Third Person Narration: Using the Zoom Lens
By Sarah Callender | April 12, 2017 |
This past February and March were Seattle’s mossiest, moldiest and mushroomiest Februarys and Marches in 120 years. In other words, it was really rainy. Usually the gray makes me cozy and able to focus on work, but this year, it has made me angry and frizzy. Crabby too. So when a few weeks back I sat down to write at a coffee shop and I specifically chose to sit next to a guy who was clearly working on his computer and would therefore not be chatting with anyone, and but so then a female friend sat down and they proceeded to talk and talk and talk, breaking talking records for the months of February and March, I got irritated.
The woman (tall, thin in that pinched way, sensible jeans, no makeup, and mid-forties, self-absorbed and epically dull) was the problem. She yakked boastfully about her “mindfulness around food and eating.” She yakked whinily about sitting in the middle seat of the center aisle of her flight home from India. (To summarize: the middle seat of the center aisle isn’t great. Who knew?) She yakked nasally about the henna paintings on her arm. About how she had missed fresh veggies whilst in India. How, in India, she was the only person in the whole group who didn’t fall off her paddle board.
In sunnier seasons, I love to eavesdrop, to play detective and figure out the players and their dynamics and the subtexts of their conversations. I hunger for narrative closeness. Not with this lady. I wanted to be nowhere near her narrative.
We writers often talk about point of view, focusing only on first person or third, or limited third or omniscient second, or shifting close third, or a grande extra hot split-shot caramel macchiato.
But in addition to first vs. third vs. omniscient, we also need to consider narrative distance—a tool writers use to manipulate the distance between the reader and a narrator.Here’s an example: when we watch a film from the 1940s, it feels like we are participating as distant viewers. The camera does not zoom in or out, nor does the camera angle change. We watch all of the characters (protags and minor characters alike) from the same distance. But with today’s technology, a camera’s ability to zoom in and out, to “see” a scene from various perspectives, rounds out and humanizes the characters, providing the opportunity for a closer relationship between the viewer and particular players. In film, the director determines and controls the distance.
Likewise, in fiction with third person narration, we have control over the distance between the narrator and the reader. Sometimes we want to snuggle the reader inside the head of a character. Other times, like when I am trying to work in a coffee shop, a more distant narration is preferred.
A few general guidelines about narrative stance:
First: While a narrator rarely cements herself in a single, unchanging stance for the entire story, usually, a narrator is either generally close to the story or generally distant. But there is movement. Here’s example of panning in and out from Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being:
The rain was starting to fall in earnest, so she went downstairs to throw some wood on the fire and found that the stack was getting low. She put on her raincoat and gum boots, grabbed a headlamp and the firewood sling, and headed out to the woodpile. The wind had really picked up and the cedar limbs were thrashing. Where was he? It wasn’t safe to be out in the woods in high winds like this.
The narrator is primarily a reporter in the first two sentences, after which she zooms in with the words, “The wind had really picked up” and brings the reader even closer: “Where was he? it wasn’t safe to be out in the woods in high winds like this.” We move from the stormy setting right into her mind and her thoughts.
Second: There is no right or wrong narrative distance; it is only technique a writer employs based on close she wants the reader from her characters and their story, emotions and yearnings. That said, while there will be a bit of zooming in and pulling away, it must not shift so wildly or inconsistently that the reader needs to pop a Dramamine. We mustn’t be head-hoppers.
Third: Learning how a writer controls the amount of distance between the narrator and the story takes time and practice. Be patient. Experiment. Practice. And then practice. Practice again and again and again. Don’t forget to practice.
The Effect of a Distant Narrative Stance
C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe offers us a distant third person narrator, about as distant as a narrator can get. Check it out:
Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids. They were sent to the house of an old Professor who lived in the heart of the country, ten miles from the nearest railway station and two miles from the nearest post office. He had no wife and he lived in a very large house with a housekeeper called Mrs. Macready and three servants.
From the first sentences of the novel, we sense we will not be lolling about in the characters’ heads. This narrator feels like an authority, a not-so-biased journalist ready to tell the story (rather than show the story through a subjective, biased lens).
In distant third person narration, the writer can naturally establish the time when the story took place versus when the narrator is telling the story. The narrator begins the entire book with the phrase “Once there was …” Immediately the reader feels this is something of a fairy tale, a story that happened when the characters were younger than they are now.
Pulling the narrator far away from the heads of the characters also allows more opportunity for the narrator to offer the details and explanation that would feel stiff and unnatural if shared through a closer third person stance.
Later, the narrator creeps a bit closer to the characters and the conflict:
It was an unpleasant evening. Lucy was miserable and Edmund was beginning to feel that his plan wasn’t working as well as he had expected. The two older ones were really beginning to think that Lucy was out of her mind. They stood in the passage talking about it in whispers long after she had gone to bed.
We are told that Lucy is miserable. We are told that the others think Lucy is out of her mind. While the narration feels closer that it did in the first paragraph of the novel, there is little detail about the interior world or the voice of the characters. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; it allows breathing space for the reader. It offers the reader the chance to interpret a character’s motives, actions and emotions.
Effects of Close Narrative Stance
Let’s take a look at Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. Here the reader is much more in the mind of Olive.
Through her closed eyelids Olive sees a red light slanting through the windows; she can feel sunlight warming her calves and ankles on the bed, can feel beneath her hand how it warms the soft fabric of her dress, which really did come out nicely. It pleases her to think of the piece of blueberry cake she managed to slip into her big leather handbag—how she can go home soon and eat it in peace, take off this panty girdle, get things back to normal.
I love crabby, girdle-pantied Olive. I love that she has burgled cake in her handbag. How she’s pleased about her dress and is someone who seeks peace. In this single paragraph, the reader knows Olive more intimately than she would ever know C.S. Lewis’ characters.
Close third person narration also provides opportunity to develop the character’s voice. Here’s an example from Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street:
Rosa Vargas’ kids are too many and too much. It’s not her fault, you know, except she is their mother and only one against so many.
They are bad those Vargases, and how can they help it with only one mother who is tired all the time from buttoning and bottling and babying, and who cries every day for the man who left without even leaving a dollar for bologna or a note explaining how come.
The child narrator, Esperanza, speaks with a wisdom that surpasses her age, but we also see her youthful observation about bologna and her syntax and diction in phrases like “or a note explaining how come.” With a close narrative stance, we are able to hear the voice of the character.
I find Esperanza’s head is a warm, surprising, colorful place to be, but another reader can feel so confined in the head of that narrator that she feels suffocated. That might not be a great thing unless that’s the author’s intention: to trap the reader inside the head of a character.
OK. I have hurled enough words at you. In your WIP, how have you chosen to control the narrative distance and why?
Have you ever fallen in love with a character (or stopped reading a novel) because of the narrative distance?
Photo compliments of Flickr’s Trekking Rinjani.
[coffee]
A Middle Grade novelist (and Middle School English teacher), Sarah Callender lives in Seattle with her family. Because Sarah dislikes cleaning anything that will just get messy again, she tidies the house and weeds the yard only when absolutely necessary. This allows her time to focus on her true–and somewhat fraught–passions: writing, Abe Lincoln, and Tony’s Chocolonely chocolate bars. Equally passionate about mental health advocacy, Sarah is a member of The Stability Network. Sarah’s first novel, LUCY IN BETWEEN, will be published by Margaret Ferguson Books/Holiday House in 2026.
Ack, Sarah, point of view. I have to admit I get a bit cross-eyed reading about variations in viewpoint. I just write what feels best and don’t think much about it after that. Usually. I wrote my first novel in what I guess would be called third person omniscient with multiple points of view. Neither my publisher nor my editor scolded me on it so it must have been okay.
Now my current WIP. Planned to do the same but it wasn’t working, wasn’t giving me what I wanted. I finally landed on first person AND third person. Because my novel runs back and forth between the present and the past and I want the past to feel closer than the present, my chapters set in the past are written in first person and those in the present are written in third.
I don’t think narrative distance has any bearing on whether I find a novel enjoyable or not. Done well, I’ll happily ready any viewpoint.
Oh, and good luck on the sale of your novels!
Thank you, Linnea. I totally agree with you about the cross-eyed issue when it comes to POV. I feel the same! In fact, I forced myself to write this post so *I* could force myself to study up on this a bit. So much forcing.
Sounds like you have a great intuition when it comes to narrative distance. Not that you need to look at examples, but the book I quoted here, A Tale for the Time Being, does first and third narration with great aplomb. (Great aplomb? How formal!)
I also love House of Cards, the Netflix series, for the fun of Kevin Spacey’s habit of turning to the camera to provide his dastardly asides for his viewers. When done well, it can be a brilliant device!
Thank you for commenting and sharing!
Thank You for this great post Sarah.
The House on Mango Street is my #1 least favorite book experience of all time. My sophomore english teacher read the whole book to us in a stupifying slow way, and took two-second pauses for every comma on the page. While I was reading the passage above, I heard it in his…slow…delivery even 20 years later.
In my WIP, I’m working with a character who is very focused on what they need to do, so I’m keeping the narrative close to show the reader that, and any interactions with other characters they have seem like distractions. Like a bus, the story stops whenever a new character gets on, and this angers my pov character.
James! I laughed out loud with your Mango Street details. I used to teach high school English, and when I taught that book, most kids–boys especially–detested it. The curriculum required that use it to focus on figurative language and voice, but man, over analyzing is such a story-killer.
I am sorry this post gave you such a terrible flashback. Sounds like a small case of PTSD to me! You can probably get some compensation if you sue. ;)
Your story sounds amazing … and I love hearing how intentional you have been in establishing it. It sounds like a real challenge. Thank you for sharing!
I got revenge (against the teacher, Ms. Cisneros’ writing is good) when I was assigned to write a new chapter in the story.
The teacher loved my parody so much he read it to the entire class.
Thanks again for your post, you put into words what I’ve been thinking on.
Good work, James. A decent teacher ALWAYS recognizes parodic brilliance when it slaps him in the face.
Happy writing to you, and thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Narrative distance. What a great topic.
Close third person is popular but I don’t wholly agree with you about that passage from Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. To me, the narrative intimacy is cloying. Even annoying, like the nattering woman in the coffee shop. Who cares what Olive sees through her closed eyelids?
On the other hand, while the narrative distance of C.S. Lewis does create a fairy tale tone, there is a certain haughty grandeur to it. We’re being spoken down to in a particularly English manner. We adult readers are being treated like children.
I’m at work on a piece in which I want to embrace both the supernatural and skepticism of it. Were I to use close third person , that would be impossible, unless I switch POV’s. Either you believe in what is magical–in my case, angels–or you don’t.
To achieve this balance, I’m experimenting with a narrator who is telling us a tale but also wrestling with it, seeking to decide for himself what is true. One question I face is when the narrator is telling us the tale: as it happens or long after?
The latter feels more natural. The narrator has settled for himself the question of whether angels are real, and is telling us the tale to lead us through his doubts and discoveries, leading us to his conclusion. The narrator’s need for us to understand what he knows provides, I hope, an extra tension in the telling.
But that is this piece. I don’t know if my experiment will yield good results, but the point is to experiment. That’s your point too. We can’t be in control of tone, distance or anything if we are not conscious of it and making deliberate choices in the narrative styles we adopt.
So, I do agree with you about that. Too many authors opt for what is easy, which is to say safely fashionable or stubbornly old-fashioned. Narrative distance is a choice only if you make it a choice.
Wonderful post.
Wow, Benjamin. I bow down to you and your willingness to take on this challenge. It sounds fascinating.
Not sure if I misinterpreted what you said, but it sounds like the narrator, in trying to convince the reader of what he believes/knows/understands creates a feeling of, I don’t know, desperation? Pleading? I love that because if that’s the case, WHY is the narrator so intent on convincing the reader? Is he insecure in his belief? Deceiving himself? Again, I am not sure if I’ve understood properly, but if so, it reminds me of Hamlet where Hamlet’s mama seems to be protesting too much. In other words, she is working SO hard to convince someone of something that we know there’s something fishy going on.
I apologize if I have misunderstood. :)
Good for you to experiment and practice. I’ve been doing it for fifteen+ years and every moment is time well spent.
I love your comments, BB. Thanks!
Helpful examination and examples, Sarah. I recently started reading an epic fantasy by an author I’ve never read, Michael J. Sullivan’s Age of Myth. I was thinking about how cleverly he opens the book, and now I see that part of its cleverness has to do with narrative distance. In the first scene he throws two strangers together, and we quickly see that one of them, Raithe (the POV character), will be our protagonist. The other, Malcom, is the escaped slave of one of Raithe’s people’s foes. Sullivan uses their unfamiliarity to keep the distance fairly close to Raithe while giving us some pretty wide-angle information about the setting and circumstance.
Unlikely allies, Raithe and Malcom are forced into flight together. This is from early on in their second scene together:
Raithe enjoyed a good campfire. Something comforting about the dancing light, the smell of the smoke, and the way his face and chest got hot but his backside stayed cold. He sensed a profound meaning in this duality as well as the enigma of flickering flames.
“One of the few spirits I get along with,” Raithe said, tossing another branch in the flames.
“What is?” Malcom asked.
“The fire,” Raithe said, throwing in another branch.
“You think fires are spirits?
Raithe raised a brow. “What? You think it’s a demon?” He’d heard it before, most notably from a neighbor who’d left his cookfire unattended while taking a piss in the river. When the man returned, his dung house was burning. “It has a nasty temper when loose, but I honestly don’t think a demon would come so easily when summoned. Least not by the likes of me.”
Malcom stared at him, something he did often. Raithe wasn’t one for conversation, and Malcom’s blank stares after his comments didn’t provide much incentive.
This snippet is just a small example of how Sullivan is using the character dichotomy in prosaic moments not just to continue to introduce us to them, but to enlighten us about their cultural differences. So far (about four chapters in) I’m enjoying the ride. Thanks for helping me realize how the technique relates to distance, Sarah.
Thanks you, Vaughn, for this example! It’s really amazing to see how an author can do so much by manipulating distance. Your excerpt and analysis is so helpful to me … there is so much to this writing gig, no?
I am glad we can all muddle through together. What a gift.
:)
Hi Sarah,
I always love hearing your voice. POV is something I never thought too much about as a younger reader. I craved the closeup without knowing why. Now I know–I read to get into the heads of characters, to know why they do the things they do, to understand “what makes them sweat,” as Lisa Cron says. It’s the sign of an experienced writer when they use POV as a tool, panning in and out like a photographer uses a zoom lens to show the mountains and the river and then the feathers of a barn owl. Thanks for the reminder… xo
Beautiful, dear Janna. Thanks for this comment. I’m with you … if I am not in the head of a character, it’s hard for me to get involved with the story. I know I should LOVE The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but it’s hard for me when the narration is so stiff (as Benjamin notes above).
The feathers of a barn owl. Beautiful. Happy writing!
Sarah, great post, giving me much to think about and to use while going over sections of my novel. And I actually love Olive in that scene. Maybe I identify with her? That’s why novels, reading is so expansive, we find what we love and who we might want to sit with in a coffee shop. Good luck with this part of your novel-journey, Beth
I’m with you, Beth. I LOVE Olive. She’s so crotchety and unhappy and desperate and human. I identify with her too. Did you happen to see the miniseries with Frances Mcdormand as Olive? I haven’t yet, but thinking about this reminds me that I need to.
https://www.hbo.com/olive-kitteridge
Yes, do watch it. I loved it. I think you will too. They handle that scene very well, by the way. And Strout has another new book out, a continuation of the characters in My Name Is Lucy Barton.
I love first person and third person-limited – I don’t like a lot of distance between my character and my reader (and me). One of the things I find in my freelance editing is ‘problems’ in POV – I tell writers that once they have that “aha” lightbulb moment, it’ll all makes sense.
A thorough informative post.
Thank you, Kathryn. Yes, it’s amazing how easy it is to hop heads and make weird shifts in narrative stance. I do it still (and shudder to think at how often I must have done it in the earlier years of skill-building) but it’s such a fun thing to play with.
Thank you for your comment!
Sarah,
I love this post. I love how you explain the nuances of the zoom lens. The subtleties and wider angles that help to tell a story.
I also love how you shatter the pronouncement that writers who see films in their heads are only getting surface matters on the page, not the deep writerly picture. I think those pronouncements show 1) a deep misunderstanding of modern filmmaking and 2) A misunderstanding of how wide a road the creative process is. There is no one way to tell a story.
I once had a writing instructor tell the class that if we were having fun when we wrote, we were not going to accomplish much. At the end of his tirade a few of my classmates felt the need to apologize for not wearing their grim reaper uniforms to writing class that day…
But that’s another story.
Thank you for this enlightening post.
Wow, Bernadette. I guess I can see why an instructor would say that writing can’t ALWAYS be fun but to say that we can’t have fun while writing (if we want to write decent stuff) is so odd to me. Yes it is very hard work, but it’s joyful work. I am sure you agree.
Anyway … I love your words:
[There is a] misunderstanding of how wide a road the creative process is. There is no one way to tell a story.
Amen to that, sister! Thank you for that important reminder. How easy that is to forget. :)
Very good article Sarah, I’ve been less of a commenter but I always enjoy reading WU posts in my inbox, especially yours so I’m popping in to say hello! :)
It’s great to explore the dimension of close/far as it adds true complexity to the limited/expanded aspect of third. I like to think as writers we are very much like movie producers contemplated exactly the correct lensing we need to capture exactly what’s happening in a given scene, and that’s going to vary especially with regard to the character’s story and what you’re trying to bring out. In my given WIP I’m using third limited close, though there is a strange touch that the reader will notice in that the narrator is not my protagonist narrating their own story, but some other third party narrating intimately the story of the protagonist as though this person knows them. In my mind, the narrator is the protagonist years later in his maturity writing the story about how he finally made the choice to stop doing terrible things that could have destroyed lives, how even in doing so he still bears great weight of guilt knowing the damage he caused before the lightbulb finally went on; though to the reader there isn’t any of this signposting, its implied between the lines, in the urgency which might say “listen to the story of this young man and the path of confusion he’s walking down, and see how even though it may look like there is no hope for him, he still accomplished the impossible.”
Hello, John! I love the thoughtfulness and the complexity of your reasons for narrative stance … and how the distance highlights the power and durability of guilt.
That, my friend, is a very appealing theme, one that resonates with loads of us humans.
Thank you for sharing such a perfect example!
Sarah, what a wonderful helpful post. But days and days of rain, moss, mushrooms? OMG, woman, how could you stand it?? By going to a coffee shop obviously. Sounds like the Eat-Pray-Love woman had the same idea unfortunately. As to the point of your post, POV is always so difficult for me. After writing 150 pages of my novel, I changed from third to first and then changed back again. First seemed too close-up and way too character indulgent. I settled on third and never looked back. Thanks again for the WU piece. I always look forward to your post — I know it will be insightful, witty, and sarcastic (in a good way).
And one more thing: I, too, love the grumpy, paranoid, forlorn Olive Kitteridge. I just finished listening to the audio version and realized in a moment of epiphany that towards the end, Elizabeth Strout manages the impossible — she gives us another view of Olive that is worse than the previous chapters. She is actually much more hateful and cruel than we thought. And YET the sympathy for her is STILL there. Brilliant writing.
Thank you, Lorraine. :)
And yes, ES is a masterful story teller and character maker. Olive really is a nasty woman, but we can see the reason why, right? Not that our knowledge excuses it bad behavior, but it helps explain it, and since most humans are capable of empathy, we can embrace her with some tenderness. II’m so glad you brought up that point.
And I can empathize with your attempts at various points of view. I have had that very challenge in my WIP, and it feels so good to finally settle on one. Your phrase “character indulgent” is spot on, lady! It’s such a skill to create a balance between narrative intimacy and narrative narcissism.
Thank you! (And I just noticed yesterday that Strout has a new novel coming out this week.) Strout is a wonderful speaker if you ever have a chance to hear her in person. She was much warmer and down-to-earth than I thought she’d be. A nice surprise! I must have expected her to be Olivine. ;)
Thank you, Sarah. A most helpful and entertaining post. I’m keeping this one for future reference as establishing the POV in my stories has been one of my biggest writing conundrums–I’ve literally re-written several thousand words because I decided to change the POV, only to go back to the original. Reading today’s post, I realized I haven’t been giving much, if any, consideration to narrative distance, something I’m now off to practice, practice, practice. Thanks, again.
P.S. “Olive Kitteridge” is one of my favorite contemporary stories and characters.
Hello, CK. Thank you for being here! I agree with you about Olive K. I am glad she is neither my mother nor my mother in law, though!
I think it’s wonderful that you have only “practiced” with several thousand words before realizing it’s not the proper POV … I’m afraid it has taken me much longer to get the right stance. I don’t want to ever know how many unusable words I have written, though I guess all of them can fall under the heading of “practice.”
This is no easy gig. I am grateful for the empathy I (and I assume, most of us) find at WU. Happy narrative stancing!
Hi, Sarah:
It’s all in the transitions.
As your examples show, it’s relatively ease to move in from a more “distant” or “objective” perspective. It can be a little trickier going the other way.
You can move from third person close out to a more “distant” or “objective” perspective, but if it feels as though you’ve left the perspective of the POV character, you’ve ruptured the fictive dream.
You can retreat to analyze what the character may not be able to see (but knows is there from experience), or to assess in some detail the history or background of a place or a situation (even though this knowledge is implicit to him, and we seemingly leave his “conscious mind” to access his “memory” only for an instant), but if this analysis or the details seem to come from someone other than the POV character, the reader is going to sense this as an authorial intrusion.
The C.S. Lewis excerpt is an example of using an omniscient narrator who chooses not to enter the minds of his characters. It’s an interesting approach, and spares him any accusations of “head hopping.” But an omniscient narrator is perfectly allowed to enter the characters’ minds, as long as it’s done well. The problem, of course, is that this is harder than it sounds, which is why I always caution my students: The omniscient narrator is not for beginners.
What many of them don’t get is that with an omniscient narrator it’s neither the author nor some disembodied presence speaking. There is an implicit “storyteller” serving as narrator, even if that storyteller seems to have no distinct personality, or on the other hand bears a strong resemblance in tone and voice to the author’s persona, i.e., the identity the writer assumes to mediate the relationship between himself and reader, which is expressed through voice.
The best omniscient narrators assume an identity distinct from the author’s persona. And in that regard, omniscient narration bears a stronger resemblance to first person than third.
A lot of my students’ problems with POV tend to center on a misunderstanding of how third person and omniscient are different, and what each actually constitutes and requires.
This is a great post to demonstrate the flexibility of third person. But it’s not so flexible it can’t be strained to the breaking point, as you very deftly point out.
Thanks!.
Beautiful comment, David. Thank you for what you have added here.
It is so very easy to rupture the fictive dream! And so very painful for the reader when that happens.
I am listening to the novel, Christodora, right now and while it’s a great story, I do find myself bumped by head hopping mid-scene (though maybe there are spaces between paragraphs where that hopping happens–that’s one of the problems with listening to a novel … our eyes need to see space and breaks in the narrative). There’s discrete first person narration (and a variety of actors performing the narrative), but suddenly a first person narrator will jump into the head of another. I’d love to ask the author why he chose that technique. I’ll add Tim Murphy to my list of people I’d like to have dinner with (alongside Abe Lincoln and the Apostle Paul). ;)
Thank you for the ideas you articulate about omniscient narration being closer to first than third, David! You are a true MVP at WU.
Great post. I am writing a novel now in close 3rd person. I have not yet examined it through the lens of just how close I’m getting at what points in the novel. Like some of your other commenters, I’ve been working mostly on instinct. I can see now (thank you) that there may be benefits to examining where and why I zoom in versus zoom out… For the most part, I think I zoom in during emotional moments, when I want the reader to FEEL what my MC is feeling. However, I really haven’t examined each scene yet for this. Agh! Writing. It’s so much more than sitting down and letting it rip. I’m discovering a lot of great stories have a Wizard (author) behind the curtain (pages) pulling chords and pressing buttons (intentionally creating structure) to make what appears to be a seamless narrative hum along.
Hi Susan … man, if only we could just let ‘er rip! But then maybe the process of completing a “good” novel wouldn’t be so satisfying (like running a one-mile marathon). And then maybe there would be billions of novelists and we’d be overrun by books and stories and our bookshelves would collapse under the weight and libraries would burst and we’d feel even more overwhelmed by the issue of “so many books to read, so little time.”
But I do wish it were maybe 5-10% of a let it rip situation.
The Wizard of Oz analogy is brilliant! Thank you for weighing in.
Thank you for this post! I favor writing in third person, and I really enjoyed your examples. Love that Olive Kitteridge! :)