For what I am doing my pattern is similar to this:

Bob walked along the sidewalk running a fat hand through his hair. etc etc. ...

***

It was a door, a large gray door. Travis looked at it with a disappointed frown...

***

"I don't think so," Tom said belligerently...

***

The shiny object had been the key afterall. Bob felt its cold brass shape slide easily into the keyhole with a satsfying click.

***

etc.

OK these are examples I made up to dmeonstrate what I am trying to communicate. My writing style is 3rd person but isn't limited to one person, it jumps to people and sometimes doesn't come back.

There may be
10 Points of View from Bob
6 from Travis
1 from Tom

and all in the order that best suits the plot,

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...to be honest I think omniscient viewpoint is very difficult to do well and I almost never see it done well.

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Tolkien does omniscient too, I believe, though he tends to mostly stick to one character for any given scene.

I do agree that omnipresent is not easy to write. I personally will stick to third person limited, it is easier and allows a legitimate way of not showing the reader things that are happening they don't need to know yet. It all comes down to personal preference.

Narrator voices can be thought of as a special case of first person POV where the POV is not an important character in the action of the story, but is only a narrator of the events. Often none of the characters of the story even know of the narrator, who may well live well after the events of the story.

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Although Balthasar thinks its crap, the first several books in RA Salvator's Dark elf series....

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First, you have one hell of a memory, or I have made a big impression on you.

Second, for the record, I haven't read Salvatore's Dark Elf series, so I don't know if they're crap or not.

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First, you have one hell of a memory, or I have made a big impression on you.

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Well, I do have a pretty good memory. I can't believe you would think I would forget my favorite person to disagree with.

As for Salvator, you have to have some interest in fantasy, and a enjoyment of the dnd system helps greatly also. His dnd books hold to the rules of that world very well, and I've never read a dnd adventure put into word so well.

Since you, Lord D., went out of your way to read a few books I recommended, why don't you recommend one or two of Salvatore's books for me to read (and you won't even have to pay me .)

Here's what I've read by him. My first read was The Sword of Bedwyr, and then I tried to read the first novel of his Dark Elf Series and the first novel of his Cleric Series, but to no avial; and then, in a final attempt to like something by him, I read his adaption of The Attack of the Clones, which I thought was awful. But that was the last straw for me; I'd never judge an author based only on an adaption.

So, Lord D., what do you recommend? Right now, it doesn't matter to me if it's a middle book in a series or the first book. So don't let that concern you.

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Important correction here, Tolkien didn't write in POV at all, he uses a narrator voice.

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If you didn't like the first book of the cleric series, then I doubt you would like any of them. The first book of the dark elf series was impossible for me to read until I had read the Icewind dale series first. I couldn't get into the dark elf society the way it was written. I had to have prior knowledge of the main character and want to know of his past before I could suffer through the first couple chapters. After that I loved it.

Crystal Shard is the first book he actually wrote in the series, that is where he introduced the main characters of the books. I have to say that although I enjoyed it, it wasn't the best one. I think some his later books gained more depth as he went along. I also discovered that he switched the POV from omniscient to 3rd limited somewhere along the way. Since he is one of the few authors who could switch to another characters thoughts in mid paragraph without it being confusing.

You don't have to read any more of his books if you didn't like his style. I think it amounts to personal preference.

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You don't have to read any more of his books if you didn't like his style.

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Standards of modern POV writing shouldn't be applied to books that use older narrative forms...it's like judging Shakespeare's grammer by modern standards.

In this case, the 'experts' have it wrong. Tolkien's work is a complete failure judged as a work of Full Omniscient. But by using a fictional expert on the legendary saga of Middle Earth's War of the Rings as his narrator, Tolkien managed to create something that was believable in its own right, even though we all know intellectually that it is fiction, the illusion that it is recovered epic history is perfect between the covers of the books.

For most of THE FELLOWSHIP, the story is experienced through Frodo. In the next book, most of the story lines are experienced through the hobbits (with Sam and Frodo, the experience moves from Frodo to Sam as their storyline progresses), and when there are no hobbits around (example: when Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas are chasing the Uruk-hai) the storyline is experienced through the individual closest to human. The only time that changes is when Legolas and Gimli talk about travelling the Paths of the Dead. Because Aragorn has resolved to do what he has to as king, he is no longer uncertain, and therefore his experience is no longer as interesting (I guess), so that story is told (in their own words, in dialogue) by Legolas and Gimli.

This masterful use of narrative voice is the reason that The Lord of the Rings seems so real...it reads just like we would expect a book written by a scholar of mythic history of about a hundred years ago to write (some references, such as the speculation that orks were responsible for inventing many of the engines of modern warfare, place the fictional narrator more firmly in Tolkien's younger years). It seriously reads like a book written by a scholar working from real ancient texts (primarily those in The Red Book and other documents created by hobbits in the years immediately after the war) and traditional poems and songs about the legendary events.

It does not read like the ancient texts themselves, though in many places there is serious effort to recreate at least fragments of those texts. The narrator is continuously present. Read any page of it, and you'll find references to the fact that the story is a compilation of traditional and ancient sources regarding the story. The easiest to spot are the poems and songs, which always have a gloss telling how the modern version is less complete or corrupted. References to this or that pretended source document are also fairly easy to spot. Some are actually a bit jarring (like the aforementioned speculation about orks inventing machine guns and so forth--I can't be sure it isn't an intentional slam on Americans), but others are so subtle you'll miss them if you don't know to look.

Tolkien's text is a brilliant example of an artificial document, which is the older convention of fiction before the development of modern ideas about suspension of disbelief. You never find yourself asking "how does Tolkien know what these people all thought or did or so forth?" When you read it, you're completely immersed in an alternate world, where the war of the Ring is real history, just like the Romans or ancient Israel or the Chin dynasty. If you didn't already know it was a work of fiction, there is nothing in the text that reveals the game.

When you look at certain creative decisions in the text, they make sense most when you look at it from the POV of our fictional scholar (not the real J.R.R. Tolkien, but his alternate reality double). For instance the decision to narrate the journey through the Paths of the Dead by means of Legolas and Gimli isn't because Aragorn didn't experience anything interesting, but because he never gave his own account (at least not to the writers of the ancient documents). The same applies to much of what happens after Aragorn becomes King shortly thereafter...the most complete accounts are not his own.

If you analyze the text in terms of modern POV usage, it is a complete failure. The POV characters are unreliable, often doing things without any clear motive so the narrator has to guess at why they did certain things, has to guess what they were thinking or feeling at the time. POV switches randomly and without even the justification of being omniscient or even objective. Anachronistic references abound, we get digressions into events much later in the history of the world right in the middle of the most intense battles, "in later years [someone] would say" occurs so often you think that Tolkien is making fun of the way old people tell stories.

But if you don't analyze it at all, you'll be utterly convinced for the space of a few hours that it all really happened. You'll often think of this or that as an interpolation, a later writer putting words into the mouths of the characters...you'll never imagine that the characters themselves never existed until you close the book. Then you'll remember, "ah, Tolkien was a fantasy writer, he wrote The Lord of the Rings, which didn't really happen at all."

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If you analyze the text in terms of modern POV usage, it is a complete failure. The POV characters are unreliable, often doing things without any clear motive so the narrator has to guess at why they did certain things, has to guess what they were thinking or feeling at the time.

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Actually, having an unreliable narrator or POV character is a hallmark of contemporary fiction. Tolkien was ahead of his time. The main difference between most modern fiction w/ unreliable POV characters is that the reader is left to "guess at why the did certain things," not the narrator.

(quote)Some are actually a bit jarring (like the aforementioned speculation about orks inventing machine guns and so forth--I can't be sure it isn't an intentional slam on Americans), but others are so subtle you'll miss them if you don't know to look.
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