In Writing with Emotion, Tension, & Conflict, Cheryl St. John writes: Become so involved in the character’s backstory and motivation that you can close your eyes and imagine how you’d feel or react in their shoes.
Do you see a problem with her sentence? Maybe not, because in conversation we often use the plural their with a singular antecedent. Why do we do that? Because the English language doesn’t have a singular gender-neutral pronoun.
Here’s what is grammatically correct:
Become so involved in the character’s backstory and motivation that you can close your eyes and imagine how you’d feel or react in his or her shoes. Problem is, we don’t like the extra words and awkwardness of repeatedly using “his or her” and “he or she.” How ridiculous it would be to structure a sentence this way: He or she should become so involved the character’s backstory and motivation that he or she can close his or her eyes and imagine how he or she would feel or react in his or her shoes. Terribly confusing, right?
You might see he/she and him/her used as singular gender-neutral pronoun, but that’s not the best solution. Most editors don’t like that approach.
Here’s what’s grammatically correct, but a bad idea:
Some writers will use he or she interchangeably at random. In one paragraph, “she” is used, and in the next, “he.” Why is that a problem? When readers have a “she” pictured in their minds, they are jarred by later seeing that person described as a “he.”
How do we get the plural pronoun to agree?
Instead of trying to make pronoun singular, make the subject plural. For example: Become so involved in characters’ backstories and motivations that you can close your eyes and imagine how you’d feel or react in their shoes.
Or find a way to eliminate the plural pronoun:
Instead of “their,” we could use “that character’s,” but that leaves us with a “character” redundancy. Maybe this would be better: Become so involved in the character’s backstory and motivation that you can close your eyes and imagine how you’d feel or react in that person’s shoes. Do we really need that last prepositional phrase? Maybe not. The meaning seems to be clear without the phrase and its disagreeable pronoun. Become so involved in the character’s backstory and motivation that you can close your eyes and imagine how you’d feel or react.
Whatever you choose to do, you should never agree to let your plural pronoun disagree with its singular antecedent.
So happy to see this difficult topic addressed! I detest the very common solution of using “their” to refer to a singular subject. Your ideas were most helpful. Thanks.
Thank you for saying so. Even encouragers need encouragement.
Great solution, Frank!