In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 269.
I remember exactly where I was when I learned you could write third person and first person at the same time: on a Metro-North train, reading James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime (Doubleday, 1967) on a friend’s recommendation. I was just about to graduate college, and I was always, endlessly, on the train between Connecticut and New York.
For all its faults—the casual racism, the misogyny, both inexcusable products of the novel’s publication in 1967—Salter’s book left a lasting impression. Some of its images remain embedded in my memory: algae so thick one could almost write in it; “hair that the summer has dried.” But it was Salter’s structural conceit that impressed me: The book is narrated by an unnamed French man who develops an intense fascination with the sexual relationship between the handsome American Philip Dean and a young French woman, Anne-Marie Costallat. Told with a nearly journalistic, voyeuristic detail, the narrator’s interactions with the couple are combined with his own imagined scenes, blurring fantasy and reality. The result is unnerving, and intriguing.
What struck me—and I can feel its echo, even now, like a bell—was how Salter’s writing in first person gives him access to third-person perspective as well. The first-person narrator reports on events and dialogue as filtered through his eyes, adding texture and mood. Salter’s book is just one of many that fuse points-of-view: Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (Knopf, 1992) uses a background narrator to some degree, and Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015–2018) might be the most famous contemporary example, in which pages are given over to the narratives of other characters. White on White (Riverhead Books, 2022) by Ayşegül Savaş is another striking example of this form, where nearly an entire chapter is given over to a secondary character’s story.
I used this unnamed narrator technique in my first novella, Fantasian (Badlands Unlimited, 2016), which I’d initially begun writing in close third. Dolores, my protagonist, was flighty and charming, well-intentioned but possibly evil; I was having trouble getting a grasp of her character. What I needed was an outsider’s POV: someone who could comment on Dolores’s bad behavior, who could be a foil to her charismatic energy. I added an unnamed narrator, whom I nicknamed Baby, and the book opened up immediately. Not only did I have access to Baby’s consciousness, and her observations of Dolores, but I could even write imagined scenes, like a chapter that seemed to follow Dolores, but was ultimately revealed to be a fantasy of Baby’s. I reveled in the freedom of movement.
In my novel, Discipline (Random House, 2026), I was excited to return to first-person narration and to explore the possibilities it held. My narrator, Christine, is a writer on a book tour. She’s traveling around, having conversations about what it means to live a good life. She’s open yet reserved; she listens carefully, yet her narration also allows hints of editorializing—her true feelings—to slip in. Though it might seem like the book frequently turns over to the stories of other characters, it’s always being filtered through Christine’s point-of-view: She’s the one writing the third person. I loved having the freedom to shine a light on different narratives, anchored by Christine’s perspective. If you love writing your first-person narrator, but want to move outside of their head, consider expanding their range: How would they describe a scene, a party, a fight? What might they overhear, or imagine?
Larissa Pham is the author of the novel Discipline (Random House, 2026); the essay collection Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy (Catapult, 2021), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard prize; and the novella Fantasian (Badlands Unlimited, 2016). She teaches creative writing at the New School in New York.
image credit: Jordan Whitfield