posted
Something in a discussion on the F&F board caused me to want to start a discussion of third person limited viewpoint over here.
I feel this is an important discussion because it seems that this is the primary viewpoint used by the authors here, and in fact, the current favorite for scifi/fantasy. It's my personal favorite to read and write because of all the advantages.
It's got some advantages and disadvantages. The main advantages seem to be that you have an intimate look at a character, without the problems of distance in time and space that first person and omniscient viewpoints can lead to. The main disadvantage seems to be that the reader can't know anything that the viewpoint character doesn't know.
I don' thave a specific question to start the ball rollling...I guess I'd just like to see some general noise on this...let me see if I can come up with some conversation pieces....If you use this viewopint, why? Do you have difficulty staying in viewpoint? How do you handle times in which you need to be deeply in a character's point of view versus times you only need to be lightly in their point of view? When you are only lightly in a character's point of view is it ok to make reference to something that the character knows but is not currently consciouss of?
I must say that before I ventured into writing, I never paid much attention to viewpoint. Now, however, I'm acutely aware of it when I read. As I read books I notice that while most authors do use limited third person, many 'cheat', as it were.
When I write, I generally use third person limited, and I use it with rigid adherance. I do not deviate at all, only in the depth to which I get into the viewpoint character. I think that's mostly because I'm still 'new' as far as writers go and haven't the skill yet to get away with muddying the waters too much.
Yet I see published authors doing that all over the place. They'll be deeply behind character A when sudddenly they switch almost midd stream to character B. The thing is...they do it so well I don't even notice at first. But then I go back and re-read the switch and I'm like, "Hey...there was no scene break, nothing...how'd they get away with that?" Red Prophet, for instance, has a scene told entirely from one guy's POV right up to the moment he is killed...then it quite casually switches to the killers POV and all is well....amazing.
As far as being limited to only the viewpoint character's knowledge...this is true, but only for so long as the narrator stays with that character for POV. In a novel it typically switches several times giving the author to flexibility to show the reader things the main POV character cannot know or see. but to me it's good not to know too much...I like seeing the world through a character's eyes--it provokes the same shock/suprise/hurt in me that it should in the character when unexpected things happen.
posted
OK, I'd like to talk about a bit of confusion I continue to have as I write in third person limited. I often receive critiques that say I have violated my point of view, when I do not feel that I have. The cases in which this happens are that another character, not the POV character, is performing the action. The POV character knows this and sees this, they see and know things about that character and have attitudes that I want to get across. But it seems silly for me to always say.
"Frank saw his brother, Chuck, enter the room. He knew from Chuck's smirk that he meant no good. Frank knew that Chuck hated him, and had hated him for some time..."
YUK! But if I write it this way...
"Chuck entered the room with a devious smirk on his face. He was obviously up to no good. He had hated Frank since they were boys..."
then I'm told I have violated POV...even if EVERY other paragraph is deeply in Frank's point of view, and it should be obvious that these are all Frank's observations...what am I doing wronng?
quote:"Chuck entered the room with a devious smirk on his face. He was obviously up to no good. He had hated Frank since they were boys..."
then I'm told I have violated POV...even if EVERY other paragraph is deeply in Frank's point of view, and it should be obvious that these are all Frank's observations...what am I doing wronng?
I don't think you're doing anything wrong, and the normal reader wouldn't have a problem with that.
I only consider it a POV problem if the information is something that the POV character cannot realistically know. So, if I may adapt your example:
"When Chuck entered the room, he kept his face straight so as to show no sign of the glee he felt about the prank he was going to pull on Frank. He had hated Frank since they were boys..."
This would have to be a POV violation because Frank would not see anything to indicate that Chuck felt glee about a prank.
Unless, of course, we are given clues that we are still seeing things through Frank's eyes:
"When Chuck entered the room, he was trying to his face straight, but failed to completely hide a smirk. He probably had some prank planned. He had hated Frank since they were boys..."
posted
I think you have a good point there, Eric, and now that I look at one of the passages in question in my actual work, I see the difference between the paragraph I made up here and the one I wrote. It's so subtle, but I see where I went wrong. It was the word "trying". Even if my POV character knows that the other character is trying to do something, or thinks he is, the word does take it out of the POV character's apparent control. "Chuck entered the room, trying to hide the devious smirk that just touched his lips." Well, perhaps the POV characters thinks thie because of the way Chuck's mouth is moving, and perhaps I even mention strange lip movements in the next sentence, but I have already attributed something to Chuck that is seems doubtful that Matt would know. I need to show Matt's observation first, and even then I should probably modify a word like "trying".
I'm looking back and seeing a few other cases where this happened...One time I was telling rather than showing. I said that "Lorianne was upset..." It wasn't that important, so I didn't bother to show how her husband knew she was upset, I simply delved right in and said so so that I could go on with life. In this case, I was telling, but worse I was telling something that is most definitely a feeling the POV character could not have shared in.
I suppose I should look on the bright side. At least I'm finally getting down to nitty gritty subtle aspects of writing rather than dealing with overarching issues.
posted
I do think, though, that if you are in the POV of the character observing Lorraine, "Lorraine was upset" can be a conclusion the POV character has formed, rather than a statement of Lorraine's actual emotional state. I suppose it depends to some degree on context:
quote:Frank sat at the table, picking at his food. He didn't feel very hungry.
Lorraine was upset. She sat across the table and just looked at him without saying anything.
quote:Frank sat at the table, picking at his food. He didn't feel very hungry. Lorraine was upset. She sat across the table and just looked at him without saying anything.
I think the paragraph break in the first vesion makes it seem like there must be a shift, and that makes "Lorraine was upset" seem like we have shifted to Lorraine's POV.
Without the paragraph break, we are still in Frank's POV, so "Lorraine was upset" is a conclusion Frank has drawn.
[This message has been edited by EricJamesStone (edited March 08, 2004).]
posted
Something I tend to forget is that you do get a bit more latitude with third limited than you do with first, but you can write it with the same degree of restriction. If you write it too tight to the POV, then you loose the ability to see just a hint of the outside of the character, which you can’t do at all with first, but can insert discretely into third.
Somewhat cheesy examples of what I’m talking about:
I combed my hair, feeling the tangles catch against the wooden teeth.
She combed her hair, feeling the tangles catch against the wooden teeth.
She combed her long, dark hair, feeling the tangles catch against the wooden teeth.
My feeling of first is that you really can’t add in the "long, dark" part without violating the scope of the POV, but you can fit it into third without feeling you’ve removed yourself too far from the character. There is a sense of watching the character inherent to a third person POV even when you are deep within their heads, where first feels more like you’re seeing everything from within the boundary character’s skin. You are never really outside the character, though there are distances of time usually, with first. Not that the information can’t be gotten across in a more implied manner (and probably should be), but you can make use of more direct description.
posted
Also, in third person LO you can have the characters think what they would never admit to having thought, let alone write down as their own thoughts.
It is important to remember that in a first person account, the narrator character has to have a reason for writing the narrative and everything in the narrative. And that has to be a character reason, not an authorial reason. Just because you, as the author, want the reader to know the main character secretly likes eating flies, this doesn't mean that the character wants to tell that to anyone (particularly as the fly eating is kinda a secret).
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