I might be chastised for this, and if so - so be it. But the truth is that this thread is the reason I came to this board in the first place.
Within my writing I extensively make use of a variant of Third Person Present. I do this not because it is gimmicky or different but because it is my natural writing style. I want to reveal to the reader a fundamental truth I have learnt over the too many years I have polluted this world with my presence.
That truth is this:- There are two sides to every story.
Actually that “truth” is itself a lie – there are many sides to any story. Back to the thread track. I am striving to immerse the reader in a tale, but one of my nefarious objectives is to hide my philosophy of life within an entertaining story. I really, really want the reader to feel that they “understand” the motivations of the characters in the story as they do things that might be objectionable. To do this I need to show them the world through multiple characters eyes and the most natural way for me to do this is Third Person Present.
I tried doing the “he thought”, “she thought” thing. It ruins the flow of the story and makes it look and feel very bumpy and clumsy. What I settled on was an almost constant use of Third Person Present. Instead of telling the reader what the character was thinking I strive to place them in the mind of the character and show them what they are thinking and feeling. It is quite difficult to switch viewpoints and show the same scene as perceived from different perspectives without explicitly informing the reader they are now “looking through someone else’s eyes”.
To overcome this I gradually ease the reader into this understanding by separating the story into multiple threads, each perceived from the viewpoint of a specific character. As the threads begin to merge the reader, hopefully, learns to switch between characters without awareness they are even doing so.
If I am successful the final outcome is that the reader finds themselves immersed in an utterly foreign world inhabited by people whose thought processes and motivations differ dramatically not only from the readers, but from other characters within the book.
Using Third Person Present allows me to have the reader accept behavior that would normally raise their eyebrows. Because they “know” why the character acts that way. They have been living in every characters mind, seeing the world from their eyes and from the eyes of the narrator who, in reality, is them – they understand.
Is this gimmicky? I don’t think so.
