Third Person Limited Pitfall: The Shut-Out

[FifthView]

I recently received my DvD of the Writing Excuses podcasts, seasons 1-5, and I happened to listen to the first episode of the fifth season first. The subject is third-person limited POV.

This stuck out for me, because I've recently also started reading a new series that I'm enjoying quite a bit in which the author does this, and it's become slightly annoying. I'm calling this pitfall "The Shut-Out" although that's not a term that Brandon Sanderson et al. used. Here's an excerpt from that podcast:

[Brandon] Another pitfall... and I've actually I think mentioned this in a podcast before, and it's a painful one for me to admit because I tend to break this one. This is the rule that I suppose you can break or at least I do, but be very aware if you're doing third limited of withholding information from the reader. The reader is going to expect third limited to be more honest than first-person. A first-person narrator can excise entire portions of their narrative if they feel like they want to, depending on the type of first-person you're doing. Third person, that's going to feel really cheap. I still have wriggled around it in some places, and I worry, personally, that it's a little cheap for me to do. But you at least have to acknowledge that the character is saying, "No, I can't think about that right now," or these sorts of things. You can't do it too much, otherwise you're going to... your readers going to see through it.

[Howard] If your plot twist requires... if the punch of your plot twist requires the reader not being told something that one of the characters explicitly knows, then the best thing for you to do is not touch on that character's viewpoint [when] that character is thinking about those things or being involved with those things.

[Brandon] Or go with first-person instead, because that really... if you're wanting to withholding information from the reader that way, stay away from those viewpoints or use first person where they can.

[Howard] It's pretty cheap when the viewpoint character says, "I have a plan," and then we cut away.

[Brandon] Yeah. Now, you know... yeah.

[Howard] Sometimes that's fun, and I've done that myself.

[Brandon] But what's really cheap is when a character says, "I've got a plan," says this and then they don't tell you what that plan is, despite the fact that you're in their head, for the next 400 pages. That can be really problematic.​

Ok. The author I'm reading has done this in at least a couple ways, although not stringing the "secret" out for 400 pages:

1. Beginning a scene/chapter with a sentence using the pronoun "it" to refer to an event that hasn't happened yet but will be explained shortly.

The first time this happened, it felt odd. But I thought, hmmm, okay. It did make me curious for that span of sentences, to see what was about to happen. But I'm in the second book of the series, and this author has now used that device several times (at least) over the course of the first book and first third of the second book, and it's becoming annoying, one of those obvious devices that hits me over the head when I encounter it.

The whole series so far is written in a third person limited POV with only one POV character. It's pretty intimate, always in his head and from his POV. Then will come a new section/chapter, and the first lines will read something like this:

It happened just before dawn, and despite the events of the previous day, no one was prepared. No one could have been prepared. Jord had just awoken from a troubled sleep, his bladder full but his body still so tired and stiff he did not feel any inclination to leave his pallet to relieve himself. From a window, the first cock had started crowing.

Giselle's words from the previous night warred within Jord's mind with the crowing cock and the dim memory of a dream involving shadows and fire. Giselle seemed the only important thing right now. Jord did not like the way she entered his mind the moment he regained consciousness when he could be thinking of anything else. Like that dream. But she had said she could never marry a bastard, especially not one with only one eye and a penchant for killing without provocation. He disgusted her, she said.

Finally, the pressure of his bladder forced the thought away, or perhaps the sting of her words was too much for him and made the need to piss a more inviting focus. He managed to roll out of his pallet and stood, groaning. And that was when it happened. The sudden brilliance of red, brighter than the sun had ever been, poured into the room through the open window, momentarily blinding him. Then the wall around that window screamed—screamed—and the next moment, as his sight returned, he saw that the stone of the wall had melted. There came a laugh from the courtyard beyond.​

Ok. The above is not from the series I'm reading, just a quick example I've whipped up. It's long because I wanted to show how this device is being used in the books. The previous chapter or scene would have resolved something or have seemed to come to some sort of conclusion. Then, there will be an "it" to announce some important event about to happen, a surprise turn in the flow of things. Not only does this skew the timeline sequence of events, it breaks (for me) the flow of the intimate third-person experience of events. I'll admit to not being too bothered the first time this happened—the device worked; it strung me along. But by the fourth time, it has begun to feel cheap.

2. POV character learns some important information about an immediate danger, an exigent circumstance, but that information is withheld from the reader.

This has just happened in the first third of the second book in the trilogy I'm reading. The POV character is chasing down two mercenaries who are trying to kill an important messenger; he catches up to them, unhorses them, then chases one on foot—having decided to interrogate the man since he, the POV character, is unsure about why they are doing what they are doing. All of this plays out in great third person intimate immediacy.

But then the interrogation is made oblique. A paraphrase: "The man wouldn't talk. He pounded the man again. The man laughed. He employed all the techniques he knew to use, and because the man was a mere mercenary not particularly loyal to his employer, he spilled all their plans. As Jord knew he would. Jord looked at the sun and saw he had a full half day to make it back. He wouldn't make it in time. He was going to be late. And there was nothing he could do about it."

Then, a couple pages are spent with the POV character racing back over horrible terrain on a horse already beyond exhausted, but absolutely nothing of those "plans" is revealed. The reason he's racing back is withheld. It's as if, for that full half day, he never thinks about what awaits him. When he makes it to camp and sees the smoke rising from all over, his heart sinks. It's not until he's in camp and discovers things hadn't played out so horribly (i.e., not as planned by the mercenaries) that he explicates, to the commander, all that the mercenary had said. (Including further threats.)

I only remember this happening this one time in the two books, but it's in line with the other device: withholding information in an attempt to build tension. But it seems cheap to me.

Thoughts?

 

[Devor]

I did this just a little in my jerk challenge entry, and it felt weird and unsettling for me. I've no idea whether I pulled it off well or not.

I may have to do this very soon in a project that I'm working on now. It's possible the character has been lying about their identity from the start, or else is hiding a secret stolen from the other person, or else gets replaced at a certain point in full view of the reader. I believe I have to pick one of these three options when I start that character's POV.

Which begs the question, again. How much is too much to hide? In your quote from the podcast, they talk about hiding a plan for what to do next - lots of authors pull that off. I'm reminded of Tyrion Lannister in ASOIAF telling different plans to different members of the council to see which version gets back to Cersei. You didn't know what he was doing until after Cersei came in yelling at him. It worked just fine. But then again, if you were paying attention you should also have known he was up to something because he was telling different things to different people.

Characters also hide their deep backgrounds from readers all the time. It's almost expected that many characters are hiding things about their past.

But how much of a secret can you keep? Are there any tips for figuring out when you can or cannot pull it off?

 

[Heliotrope]

I don't have a third person example of this, but I am reading the Percy Jackson series right now for research for my YA pirate story. It is written in first person, but what you are describing happens a lot and it drives me nuts. I do think it is a cheap way of creating tension, and I have seen this done in better ways. For example, in the Hunger Games, the MC has a plan, and she tells us the plan, so the reader knows the plan… but the reader also knows that the villain knows the plan. When we go forward in the story the tension lays in wondering how the villain is going to thwart the plan. In Percy Jackson he just purposely withholds information that Percy should be thinking about, and it doesn't always work.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Personally, there are a lot of fine lines here, to me its just as cheap in first person, which may mean its actually cheap or not. Its all about execution. Cheap is in the words of the writer? heh heh.

Personally, I don't expect the writer's voice to tell me everything, in fact, it would be horribly redundant if the author wrote out the character's plan as they conceived it, and then proceeded to write the plan being executed. So in that respect, do you want to hear the idea or see the execution? But at the same time, this can be an issue if done poorly and for the wrong reasons.

If the plan isn't explained, it often signals the plan is going to go well. If the plan is explained, more often than not it will fail miserably and go all kinds of wrong, or at least have a pile of wrenches thrown at it, like Ocean's Eleven. I like the approach of telling the reader the plan, at least in general, and then having it blow up.

 

[Velka]

It is a tricky thing isn't it? This is one of the reasons why I almost always write with multiple POVs. It makes things like hiding information, feelings, thoughts much easier because you can write a scene from the POV of the person who isn't lying, or withholding.

One instance I can think of off the top of my head where I struggled with this (not wanting to tell the reader the plan right away, but the reader knows there is a plan) is by ending the chapter on a question.

“How exactly are you planning on setting off the firefall?”

“That all depends on whether you’re better at swimming than I am.”

The next chapter is them executing the plan and showing how who the stronger swimmer is comes into play.

 

[Penpilot]

Yep, it's cheating, and unless you do it well enough that I don't even notice, I'll call BS on it. There's one instance in Lit Fiction I've seen in a well received book called A Sense of an Ending. The book is filled with information hiding and it's one of the things that bugged me beyond belief. I get there was a certain purpose to it, but it was still cheating.

This kind of thing ranks up there with those contrived conflicts where a person doesn't take the time to ask or answer a simple straightforward question, but instead skirts around it, talking in vague terms so the conflict doesn't go away.

IMHO, a lot of times if you really think, revealing information can lead to greater conflict that isn't cheating.

 

[FifthView]

@Devor:

For me, the issue doesn't really revolve solely around hiding a plan. That was an example used in the podcast, and it was one that resonated with me because, without remembering specific cases, I recall having experienced exactly that sort of thing before while reading. But many potential types of secrets exist, and there are probably many ways to withhold information, beyond the issue of an MC coming up with a plan.

The specific types of withholding in the books I'm currently reading have been problematic for me for three reasons:

First, unlike a plan the POV MC might conceive internally, these are external events. In the case of beginning with a vague "it," some hidden external event/stimulus is addressed—something is going to happen—but the author purposely avoids giving any shape to that "it." In the case of the interrogation, this is an external stimulus where the MC receives information from an outside source, but the author elides that interrogation and withholds all the content of it until much later.

Second, both types of withholding concern exigencies. These are things requiring immediate attention once they happen. Compare this to, say, a plan an MC makes that will take time to unfold as actual activity, or where a plan is made in one scene but isn't expected to be put into effect until some time in the future. Because of the immediacy, it's very difficult for me to believe the POV MC won't have these events in mind in the present. When otherwise the book hews to an intimate 3rd-person POV, where we experience things as the MC experiences them and we have access to the internal track of his thought processes, this failure to show him reacting in real-time to the info/events is like breaking from the 3rd-person POV.

Third, neither method was necessary in any way. The author could have written those "it" scenes without first introducing the "it happened..." And with the interrogation, the author could have shown the interrogation happening, revealing the info to the reader even as the MC received the info. In fact, this would have made his rush back to base camp more tension-filled, because we would have known exactly the type of horrible events that were likely to be going on at the base camp while he was away. Because neither type of withholding was in any way necessary or reasonable, I felt that the only reason the information was withheld was to attempt to build tension—these withholdings seemed contrived.

 

[FifthView]

I don't have a third person example of this, but I am reading the Percy Jackson series right now for research for my YA pirate story. It is written in first person, but what you are describing happens a lot and it drives me nuts. I do think it is a cheap way of creating tension, and I have seen this done in better ways. For example, in the Hunger Games, the MC has a plan, and she tells us the plan, so the reader knows the plan… but the reader also knows that the villain knows the plan. When we go forward in the story the tension lays in wondering how the villain is going to thwart the plan. In Percy Jackson he just purposely withholds information that Percy should be thinking about, and it doesn't always work.

Heliotrope:

When I first listened to the podcast, Sanderson's comments comparing first-person to third-person-limited confused me. Except for the case of the unreliable 1st-person narrator, I've generally thought that a 1st-person narrator would be more intimate, or less able to hide information.

But after thinking about this all day, I've realized something. The single most important difference between a 1st-person narrator and a 3rd-person limited POV is this:

The 1st-person narrator knows he has an audience. He's talking/writing directly to another person. So he's aware of his ability to hide things, to prevaricate, to mislead, and to manipulate whoever is listening to him or reading his words. Even if he doesn't consciously do these things, we as the reader know that this is another person who we don't completely see. It's like having that first date with a person who talks endlessly all about himself. No matter how much he says over several hours, we know there is a vast hidden realm still. We also know that, when he's talking, he's wanting to present a certain kind of image of himself (consciously or subconsciously), and so we might not be getting the whole story. Plus, most people can get on one track when having a discussion, which leaves a whole lot else unsaid. This makes certain types of info-withholding reasonable, or at least not wholly unexpected, in a 1st-person narration.

But the 3rd-person POV character is not aware that he's being watched/read. So I wonder if this is precisely why Sanderson said to be very wary of withholding information when using a 3rd-person limited POV because readers expect the POV to be "more honest."

But I've experienced the same thing you have w/ 1st person narrators. I haven't read the Percy Jackson books–although I've seen the two movies and they are TERRIBAD. But sometimes it's so obvious, given the personality of the narrator, the nature of events, the general flow of the narration, that the narrator should have things on his mind and be openly including them in his narration, but the author decides to break that in order to attempt to build tension.

 

[Heliotrope]

Yeah, that makes sense. Good explanation.

 

[Caged Maiden]

I withhold a lot of information in my novels, but none of it is exactly like this example. I have one novel where two factions of people are both working toward goals, and then halfway through, you realize one of the POV characters is a middleman for them both, but the connection was never stated before. I did that simply by keeping his mind on his tasks and dropping a few hints that he knew what some other people were doing, despite not directly connecting him to the events. I think it worked pretty well, because some readers guessed he was involved with both groups, and other readers were really surprised.

In another story, I have a character who had a previous life and another name. It makes sense that he'd abandoned that past, and so he referred to himself by the new name, and his POV was pretty focused on again, the immediate events, not the past. I have a hard time understanding why this particular thing was so hard to mitigate, because if someone had intimate knowledge of an event, or someone else's movements, or whatever, the writer need only focus on what IS happening, to keep the reader entertained and not wondering "Is this character keeping secrets from me?"

I dunno. I think if someone has a plan for something, or if an event happened, or whatever, it's easy enough to use time as a separator of sorts. I had a story where a young man is going to sabotage a utility system in the city, and the reader doesn't know that's his job, only that he's not telling his friend the real reason he's going to this place. It made sense to me at the time, and I still think it works really well. Then, the next scene is from another POV, and when it cuts back to the young man's POV, he's seeing the devastation he caused. But until that point, the reader doesn't understand the magnitude of his sabotage. And they get to see the dread and horror as he experiences it, seeing the dead people he feels responsible for, though in his mind, he's adamant that what he did couldn't have caused that kind of destruction. When next he meets his friend, he tells her how he couldn't have done it, that his job must have set off a chain reaction, which means someone planned it that way and used him as a pawn. In that sort of context, it makes sense, because if he KNEW he was going to kill thousands of people, he'd have had more mental weight on the subject.

Hope any of this makes some sense.

 

[Chessie]

I dislike doing this. If there's a good reason for withholding information (mysteries are a good example), then so be it. I try to give readers plenty of information to decipher what's going on within the story by giving clues about character, setting, and story through various elements. I want them to be immersed, I want them to have clarity on the story. That's just my take on it though.

 

[FifthView]

I withhold a lot of information in my novels, but none of it is exactly like this example. I have one novel where two factions of people are both working toward goals, and then halfway through, you realize one of the POV characters is a middleman for them both, but the connection was never stated before. I did that simply by keeping his mind on his tasks and dropping a few hints that he knew what some other people were doing, despite not directly connecting him to the events. I think it worked pretty well, because some readers guessed he was involved with both groups, and other readers were really surprised.

In another story, I have a character who had a previous life and another name. It makes sense that he'd abandoned that past, and so he referred to himself by the new name, and his POV was pretty focused on again, the immediate events, not the past. I have a hard time understanding why this particular thing was so hard to mitigate, because if someone had intimate knowledge of an event, or someone else's movements, or whatever, the writer need only focus on what IS happening, to keep the reader entertained and not wondering "Is this character keeping secrets from me?"

I dunno. I think if someone has a plan for something, or if an event happened, or whatever, it's easy enough to use time as a separator of sorts.

This seems key and actually ties in with what Howard Tayler said in the podcast although they passed over it rather quickly. (Often, something will be mentioned in their podcasts and I want them to explore it further but they move on.) Here's what he said:

[Howard] If your plot twist requires... if the punch of your plot twist requires the reader not being told something that one of the characters explicitly knows, then the best thing for you to do is not touch on that character's viewpoint [when] that character is thinking about those things or being involved with those things.​

If a character has a big secret that has to be kept from the reader and is also a POV character in your novel (in a 3rd-person limited scheme), you could still write scenes or chapters from his POV but it would be best if those secrets are not likely to be on his mind.

The central issue for me is staying honest to the POV. This is particularly true when the structure of the narrative is a very intimate 3rd-person, i.e. when we as readers are treated to the inner workings of the mind. (Some approaches to limited 3rd-person do not do this as much.) And, characters can have their own attention divided.

So for instance, it's possible to imagine a character locked in a cell, worrying about his state with no obvious way out. But then, something he thinks about gives him an idea, and we might write, "Wait. That's it." Jord started pacing furiously as the beginning of a plan formed. "If I just wait until Mikal is on guard duty, and then–" at which point a commotion outside distracts him, perhaps the sound of the Overlord barking out commands as he's approaching, and this distracts the MC. The MC is dragged out of his cell after some dialogue w/ the Overlord. The next scene opens up in another room in the dungeons, and this is where the torture begins. That plan that formed in the MC's mind? Well, he's distracted by the torture, the questions his torturers are putting before him, and the Overlord's dialogue. The plan's not on his mind. So the reader never hears the shape of that plan–at least, not for now.

Also, using time as a separator (something I think @Velka was suggesting also) can be good in the right circumstances. The reader can still be left with the impression that the MC may well have been thinking through the plan(s) in the interim.

I do suppose, however, as Sanderson implied, that stretching out the secret-keeping over a very long time can be problematic; it's hard to stomach the idea that, of 400 pages and a wide range of MC impressions/thoughts, the plan just happens to never intrude in any way.

I also think that the issue of immediacy plays a big role, either way. Some plans are not of immediate concern. I mean, I have plans for Christmas, but large portions of my days currently involve other things, so I'm not thinking about Christmas plans 24/7. BUT early on Christmas Eve, I'll probably have those plans foremost in mind much of the time.

Also, come to think of it, I probably should have added a #4 in my list above: The examples from my current reading are cases where the author has telegraphed the existence of a secret and then, as if saying, "Hahaha. Nope. I'm going to keep these from you," withholds that information. This, I think, can be very problematic in 3rd-person limited. There are other examples where a secret can jump out at the reader later because it was never telegraphed before or else was foreshadowed very subtly. Withholding information by simply not focusing on its existence might be simpler, sometimes, than trying to telegraph its existence before withholding it.