Third Person Plural Future Tense (They [both/all of them] will go...)

For this, the final of the main POVs, I only have one example.

But I only need to have one.

I was lucky enough to see Thomas Morris read his story, ‘All the Boys,’ at the 2015 Cork International Short Story Festival.

At the time, I knew it was in a POV I’d never heard used as the basis for a story. I also knew it was a bloody great story.

(If you want to do a compare and contrast, with an equally great story, read it alongside Kevin Barry’s ‘Beer Trip to Llandudno’. It’s on the Times website, but behind a paywall. You can find it in his collection Dark Lies the Island, Vintage, 2013.)

‘All the Boys’ was published in Morris’s first collection We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, Faber, 2015.

More recently, also with Faber, he published the wonderful collection Open Up.

I should also say, Thomas is one of the writers I shared the Complete Guide to POV with, before I put it out here. And he made some great suggestions.

Here’s some pure Third Person Plural writing —

So they’ll get the taxi, and they’ll wait at departures, and they’ll board their flight, and they’ll sit there as the plane carries them over the water, over from Dublin to Bristol, and they’ll wait at Bristol Airport for their minibus to pick them up, and they’ll get on the minibus, and they’ll tell stories about the weekend to each other, and they’ll try and clear up some details that are hazy, like how much did it actually cost to get into the strip club?

But it needs breaking up, and so we get —

Did anyone else see Rob Senior on the table in Gogarty’s? And Gareth, where did you get to last night, mate? What happened to you?

The Third Person Plural Future Tense is awkward. If you use it, you’ll be trying to find ways to avoid putting will in every sentence.

And you’ll be desperate to break that doomed collective they up into idiosyncratic individuals, with names, quirks.

For the opening of ‘All the Boys,’ Morris starts with variation — with won’t. That makes the listlike nature of the narrative that follows just slightly less obvious. (This and then this and then this will all happen.) The other obvious minor variation, shortening will to ’ll, he does later in the paragraph —

The best man won’t tell them it’s Dublin until they get to Bristol Airport. He’ll tell them to bring euros and don’t bother packing shorts. The five travelling from Caerphilly will drink on the minibus. And Big Mike, the best man, will spend the first twenty minutes reading and rereading the A4 itinerary he typed up on MS Word. The plastic polypocket will be wedged thick with flight tickets and hostel reservations. It will be crumpled and creased from the constant hand-scrunching and metronome swatting against his suitcase – the only check-in bag on the entire trip. He’ll spend the journey to the airport telling Gareth, and anyone who listens, that Rob had better never marry again, that he couldn’t handle the stress of organising another one of these.

‘You should see my desk in work,’ Big Mike will say. ‘It’s covered in notes for this fuckin stag. It’s been like a full-time job.’

This is a story of lads abroad — Welsh lads in Dublin. They are, for most of the time we’re with them, definitely a raucous they. But in order for a story to happen, something or someone needs to be out of place.

I won’t give away what or who it will be. But Morris plays the Third Person against itself beautifully and movingly.

As soon as you’ve finished reading, you need to begin again.

The Third Person Plural Future Tense POV lends everything that happens a sense of inevitability. This lot, they’re doomed from the moment you meet them. Especially when they dress up as potatoes for a night out in Dublin. Cringe. And yet, Morris gives a real sense of a whole load of different possibilities that don’t arise.

Some of the story is in Third Person Singular Future Tense — there are he’s, she’s and it’s. But the spine of it is plural, with all the support and oppression that suggests.

In summary:

Third Person Plural Future Tense

Likely upsides:

Chunky, ongoing, vulnerable

Possible downsides

Undramatic, summarising, gloopy

My Example

Third Person Plural Future Tense

They will not tolerate that kind of behaviour from one of their community, and in many subtle ways they will let her know she has gone much too far. They will still allow her to attend group gatherings but no-one will invite her to their house for refreshments, and certainly not for dinner. No-one will make so much as a cup of coffee for her. And they will tell their children to avoid speaking to her children on the way to and from school, and also during lunchbreak and playtime. In class, if the teachers make them do group work, the children can acknowledge her children exist. The rest of the time, they will be told to pretend they aren’t there — however much they whine. The elders will decide what the next step to take will be when, after a week of ostracism, the woman makes a formal approach to them. They will listen to her apology, and her explanation, and her pleading. Then they will go into closed session and decide what form the community’s mercy will take.