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Zero
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Ok I am still debating whether to go the 3rd person limited or 1st person route for my current story. It is crucial that I dig deeply into the character's thoughts.

Tentatively I plan to try 3rd person limited.

The first scene opens and our character is recovering from an injury. He is in a room and is interacting with a few individuals who are trying to get information form him, information he doesn't have. He has suffered a head injury and cannot remember who he is. The trick is how do I write that narrative?

I don't wnat to refer to him as "The man" (ie: the man sat up...) Additionally "the man" might be confusing because there are multiple unknown people in the room interacting. But I can't give his name either. "John didn't remember who he was." I don't like that at all.

So what do I do? I could fall back on first person but I'd rather not if I don't have to. I don't believe there isn't a way to make this work.


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wetwilly
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Maybe just have one of the people he's talking to tell him his name so he has a tag.
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oliverhouse
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Do the people he's interacting with know who he is? They can call him by his name.

Has he been out for a long time? They might have assigned him a title: "John Doe #2645". Even if they don't know what his name really is, they could call him "John".

Maybe he has a different tag: "the patient", "the cop". If he's in trouble, maybe it's a tag with an ominous overtone: "the suspect", "the Jew" (used by the others in a derogatory way).


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Zero
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No they don't know who he is. They found him trespassing and that's when they tried to capture him, he tried to escape, received a head injury. Now nobody knows who he is, at leats in the room.

But I could tag him as what they think he is. They think he is a terrorist... but that feels strange to me.

quote:
"Who are you, terrorist?" The woman said. The terrorist searched his memory deeply but drew only blanks.

"I don't know," he said honestly.


Is this the kind of thing you're suggesting? I can't tell if it works or not. The trouble is he isn't a terrorist... not really. So by branding him thus "the terrorist" before giving him back his atcual name, well, what effect is that having on how my audience sees the character?


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xardoz
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Keep it simple - "the trespasser" or "the suspect". Either is accurate without being too negatively weighted.

Sadly for me, I know just enough about memory loss that unless you're very clever with how you approach it, I won't buy it. Others may dig it, though.


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kings_falcon
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Did you ever see the movie Dead Again ? Emma Thomas's present day character doesn't talk for the first bit of it and doesn't remember her name. Kenneth B. names her and she agrees to the temporary name so they don't have the problem you are talking about. While the movie format is very different than the written one because I can see the character, something similar might work.

If you are in 3rd person limited - the only person whose head you are likely to be inside for that scene is the MC. He doesn't know who he is so you might not need to name him right away. I suspect that if he's "captured" for any lenght of time, the people holding him will give him a name even if it is just John Doe and he may adopt it as his own. In 3rd limited you can get into "John's" head and show me his attempts to remember who he is.

In first person, you aren't going to have the "he" problem because the MC will think of himself as "I." You are going to lose some suspense on 1st person depending on the kind of story you are writing, I would think, because the reader already knows the MC survives whatever happens to him in the story. After all, if he didn't, he couldn't be narrating it now.


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oliverhouse
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What Xardoz said. The tresspasser lost his memory, but not his personality. Calling him terrorist doesn't work because _he_ knows he'd never be a terrorist (I assume) even if they don't. But if you call the tresspasser something milder, I think you can get away with it. If this paragraph didn't sound awkward to you, then maybe your own won't, either.
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xardoz
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quote:
Calling him terrorist doesn't work because _he_ knows he'd never be a terrorist (I assume) even if they don't.

I dunno, Oliver. If he doesn't know who he is, how would he know what he is capable of? Maybe before his injury he considered himself an activist, or a freedom fighter - either of which could be reasonably considered "terrorists" by security personnel under the right circumstances.


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Zero
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I don't think tresspasser would ve any more valid than terrorist. On the grounds that the character, having memory loss, doesn't know he is trespassing. He is simply in a room with angry people and he doesn't know why or who he is. They think he is a terrorist. That feels wrong to him but absolutely nothing is certain at this moment.

How would you (anyone) write the tag?


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xardoz
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They're holding him captive, so just call him "the captive."
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oliverhouse
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Thinking out loud here, so take it for what it's worth...

The issue isn't what's possible so much as what would seem natural to the reader for that situation. In 3rd-person limited, that means having a tag that's congruent with the viewpoint character's self-image.

Members of ALF and ELF think of themselves as activists, despite the fact that they're regularly labeled as "extremist" and "eco-terrorist" organizations. Palestinians who blow themselves up think of themselves as jihadists. IRA members in Northern Ireland saw themselves as patriots.

It could be more or less jarring for any of them to be _called_ "terrorist"; however, I can't imagine them adopting that tag for themselves. Thus "The terrorist wanted to get off the gurney" is too strong for a 3rd-person limited POV from their perspective.

"Trespasser" is objective. If they were found on someone else's property without the owner's permission, they are trespassers. That's something that they could probably adopt (even if it turns out to be false for some reason) because there appears to be an objective basis for it. (To Zero's point, that would require that he had some awareness of why he was there.) Same with "suspect". I just stopped editing and checked the post again, and Xardoz may again point the way: "the captive" is probably best of all.

The point is, none of the three violate the captive's self-image, and could therefore be used in 3PL POV. Or so it seems to me.


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Survivor
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The captive.

If you're going to start the story in such a difficult POV, you need to accept that conventional methods aren't going to work well or really at all. You ever try writing a story from a baby's point of view? Why not? They have pretty interesting adventures, after all.

Anyway, I'd answer this question with an appeal to Cherryh, zeroth person non-tense. You can open in that till we have enough context to understand that he's a captive and then you can start calling him "the captive". Or you can just take the context for granted.

quote:
The captive huddled in the metal chair they'd given him. He didn't know how long he'd been here, listening to questions that didn't make any sense. It was hard to know how to measure the passage of time when he couldn't seem to recall anything before this room, with its single harsh lamp and the mirror that showed him a stranger's face whenever he looked at it. That mirror, something about it pricked his memory, he knew that there was something important about it. Not his face in the mirror, the mirror itself. The people keeping him here kept saying that he was a terrorist, but he was sure they were wrong. They didn't seem all that afraid of him, at least.

You'll notice that I only use "the captive" once, and then just say "he". But we know that "he" is "the captive". It's all that he knows, it's all that we know, but it's enough...for us, I mean. He probably wishes he could remember his name. Have him do that, when they're asking him questions. You'll also notice that I left them undefined except as "the people keeping him there". I didn't have to do that, I could have introduced them as "his captors" or not referenced them so early. Anyway, a lot of options here.


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Zero
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Thanks everyone. I'm going with "the captive."
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