Note #1: Enbies = NBs = non-binary people, in case you're not familiar with the terminology ✨

Note #2: I generalize a little in this chapter, but neopronouns also exist, and fall under the enby umbrella. They are, however, exempt from the unique challenges of they/them

In the months leading up to ONC 2021, I got into a conversation with a few queer friends about how hard it is to write a character with they/them pronouns in third person. How do you handle group settings? Reflexive verbs? Name exhaustion, if you try not to overuse the word "they"? Some of us had done it with side characters, some of us had put enbies front and center in first-person narratives that evaded the challenge altogether, but the challenge remained.

Now, anyone who knows me knows how I respond to writing-related challenges. I love to push myself, and that extends beyond just wordcounts; anything that expands my horizons as a writer and teaches me new skills is fair game. When faced with a new genre, style, writing technique, or other book-scale thing that must be practiced over large wordcounts, I also have a tendency to figure it out by experience... which is to say, I write a book with it. Usually (though not always) a novella. Most of my novellas are experimental works of some kind.

Anyway, the ONC was, conveniently, coming up, so I jotted down an idea-fragment in my book queue: Write a novella with a non-binary protagonist in third person. I wanted to see if I could do it. I wanted to see what I could learn. I wanted to see if I could get to a point where it came as naturally as any other pronoun, so I wouldn't be limited by my own lack of experience on the matter anymore. Two months later, that idea-fragment joined with a conversation about bug-sized humans trying to ride a whirligig across a pond, and Green Grass Weald was born.

It was a romp, it was a challenge, and I learned as much from that book as I'd hoped to going in. Here, then, are my tips and tricks for turning your they/them-identifying enbies loose on the page without tripping over your own subordinate clauses.

1. Get used to it

I mean this in the most positive way possible! Many writers shy away from writing enby MCs not because of the challenge, but because they/them is new to them, and new things feel weird by default. Maybe they don't know much about nonbinary genders. Maybe they're worried about how readers will react. Maybe they're not entirely comfortable with they/them pronouns themselves—hell, I'm queer myself, and I know I still had issues when I first got started.

Like me, I know many writers want to be better at these things, but just haven't had the chance to use they/them pronouns enough to get used to them.

The good news? Writing a book is perfect for that.

The best way to get used to something through exposure, and us authors have the advantage of being able to spend time with and "get to know" enby characters without having to subject real-life enbies to our trip-ups as we practice. Make an enby character. Learn who they are as a human being, not as an identity. Use their pronouns in your head. Write snippets with them. Write a first chapter with them. Write thirty more chapters. And then edit the hell out of those, fixing mishaps, clunky phrasing, and all the workarounds you used at first but then found you didn't need anymore by the end because surprise! They/them now comes to you as easily as any other pronoun.

Now, this is a simplification (among other things, please research enby representation before you get started, and use sensitivity readers as required) and there's a reason this is only the first item on this list. They/them is still trickier to write than pronouns with clear singular and plural forms. But that's what the rest of this chapter is for.

2. Make use of the singular reflexive, "themself"

"Themself" or "themselves" is one of the biggest questions that came up in the conversation that started Green Grass Weald. Does your character pat themselves on the back? Or pat themself? We're used to the former because formal grammar dictates it, but the latter is not actually incorrect. Not only that, it flows intuitively from its equivalent in other pronouns (himself, herself, emself, etc.) and, best of all, it gives you a singular form for a word you'll also use in plural contexts.

This is key for keeping your group scenes in order. If you've ever got more than one character on the page, you'll want every tool at your disposal to make sure everyone knows what you're talking about when Youssef and Mia whisper amongst themselves while Jesal removes themself from the conversation.

Like the first time you use(d) they/them pronouns at all, singular "themself" will probably take some getting used to. I can attest, though, that it very quickly becomes your best friend, and will eventually roll off the tongue so easily, you'll forget you ever switched.

3. Index the words "they/them" while writing

Even when you're writing a character with a binary gender, you always have to refer to them by name (or some other descriptor) at least once before you can switch to using pronouns, so everyone knows who those pronouns refer to. Aiukli snagged the brightest bookmark from the pile available. She loved yellow. The same deal goes with they/them, with one critical difference: we use those words as more than just pronouns. So what's a writer to do?

Say you open with your character, Jesal. They walk into a room, and now the word "they" refers to and belongs to them and them alone. You write like this quite happily for a couple of paragraphs, until Jesal's friends arrive. Something just changed. There's a new "them" in the room, and the moment you write that the five of them head for the snacks table together, you've reassigned your they/them.

I call that "indexing."

When I'm writing, I pay attention to these switches. I picture they/them like a ball that gets tossed back and forth: one moment, it belongs to the enby character; the next, it belongs to a plural group of people or objects. The key is that a ball can't teleport. It has to be passed, and to do that, the new target has to be identified. As you're writing, try at all costs to avoid switching between singular and plural "they" without a line—even a couple words—that make it clear you've changed what the word refers to.

Example with broken and/or nonexistent indexing:

Mia teamed up with Airi in the hallway. Jesal filled their glass with ice cubes from the bowl on the table as their footsteps bolted for the front door. Mia would get what was coming to her. No prank went unreciprocated in this friend group, and the ice cubes on the table were just begging for mischief. Jesal would make good use of them: they made the best attacks. The key, though, was stealth. Mia and Airi were determined, but they were the quietest of all. Quiet ones always raised the least suspicion.

Context cues make it possible to puzzle out who "they" refers to throughout this excerpt, but most readers will find it much harder to follow than a scene with proper indexing.

Jesal broke into a grin the moment they walked into the room. The snacks table had fruit punch, their favorite party drink by far. They were about to grab a glass when Mia ran in, laughing hysterically. Youssef and Emma pursued her, both armed with the ice cubes she'd slipped down their backs. They pursued Mia once around the room before she escaped. Jesal rolled their eyes and went back to their drink.

Here's that same paragraph with the indexes bolded:

Jesal broke into a grin the moment they [Jesal] walked into the room. The snacks table had fruit punch, their favorite party drink by far. They were about to grab a glass when Mia ran in, laughing hysterically. Youssef and Emma pursued her, both armed with the ice cubes she'd slipped down their [Youssef and Emma] backs. They pursued Mia once around the room before she escaped. Jesal rolled their [Jesal's] eyes and went back to their drink.

This is actually a pretty common grammatical trick in general. Our minds are wired to associate any adjective or action with the most recent candidate we've read or heard, which is why, "The bees droned in the meadow as the man walked, flitting from flower to flower," elicits mental images of a flower-picking man even if the author meant to refer to the bees instead. The same thing goes for they/them.

4. Stick with one or the other for as long as you can

It should be evident from the bad indexing example above that the biggest challenge with using they/them comes from assigning and reassigning it. So what if you just... don't?

I don't mean this on a book scale: obviously, you're going to need to jump back and forth countless times over the course of an entire book. On a paragraph scale, though, you can work with the strengths of indexing by using name substitution, quantification alternatives, and sentence-structure changes to eliminate either singular or plural "they" from any overloaded paragraph.

Note how this sentence changes when this trick is applied:

Ula smiled. Linden's happiness had been hard to miss the last time they met.

Ula smiled. Linden's happiness had been hard to miss the last time she and they met.

While the second version is a little more awkward from a grammatical perspective, it comes with one major advantage: it doesn't leave "they" in index limbo, but nor does it reassign it. "They" continues to refer identifiably to Linden, who can carry it into the following sentences until you absolutely have to switch.

When it comes to elimination, name substitution tends to work best for removing singular "they," while relatively simple non-they substitutes work better for the plural form: the two, the group, those, or just including the additional characters like I did in the example able. This trick works best in paragraphs where either plural or singular "they" dominates, making the remaining instances easy to remove without nuking your reading flow. It comes with one caveat, but I'll discuss that in the last point in this list.

5. Quantify your plural "they"

When writing your enby character, there will come a time when you get stuck on a line that feels ambiguous even when indexed, but where name substitution or other tricks feel like overkill. In these instances, you can make your life easier by quantifying your "they." This works far better in its plural form: All of them, they both, etc. are obviously plural uses, and can be sprinkled throughout your indexed paragraphs to reinforce plural "they."

This can also work in the singular direction, but not as well as plural. Why? Because English is weird, and we refer to a group as singular even if we refer to its members in the plural. Hence why "everyone is scratching their heads" is correct, but "everyone are asking what is up with this language," is not. "They alone," can still refer to a group. One of the few places you can get around this is with a singular reflexive:

Ex. The three of them together got the project finished a minute before the deadline, though Huan suspected they themself hadn't helped much after 11 PM rolled around.

Note that an obviously plural or singular "they" will change your index, not circumvent it, but it's another good tool to have in your back pocket.

6. When all else fails, change your sentence structure

There will be times when you'll find yourself with just too many instances of the word "they" or any of its alternatives in a single chapter, page, or paragraph. Because the word has a dual use, this is kind of unavoidable. If your writing flow breaks down or ProWritingAid starts yelling at you for word repetition, you'll have reached this point on this list.

Most sentences that use the word "them" in a plural or singular context can be rearranged to eliminate the word altogether. If you find yourself eager to apply this trick, though, I encourage you to take a step back for a moment and take a breath first. Ask yourself what you're erasing, and why.

I put this trick last on the list because it has the same caveat I mentioned in point 4 above. If you're still unfamiliar and/or uncomfortable with using they/them pronouns in writing (especially writing that other people will read), you may find yourself using substitutions and sentence rearrangements to avoid the pronoun's singular form more than its plural one. That doesn't mean you're queerphobic, or a bad person, or anything else of the sort—just that you were raised in a society that's more familiar with plural "they" than singular, and (like the rest of us) have new habits to form. If you've ever strategically rearranged your spoken sentences to avoid gendering an enby friend, celebrity, or character while talking to people you suspect won't take it well, you know what this feels like.

Because our societal training leans this way, this can be a very easy trap to fall into. Unfortunately, it also defeats the point of writing a non-binary MC. Good representation means becoming comfortable with other people's pronouns, and then writing them in a way that does not apologize for their existence, and helps normalize them for others.

And so, this trick should be a last resort, not a regular feature of your writing. In all of Green Grass Weald—a 32k novella—I remember using it only twice. Use that as your guide.

Conclusion

If the amount of detail in this chapter feels overwhelming to you, that's okay. You're probably not alone. The amount of use you'll get out of it is going to vary by your experience level with writing enby characters in third person. If you're just getting started, you might stay in the "accustoming yourself to the pronouns" stage for quite a while, then move on to later tricks as you come back and edit whatever you wrote. If you've already tried and found it the unique challenge that it certainly is, I hope any part of this list was of use to you!

You also don't need to go off the deep end when you're getting started. Green Grass Weald was my first time writing a character with they/them pronouns in third person as a main character, but I already had the first book and a half of a series with major enby side characters under my belt at the time. That is where I see a lot of people starting. You can work your way up: side character to major character to POV, writing exercise to novelette to novel, solitary character to pair or group scenes.

As for my own journey, I've gone through all of those ramp-ups over the last two years, and have logged (to date) some 370k of writing with third-person they/them enbies in prominent—major or POV—roles. I now find they/them easier than the "gay pronoun problem" (multiple characters with the same pronouns in close narrative proximity, ex. a gay couple) which is a beast of its own that I'll unabashedly let somebody else write a blog post about.

So it's possible. I'm not saying it was (or is) easy all the time... but it has certainly been worth it for me!