My point is--I haven't read any book in a while where the author doesn't slip up, and yet it's considered such a mark of bad writing when you break your third limited. so this leads me to believe that it's not really a slip up,writers break their own rule for convience's sake.

Have I completely misunderstood by lesson on this?

"A good writer must know the rule before they can break it" you say, but this to me is different. Learning to write this way is not easy and takes lots of practice, and I've studied it long of enough that it ticks me off when I catch someone doing it, because it's not considered acceptable to write in anything else anymore; the arguement is that it's better when you do it this way (and I agree) but I haven't seen a book in a long time that follows this rule from begining to end. So if you can't do it right, then don't preach it, darn it!

I'm not sure why this makes make me mad when I see it, but it does. I keep feeling like there is a little trick I'm missing that someone's not letting me in on...

Also, many people actually like the flavor of the non-character point of view because it means that the author is showing his or her own prejudices, thus opening themselves to criticism (it's much more fun to criticize a person than a work). On the other hand, artists want to expose themselves, that's why they become artists.

But of course, most of the time, it's just a mistake. When you work up a character, you attribute motivations and thoughts, not just actions. And sometimes when you're writing, you forget to just look at the action (actually, just the POV character's perception of the action). Kind of like a lapse in grammer or spelling.

But I have a deeper beef with point of view violations. The truth of the matter is, we all experience our lives from a single point of view (my apologies to the X-Men, esp. C. X.). I don't read minds, and even if I did, that would be experienced by me as my perceptions of someone else's thoughts rather than as my own thoughts from that person (or at least, that's what I would hope). If I were to assign specific thoughts and motives to one of my non point of view characters, I would be granting myself (or my main character, or the reader, I'm not really sure who's who at that point) an ability to judge that none of us has in real life (except maybe my character, who is a mind reader).

I like third person unlimited (I think this is actually called 3rd person omnipresent or something like that). It's a little too "narrator" voiced for some folks' taste, but it avoids exactly the problem you are alluding to. My narrator can be everywhere and relate everything about the story because HE is telling the story. No big deal, no need to break POV.

And, as far as telling what emotions the characters are feeling, do it in the dialog, not by saying things like '"I like that" he said, sarcastically.' I think readers pick up on your well chosen phrases better than they do on your "markers" after the quotation ends. I think Card calls those things "throw aways" or something like that.

I like Victor Hugo as my current favorite example of a GREAT omnipresent 3rd person narrator. I like Charles Dickens too. You are never in any doubt that it is they, the authors, telling you the story. It isn't through anyone's eyes but their own. That is as it should be. I don't think they EVER break POV and they always manage to describe their characters in sufficient detail that you understand when they are angry, sarcastic, or happy as clams.

Here's a little clam song:

Raw, steamed or fried,
I just can't decide.
I once was part of the plankton of the sea,
Now I'm in a tidal basin singing merrily.

Oh...
Clams are the best
We laugh at all the rest
We open our valves
To feed ourselves
When bacteria counts are really HIGH...
If you eat us, you will die.

But there is nothing artificial or forced about telling a story from the limited point of view. In fact, most of the stories that any of us remember are things that actually happened to us, and all of these, without exception, happened from our own point of view.

Someone brought up The Great Gatsby in an earlier discussion. I went back and read it, and there is indeed a passage that seems to violate POV. Nick is reporting on the information collected from a chap named Michalis or something, who was present after what's her name got run over. But looking at it, it's clear that this is Nick narrating a report that he recieved from another person, not that persons own report.

All characters created by a writer come from that writer.

All characters are either an aspect of the writer's personality (even the bad guys can be considered Hydes to the writer's Jekyll) or they are based on the writer's perception of some individual outside of the writer (which really means that they come from the writer, too).

Because characters come from the writer, the writer has every reason to know what they are all thinking.

As pointed out above, though, a character without telepathic powers does not know what the other characters are thinking unless they tell that character.

As far as capability is concerned, if a writer is capable of manipulating multiple characters through the action, then a writer is capable of understanding and knowing the minds of multiple characters.

Since writers only put down one letter at a time, writing one word at a time, even if there are multiple characters, the writer is only portraying the feelings and thoughts of one character at a time anyway.

POINTS OF VIEW, edited by James Moffett and Kenneth R. McElheny--ISBN: 0-451-62872-1

This is an anthology of short stories that exhibit as many different ways to use point of view as just about anyone (except, perhaps, Survivor) can think of and that have actually been published.

They start with interior monologue (first person point of view), go through various kinds of third person point of view, and end with a few examples of no character point of view. There is even second person point of view in there.

Cost is only 7.99 plus tax (at a bookstore) and amazon.com would charge less.

That may be because humans seem so alien and senseless to me anyway...

Somebody back me up on this one. I know for sure that a lot of the characters we put in our fiction are defined more by their behavior and action than by our conscious definition of their mental landscape. Sometimes we just never find out why a character behaves in a particular way (my favorite is when a writer using the omniscient voice says something like, 'perhaps he thought...or maybe he was just hysterical...or...but he died without revealing the secret of his behavior that day.') I mean, it's easier to tell when a writer like Hawthorne isn't familiar with the inner thoughts and motives of a character that he's created, but surely many of us put fairly important characters into our plots, basing them on the actions of people that we don't really believe that we can understand.

I know for certain that I haven't ever accomplished the feat of mapping out my own characteristics, and I doubt that anyone else has accomplished it for himself. So why would convincing characters be any more accessible to us than we are?

Most people have an area of reasoning, personality, and way of thinking they stay in. When you move outside of your normal area into another it's called a paradigm shift, and people don't do this often. The problem is, when you don't have a good feel of your character's normal gambit of emotions, it's easy to fall prey to inconsistencies in your character's behavior.

It's true human's behave erratically, but to the human who's behavior seems so bizzare, their is a method to their madness. At least to them (unless they are completely insane).

As for the question of whether this leads to inaccurate sterotyping, I believe that it is less likely to than its alternative. After all, most of us have a great deal of experience observing the actions and outward behavior of people that we find inexplicable, while none of us have any experience whatsoever observing the actual thoughts of people that we don't understand (that's pretty much the definition of us not understanding them, after all). So if we descibe characters in terms of their actions alone, without bother about their feelings and thoughts, we're dealing with something that we have real life experience with. When we try to make up their thoughts and feelings, we're speculating about something that we have no basis of actual knowledge concerning. When are we more likely to make errors in personally stereotyping those characters?

Also, consider that 'personally' stereotyping a person is a matter of assigning (or assuming they have) attributes on the basis of unrelated observed characteristics. Behaviors are interrelated. If I'm sneaking about, I'll tend to crouch down, hide behind things, walk on tiptoes, etc. So I can describe a pattern of behavior accurately and with a minimum of stereotyping. Thoughts are not directly correlated to behaviors in the same way. If I'm sneaking about, that doesn't tell you why I'm sneaking about, or even if I mean to do so. So when you assume something about my thoughts, you assign me an unrelated attribute.

quote:

---

All characters created by a writer come from that writer.

All characters are either an aspect of the writer's personality (even the bad guys can be considered Hydes to the writer's Jekyll) or they are based on the writer's perception of some individual outside of the writer (which really means that they come from the writer, too).

Because characters come from the writer, the writer has every reason to know what they are all thinking.

---

Okay, this is the point in particular. Those characters that come from an extrapolation of our own personality are the ones of which we can reliably report the feelings and thoughts. But the ones that come from our perceptions of other people's actions, while they can be said to spring from us, do not naturally spring from us complete with thoughts and feelings. Our perception of them (if we are in good mental health) is only a record of observed actions, with some estimates of future behavior. We don't perceive their thoughts and feelings, so if we add those to a character based on our observations, then we're adding something that we've just made up on the spot.

It may FEEL like some characters "write themselves" (or whatever you want to call it), but they aren't alive until or unless you, the writer make them so.

It's a lot like clams. No, let's drop that...

What we have in the POV discussion is an interesting question. Are there really three POVs we've been discussing? I call narrators omnipresent, NOT omniscient. That may bother some, but I see omniscience as a higher level of POV than what most narrators give. A story-teller acts as if he was there to relate the drama of the moment. He is understood to be filtering the emotional content through his own person. He is the author speaking to the reader and telling the reader who did what when and letting us draw our own conclusions.

The ominiscient POV is beyond narration, seems to me. They are the ones who tell us who did what when, why, under what motivation, and what their digestive tract was doing at the time. That can work as a story telling device too, but it isn't as engaging as letting the reader figure out things for themselves.

I don't have much luck with character POV (letting a single character be the narrator) because I usually I like to have characters disappear for awhile. If the narrator disappears, the book has to stop, no?

Give me an omnipresent spectator over an omniscient interpreter any day.

Or, have I created a false dichotomy here?

Omniscient point of view is not done very often in fiction any more--and when it is attempted, it usually doesn't work very well. (Most times it tends to look more like sloppy point of view shifting.)

Omnipresent narrators make much more sense to a readership that has been trained to view stories on television and at movies. The camera doesn't show thoughts, and voice-over is considered hokey. The actors have to be able to let viewers know what they are thinking by their acting and their actions, so the writer has to use similar methods to convey what the characters are thinking.