wood's Jedi Mind Trick comes into play. It's wonderfully simple:

When the camera is following a specific character, the narrator shifts into that character's mode of speech.

That's it. Of course, Dr. Woods goes into depth about how this works and why this works, and he gives lots of examples that help you get a feel for it. But that's the basic idea.