the third person
For the homeless writing workshop this week, I had two men attend and I gave the prompt of writing something that happened to them recently, but to write it in the third person.
I didn’t realize it would be so hard to explain this prompt. It’s so early in the morning and I was trying to explain how we usually talk about ourselves in the first person, I, but novels are usually in the third person (he/she). I wanted them to step outside of themselves and see themselves from a short distance away, to see what new details emerged. I explained it several times, offering lots of examples, and once we started writing one of the men seemed to give up and I felt sorry for offering too difficult a prompt, but he went back to it. I became worried that I might be dealing with people with multiple personality disorder, and that I might split these men in thirds accidentally with my assignment.
One of the men wrote something where he was in the third person, but there was also another character, I, who was looking at him. Which is essentially how I explained what third person means. This man works so hard to see how others see him already, the assignment actually fit his temperament.
Another of the men stepped outside of himself and wrote something without action, but essentially he evaluated his personal progress in life. He looked at himself critically from a distance.
And then when he spoke about what he learned, it was clear this idea of the third person was incredibly tangible to him, more tangible than any definition I could give. He spoke about the need to listen to people, to be able to step inside of their experience and feel what they’re going through, and to step outside of himself to really hear another person’s story. It was profound and strange. He said, If you want a friend, you’ve got to be a friend. You’ve got to be that third person. I’ve not thought about the third person that way, as a friend, an outsider capable of flitting in and out of others’ minds to aid them, like a ghost of us that can disobey borders.
I offered the exercise because most poetry has a character called I in it, if there is a character. I recently read a book of poems where the character was instead he even though it was pretty clearly the poet’s life. It really removed the poems from the realm of confessional poetry, even though they were pretty confessional. That one small pivot shifted a ton of details and emotions and the way I approached the poems.
(so I tried it in workshop, too)
She saw her house for the first time in a long time, and it looked clean. Light hit in the kitchen from the winter sun. It only happens in winter. In the summer, leaves obscure the sky and so she cooks her meals in shadows. She saw her plants–she had forgotten about green. The color lit by winter sun is a stained glass window of photosynthesis.
.
She remembered where the silerware was, but she didn’t know where her husband had put the spatula. She noticed the empty boxes in the pantry–empty cracker boxes and candy wrappers–from where the teenager had snuck food (someone might have heard her throw away the box so she left it empty, taking up hollow space). She noticed the empty refrigerator.
.
This house had gone on without her–the dogs lived and the plants grew and the leaves continued to fall–but the kitchen had suffered. It was the only part of the house that crumpled a little in her absence. She refolded the cloth napkins and recycled empty boxes and made lists of what was missing–eggs, butter, milk. There hadn’t been an absence of butter in this house for years. She felt strange without it. She fumbled on how to make pancakes, settling for canola oil where the butter should have gone and grumbling as she stirred.
.
She stirred and the dogs made pinwheels with their tails below her. When she bought butter she would give them some. She would carve it into wafers and drop it tenderly onto their tongues, sorry for having been gone so long. In the meantime, canola pancakes fell like leaves from her plate toward the floor, never hitting the floor.
