Third Person Plural Present Tense (They [both/all of them] go...)
A Complete Guide to Point of View Part 22
I once wrote the libretto for a children’s mini-opera. It was intended to be learned, rehearsed and performed by ten- or eleven-years olds in a single school day. The title was The Itch Witch.
And I had one main rule, given me by the commissioner —
There must be no solo singers.
No arias, no recitative.
Everything had to be done by choruses of perhaps eight or ten voices.
This made creating drama — stage events that take place in a moment and to which characters react — very very difficult.
Almost impossible.
Try getting nine ten year-olds all to gasp in horror at the exact same moment.
If only one of them is staring at their sparkly shoes, you’ve lost all sense of a jump scare.
I’m reminded of The Itch Witch because using this Third Person Plural Present Tense POV (They [both/all of them] go...) is just like writing an opera that only employs massed voices, singing as one.
If you were trying to write an opera within those severe limitations, what you’d realise, fairly quickly, is that you’re instead writing a choral work — and one that doesn’t even allow you the drama or variation of the occasional solo soprano, alto, tenor or bass voice.
And it doesn’t allow you a duo, trio or quartet.
I’m already feeling claustrophobic, aren’t you?
In the end, to make the opera work, we (that is the composer Emily Hall and I) had to cheat slightly and introduce a solo character — a puppet of the Itch Witch herself — in order to have something for the children to play off, to react to.
(The Itch Witch is like an evil version of the Tooth Fairy. She sprinkles nits on children’s heads, as they sleep, so she can steal their blood. Only the combined efforts of the Combers can defeat her.)
Perhaps some of this sense of dealing with a chorus is familiar to you from your own writing — if you’ve tried using POVs that are second person or are plural.
We’ve been here before.
Much of what we’re going to observe about the Third Person Plural Present Tense, we’ve already seen in the Past Tense version.
The example I gave of that POV was Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried’.
And the chief difference between that and this POV is there in the title.
The ‘They’ are soldiers, and because we hear about them retrospectively (‘Carried’ not ‘Carry’), we get the strong implication — right from the start — that they are now dead. (The things they carried until they stopped being capable of carrying things.)
Here, by contrast, is a made up example in the Present Tense —
They march toward the front, unresisting, unyielding. Although it is a very hot day, none of them remove their jackets. They are carrying full packs and have all the ammunition they were issued with. Some among them might have dumped their more useless pieces of equipment – for example their binoculars – but they knew that some others would have reported them, and that the punishment would have been immediate and brutal. So they obey their original orders and head towards their deaths.
Stories promise change.
Whatever state of affairs you begin with, the reader expects it to alter.
Someone carrying something will drop it, throw it or have it stolen from them.
The status quo will come under threat.
The First Person Singular Past Tense narrative voice used to mean, for the most part, that the narrator was safe.
If Kay Scarpetta was the narrator of Post Mortem or one of the many sequels Patricia Cornwell has written, then however much she was put in danger by this or that serial killer, Kay Scarpetta was never going to die. Unlike the Dead Boy Detectives, she’s not going to investigate crime posthumously.
And these soldiers of mine, heading toward the front, are protected by the Present Tense until the moment it describes them dying or being dead.
They are, not they were. Hope, not certainty.
Again, as with previous Third Person POVs, the likelihood is that — unless you make the brave but slightly bonkers commitment to write a whole story/novel this way — the cohesive group identity is going to break down the moment that one or two individuals have something good or bad happen just to them.
A yellow butterfly landed on the barrel of Corporal Satnam Singh’s rifle. But he didn’t notice. Only Sergeant Bill “Bastard” O’Kelly saw, and it wasn’t something a sergeant could point out — but he thought it was beautiful. He was glad he’d got to see something beautiful, if he was going to die today.
The most useful post about this POV that I’ve found online, says that the Present Tense version sounds like ‘a play-by-play’, a sports commentary.
Crystal Palace are moving the ball beautifully around the pitch now. They are keeping possession, as they send it out to the right, and are not letting Manchester City — was that a foul? — get hold of it for a second. And now the press comes, but, yes, they are dealing with it with almost arrogant ease — into the midfield, one touch passing — not allowing even the City attackers even the whiff of a turnover. But when they see an opening, through the middle, they are running rings round…
This isn’t quite right, though, because I’ve slipped into a continuous (‘are going’) tense. The simple Present Tense makes it sound like a generalisation, summarising a period of time, rather than something happening in this moment and this moment.
Crystal Palace move the ball beautifully around the pitch. They keep possession, and don’t let Manchester City get hold of it for a second.
Keeping the Third Person going is obviously artificial, because a football commentator will always be looking to pick out pieces of individual skill, or mistakes made by a single player.
Eze makes a darting run through onto Olise’s oh-so-casual pass, and — it’s onto his right — he drops the defender and blazes it into the top left hand corner, past a flailing Ederson.
The POV we’re discussing today would work better for the half-time summary, where the pundits often use the Present Tense, rather than the less involving Past Tense, but when they are summarizing the overall performance of the whole team.
They pass the ball well. When they find the channels, they exploit them.
As you may have noticed, while tuning out, quite a few people aren’t interested in football.
Most people/readers are more likely to be gripped by the doings of known individuals rather than faceless teams, gangs, armies and crowds.
The masses just aren’t relatable.
That’s why this is a POV you should be cautious about using for any extended piece of writing. But it’s absolutely essential for big crowd scenes.
In summary:
Third Person Plural Present Tense
Likely upsides:
Chunky, ongoing, vulnerable, outreaching.
Possible downsides
Undramatic, summarising, inflexible, gloopy.
My Example
Third Person Plural Present Tense
They climb to higher branches and look down at the giant stripey tiger below. It is about to climb up and start hunting them, they know that, but for the moment it is deciding which tree to attack. They communicate the nuances of their alarm with screeches of different pitch, tone and length. In almost no time, they have let one another know the tribe is still all here. Although the tiger’s approach had been stealthy, and its leap sudden, they confused it by running in contradictory directions. Now, they shifted themselves further out onto thinner and thinner branches. They know these will not bear the solid mass of the giant cat. From experience, they have learned how far out on a narrow, bending branch they can go. With a grumpy growl, the tiger climbs towards them — lumbering up the trunk of the biggest, most populated tree. They sidle further away, confident of survival.