Free Indirect Discourse -- Anyone else struggle with this technique?

[HamdenRice]

All my writing of late has gravitated to this voice. I find it very, very expressive, but very, very difficult. It raises so many technical issues that just weren't present when I was using other points of view and voice.

Just in case you are not familiar, free indirect discourse, or free indirect speech, is a voice that blends the points of view of a close omniscient third person narrator and the character's first person speech.

To simplify:

Indirect discourse: She looked at the hotel room. She thought it would be nice to stay there the next day.

Direct discourse: She looked at the hotel room and she thought, "It will be nice to will stay here tomorrow."

Free indirect discourse: She looked at the hotel room. It would be nice to stay here tomorrow.

Two of the best practitioners of this discourse pattern writing today are Jonathan Franzen ("The Corrections") and Alice Munro (most of her short stories).

When I say that free indirect discourse raises technical issues you don't ordinarily have to think about, a typical problem raised by free indirect discourse would be the choice, in the third example above, of whether to write: "It would be nice to stay here tomorrow" ("here" is her voice and pov) or "It would be nice to stay there tomorrow" ("there" is narrator's voice and pov mixed with her voice and pov).

[Shiver]

1. I've honestly never had a problem with it myself

And, in fact, was unaware until now that it was the style I had been writing in.

Unless I'm mistaken, Free Indirect Discourse sounds similar to the method I tend to use; "third-person personal", which probably goes by another name I am unaware of. Basically, each scene is through the viewpoint of a specific character, but told in third-person, almost as if the character were narrating the scene themselves. Thus, everything that would be narration comes from the character's perspective. Occasionally I shift to a 'floating viewpoint', allowing me to touch upon multiple characters in the same scene, but I tend to use this sparingly as it can get confusing (seeing something through the eyes of six different people, for example, can be very useful, though).

The only problems this tends to create come from describing new characters and scenes so that the reader can create a mental image - it's unnatural (and often, just plain bad writing) to have the characters describe new places to themselves like a narrator would. It's not too difficult to avoid this, though.

In any regards, I always stick with the character's pov. The only time I use a narrator pov is if the character hasn't been introduced in the scene yet, or on the rare occasion when I use an omniscient perspective.

[HamdenRice]

2. Without having some text in front of me, I think you may be talking about something different

I think you may be talking about "close third person," because you describe it as "told in third-person, almost as if the character were narrating the scene themselves."

The hallmark of free indirect discourse is that it shifts between close third person and language or thought that is actually attributable to the character.

Here's a more concrete example than the one upthread:

Close third person: Jeremy looked at the dinosaur model. He thought it looked real.

Free indirect discourse. Jeremy looked at the dinosaur model. It looks real!

That's a little abrupt and clumsy but you get the idea. The shift from the third person narrator to the character is the hardest part, and is signaled very subtly when done well. That precise timing and the word choice used to signal that shift is the hard part. Sometimes, as in this example, a tense change is used to signal the shift in pov.

Here's a passage from the end of The Corrections that uses free indirect discourse:

"She'd felt Wrong all her life and now she had a chance to tell him how Wrong he was. Even as she was loosening up and becoming less critical in other areas of life, she remained strictly vigilant at the Deepmire Home. She had to come and tell Alfred that he was wrong to dribble ice cream on his clean, freshly pressed pants. He was wrong not to recognize Joe Person when Joe was nice enough to drop in. He was wrong not to look at snapshots of Aaron and Caleb and Johan. He was wrong not to be excited that Alison had given birth to two slightly underweight but healthy baby girls. He was wrong not to be happy or grateful or even remotely lucid when his wife and daughter went to enormous trouble to bring him home for Thanksgiving dinner..."

Notice that the first three sentences are clearly voiced by an unnamed, disembodied narrator, but from Enid's perspective -- hence "close third person." But Enid is still observed; she is "she."

The fourth and following sentences, "He was wrong..." is not just Enid's perspective filtered through an omniscient narrator; it is Enid's voice. It is Enid (either talking to Alfred or inside her head) or a mixture of the narrator and Enid.

[Shiver]

4. I didn't explain it quite accurately

It's told almost as if th character were narrating it, but some thoughts are portrayed as free indirect discourse. Let me see if I can find an example.

From one of my own stories...

The corners of her lips turned upwards as she sang, the last vestiges of sleep finally departing as her eyes snapped open in realization. It was a familiar song! With practiced ease, Thaliá rose to her feet without aid from her bound arms, her toes already tapping the rhythm. Pillows were kicked aside by fuzzy pink slippers as they glided into the center of the small cell, bringing with them the bouncy young woman.

"-he works his hands to the bone/ to give her money every payday," She sang to herself, her voice growing strong and melodic; there had been plenty of time to develop natural talent these last fifteen years. The words formed in her mind seconds before they sounded from the radio and rolled off her tongue in perfect accord. "But she wants more dinero just to stay at home-"

Her shoulders were a little sore. An attempt was made to rotate them, quickly deemed futile, and ignored in favour of the dance. Thaliá was slowly consumed by the music, swaying sensually in time with the beat - well, as sensually as one could sway while in an overly-confining straitjacket. Maybe they would let her take it off for a few minutes today and let her stretch out a bit. Hadn't it been a few weeks? It would have to be under close supervision, naturally - one could never be too careful.

There are some instances where I have characters express direct thoughts, so I tend to interchange the two as the situation warrants, similar to what is shown in your example.

[HamdenRice]

5. Yes, that's an example of it

"Maybe they would let her take it off for a few minutes today..." is the beginning of it.

I just want to point out that there is a difference between close third person point of view and free indirect discourse. I'm writing a story that looks at the inner lives of four family members, so it's not from any one character's pov; but it uses free indirect discourse to probe the thoughts of each of the four characters.

[Orrex]

3. Interesting...

I've never actually heard the formal term for it, but I find that I write in "indirect discourse" most of the time.

I've been reading a lot of Hemingway's short stories lately, and he seems to do this a lot (I don't have the text at hand, or I'd cite a specific example). McCarthy does it a lot, too, notably in The Road.


Do you like your finished product? I've never written in "free indirect discourse," so I'd have to say that I wouldn't be very good at it. I can see how it would give an immediacy to the thoughts of one's characters, though.

[HamdenRice]

6. What is the old joke about talking in prose?

It was something like that Johnson, on being informed that he had been speaking in prose all his life found he could no longer talk?

Hemingway is, indeed, notable for his use of free indirect discourse.

I find that I like the merging of the narrator's and character's voice. It is more immediate than thoughts conveyed with "tags." At its most mechanical, free indirect discourse is simply the "reporting" of thought without the most commonly used "tags" of comma-quotation marks, (she thought, "I like...") or "that" (she thought that she liked...).

I only learned what free indirect discourse is because I wrote a story about a married couple and gave it at a workshop, and the instructor pointed to a paragraph and said that it was an example of free indirect discourse. So I researched it, and found that it was indeed an emerging style of mine.

The problem is that it raises weird "mechanical" problems, like what pronoun to use. Here's a famous passage from Saul Bellow's "Herzog" (which I haven't read) but apparently, the character is reflecting on the world while sitting on his mistress's bed. Notice the use of "you" at the end:

"For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As Megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs. The beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind. Would you ask them to labor and go hungry while you yourself enjoyed old-fashioned Values? You-you yourself are a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest. Or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot. There, Herzog, thought Herzog, since you ask of an instance, is the way it runs."

<end quote>

He could have written, "Would he ask them to labor and go hungry..." He might even have written, "Would I ask them to labor and go hungry..."

The last sentence is a wonderful conundrum of this: "There, Herzog, thought Herzog, since you ask..." Although not actually free indirect because it uses a tag, but the Herzog and "you" (for "me") are weird.

At any rate, this style is constantly throwing up these weird little questions.