Third Person- Yah Mama, An Outlaw Rant

A Matter of Perspective, Literally

Outlaws!

The assassins have failed, so far! I’m alive and banging away at the keys, and if you are reading thing, there is a 99.9% chance you are alive and well too. (I’m on to you, vampire, but it’s cool, live and let unlive.) I have a author related rant today, but as I have grown to doing, I’ll hit y’all with the writing updates and then let loose with my brand of madness.

First of all, there are lot more members in the Outlaw Author gang now than even a week ago, and thank you all so much for supporting me in making this dream happen. I’m grateful for your time and support. If you have friends that like action packed reads, spicy ladies that aren’t afraid to rumble, and big sarcastic brutes out for vengeance, please spread the word. I am to deliver stories I would want to read, and I hope you will to.

I’ve been working on a novel, and working on getting a lot of stories out to you all. I have two new releases as of the beginning of the week that are live for immediate enjoyment, and the most fresh of announcements, my editorial debut is live May 26th.

This is up for preorder, and I am so excited for you all to meet the Darkleaf family, along with everyone else’s redneck crew.

Cogs and Cutlasses with my story Rise of the Read Eagle, and A Touch of Aether, with my story Dead Wolf are also live and ready for purchase. I’m immensely proud of both stories, and you can even find an interview with me all about Dead Wolf on the Blasters and Blades Podcast.

This release is Rune, Rise of the Red Eagle’s protagonist second outing, of many. Rune is a character drawing on all of my youth experience along with my love of history and ancestral ties. Rune will return, and often, so I hope you all love him and the Fractured Land he lives in.

Leonidas Vanagandr, the star of Dead Wolf, will also return. Leo and his friends are central to my upcoming novel, which I look to enter in for the vaunted Ark Prize with newly minted Ark Press. I’ve got one more release at least waiting in the wings. This one another action comedy piece like you can expect with It came From the Trailer Park.

Concept art for Morgan (Left) and Kyras (right) coming to you later in the year via Space Truckin’!

That’s it for news updates. Go get some previews, or give one othe anthologies a whirl, I have been blessed to read, and I can promise you the quality is there.

Now I’m going to bitch, hopefully in entertaining fashion.

I like to think, just like with all the martial arts and contact sports, that I have a pretty thick skin. I learned to take criticism long before my writing days. Got screamed at military style for every missed block or tackle from middle school through high school graduation, and in general got raised with some backbone. I don’t give a damn if you are harsh or brash. I’ve gotten literally terrible critiques and just let it roll. I though I was pretty much over having anything get my goat about writing or otherwise. Well I figured out the goat was still in the pen these last few weeks. He no longer responds to vitriol, but there is one thing that still gets him up and ready to clash horns.

Stupid

Now I’m not trying to call anyone who believes different than me about this stupid. I’m just trying to say that to me, this one thing, similar to advocating for gun control or getting involved in a land war in Asia, is a sign you might not be as bright a bulb as I thought you were. It’s a thing that one of my firearms instructors, Pat Mac, called institutional inbreeding.

In short, its when one idiot in the institution, group, or industry spouts off with some dumb shit or implements some stupid training policy, and suddenly everyone else adopts it, and all the people they train adopt it, and so on, and so forth. Then they train with people who have only trained that way, and suddenly everyone is doing the dumb shit because that’s how you do it.

OK, Jess, What’s that got to do with authorship?

Thanks for asking, Outlaws.

In writing, we do this thing called point of view. It’s how you frame the story, specifically how you are provided the information.

1st Person- You are in your protags head. Think Dresden Files or Red Rising

2nd Person- I’m telling you what you did. This one is rare and only for like choose your own adventure or Dungeons and Dragons

3rd Person- Most of the classics are written this way. The story describes it the way a camera would see it, being able to focus in and out or even swap points of view. Lots of the Classics like Dune and The Lord of The Rings, probably most fiction is written in 3rd.

Well I did and still do a lot of 1st and 3rd. I like 1st for when I feel like the tale only needs to focus on a single person’s experience. I like 3rd when theres more than one protagonist, or when the POV needs to capture more than one person would rightly see. Fights come out a lot clearer in 3rd, because any singular person wouldn’t be able to see and remember all the chaos going down in a big battle.

So I wrote a few 3rd person stories the last six months, and I’ve been expanding my beta readers outside of my friends and loved ones more and more. I’ve been blessed to become an Alpha Merc, a Nobody, and a Work In Progress writer, so I have several writing groups to both read and be read by for critiques and feedback, and all of them are great. When life takes my normal test readers out of the running, these people save the day.

So here’s the bloody stupid issue.

Third person has been divided into sub categories. Close, which is like the camera and perspective sticking to one person. you still get to zoom out some, and hear that person’s thoughts, but nobody else, and Omniscient, which is an all knowing narrator that can give you the camera swapping shots midscene and get into other characters heads.

Most of the classics are Omniscient. Everything I read as a kid was, but at some point, someone decided Close was cooler and better and suddenly Omniscient was the old man that had worked all his life and then retired only to be forgotten. Some people decided they didn’t like it at all. It became like driving a stick shift. Has lots of advantages, but “everyone” prefers automatic, so why even make the stick?

Third person Omni became this old school thing that nobody does and “everyone” says not to do, despite me being able to name a dozen of the greatest novels of all time that are written that way. Third person close is just better, do that or write first person.

I have one problem with this. If I was just going to stick to one person, to write from their perspective and thoughts, and not change to others…

I’D WRITE IN BLOODY FIRST PERSON!

So as I got feedback on the slew of stories that I have now professionally sold, I would get one or two great people that would hit the point I moved from one character point of view to another suddenly say

aRe yOu wRiTinG tHiRd PeRsOn OmNiScIeNt?!!!!1

Like they walked in on me balls deep in a barnyard animal, or drying out human skins on a rack. You would have thought I was making skin lamps like Ed Gein.

My blood boiled.

This was the kind of stuck in the mud goofy bullshit I would expect at a corporate job.

Ranting to some close writing friends, I decided I am founding a new Thrid Person perspective subclass.

Third Person- Yah Mama- Third person, and if you want any more details than that, go ask yah mama, cause I don’t have the time, the patience, or the finger paint to explain this to you if you have to ask me in the middle of a fight scene.

In seriousness it’s not these dear readers faults, they are simply going off personal feelings of preference or what they were taught or learned, but holy pants on head retarded batman, the whole point of 3rd person is to be able to move as you need to to tell the story i nthe best way.. It’s worked since the Epic of Gilgamesh, It will work for me too.

There isn’t a damn thing wrong with 3rd person Omni. Close limits itself on purpose to immerse the reader, and that’s awesome, but its not needed. You don’t have to write how everyone else writes.

You don’t have to do anything how everyone else does it as long as it works, and you can take care of yourself.

That’s the whole reason I’m the Outlaw Author. Legal and Social expectations don’t make moral actions. Right and Wrong have nothing to do with Social acceptance or legal precident. Just because that’s “How it’s done now.” Doesn’t mean it’s the best way.

I’m going to do it my way, with all the tricks and turns I can find, all the wisdom others will give me, and I hope you all do too. I hope that when the time comes, you are willing to spit on the ground and say “We don’t have to walk the same road.”

I hope you are happy and healthy out on your own trail, finding your own tribe, and finding what makes your heart sing. If we happen to find ourselves at the same table or the same campfire, I hope you’ll share some hard fought wisdom with me.

May We All Find What We Seek,

Jesse James Fain