posted
Is there a such thing as "No POV"? I was going back to revise a part of my story to change the POV and as I re-read it, I realized that it really wasn't written from any particular POV. Perhaps that's a sign that it needs work? It was a scene with dialogue and character actions, but because it didn't have any of the character's thoughts, there would be no way to indicate whose POV it was from (unless maybe you assume that it's from the first character who speaks - it's the first line of the scene)?
Posts: 172 | Registered: Nov 2007
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posted
In OSC's Character & Viewpoint, he refers to limited third-person, cinematic view. It is as if you are watching the scene through a movie camera - no peering into anyone's thoughts. Sounds like that's what you have.
[This message has been edited by NoTimeToThink (edited December 30, 2007).]
posted
NoTimeToThink is right: it's cinematic POV, and if you didn't do it intentionally for some specific purpose, then it is indeed a sign that the scene needs work.
Writing in cinematic means that you're giving up the greatest advantage that prose fiction has over the movies--a look into a character's head, the ability to live the events rather than merely watch them. If it goes on very long, the reader becomes very disconnected from the whole thing.
Probably what it means is that you knew what you wanted to happen in that scene, and so you made it happen, instead of knowing what your characters wanted, and letting them do what came naturally. Of course, your characters might not have wanted to do what you wanted them to, and that can cause plot problems; but the way to handle it is to know what their motivations and reactions are, and to respond to them so that they have to follow the course you had in mind whether they want to or not (OR to change the plot to fit with what they want to do).
Another thing it might mean is that the motivations are so transparent at this point that you just never bothered to look into anyone's head. If that's the case, it's possible that everything is so transparent to the reader that the scene could be cut entirely. Sometimes a scene is just a matter of information exchange. It's necessary, because the reader is getting the information as well as one of the characters, but there really are no motivational problems involved. In that case, you still need to include one character's reactions to the information. People think more than they say, and often use what they say to disguise their thinking. Let us see those details; we'll be far more involved with your story as a result.
posted
Omniscient isn't a specific character's PoV either. It allows you to hop back and forth between them all.
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Omniscient is coming back into "style" since JK Rowling's success with the Harry Potter books. They're written in an omniscient style, but we're pretty much limited to what Harry sees and experiences - most of the time. Then there are scenes that don't involve him, seen from inside the head of the Prime Minister, for instance (in "Half-Blood Prince"). I'm sure JKR broke a lot of writing rules, but she's a success, and now there are probably quite a few more books with some form of omniscient POV being released than there have been in years.
The great wealth of written fiction is the ability to see inside the character's heads. Find someone's head to be in and stay there - that's the safest, most secure way to write.
posted
Everything has a POV. Even Omniscient or "cinematic" has a POV - it's just a narrator outside the story. While I hate to quibble with OSC, Cinematic is just another was of saying full Omniscient with very little penetration.
Omni gets a bad wrap lately because it is hard to do well and "fell out of style." I tend to find with complex stories -ie those with more than one MC - a 3rd person limited POV is, well, limited. Some excellent writers get around this by separating the MCs and switching POV every chapter. I tend to think of that as a sneaky way to be omniscient without really being omni.
Just because the scene (or whole thing) is omni doesn't mean you "have problems" or the scene needs work. BUT if something doesn't feel right with the scene, then you need to look at the mechanics: how distant is the Omni POV, could you do better by sinking a bit more into a closer Omni, ccould you do better if you sink into a solo POV? Does the scene need to be there?
I'm a big fan of Omni especially for "epic" fantasy. So, either try to figure out what is bothering you about the scene or give it to someone else to see if they are bothered by the scene.
posted
Going back and looking at the original comment - the POV isn't just attributing thoughts in the scene.
If one of the characters is an interior decorator and the other a teenager, they are both going to "see" the scene differently. The interior decorator will notice the lighting, type of furniture (Queen Anne period, etc) and such. The teen will see a chair. Those sort of details will signal to the reader whose head we are in.
posted
As JeanneT and kings_falcon said, POV isn't just about thoughts--if by thoughts you mean things like: What a jerk, he thought. (done with or without italics)
However, it certainly does require reactions, attitudes, etc. To me, these are all thoughts--i.e., cognitive brain activity. The point is, you have to be in someone's head, seeing events through their eyes (again, as both JT and k_f said). If you don't do this for anyone, you're in cinematic. If you do it for everyone (or at least clearly maintain the option), you're in omniscient.
I would disagree, however, that cinematic is full omniscient with very little penetration. 3rd person limited omniscient is limited because it's only omniscient with regard to one person. The narrator is NOT omniscient with regard to any other character. Cinematic is even more limited--the narrator can't even see into a single person's head. I suppose you could say it's fully-limited omniscient, but if that's not an oxymoron I don't know what is.
Narrator POV is also different from cinematic or omniscient. In most of today's fiction the narrator is as close as possible to invisible. The author can't help but leak attitudes and whatnot into the work, but if you're using a narrator POV, the narrator is an actual person (NOT the author) who's attitudes and opinions are deliberately included, even though he's not a character in the story.
Also, Harry Potter was in 3PLO, not omniscient, and all (except for maybe 4 scenes in the series) from Harry's POV. We never got a scene from Ron or Hermione's POV, or even (that I remember) a stray thought. I won't say that she never made a slip, but this was one thing she was really quite consistent about.
One of the things that makes full omniscient difficult is that people are sufficiently used to 3PLO that they find it jarring when there's a switch from one person's head to another, so the author must keep it clear at all times that he/she is not really in anyone's head, that shifting can and will occur at whim (one way to make this clear is to compare two people's reactions: seeing into two people's heads at the same time can only be omniscient). In the process of making it clear, the reader will lose identification with the POV character (since there isn't only one), and that (aside from the difficulty of doing it well) is the biggest drawback of using omniscient.
I'll also stick with with I said at the start: if you didn't intentionally use cinematic or omniscient (whichever it is), then the scene does need work--even if that work is only examining it closely to decide that you really do want to do it that way. (And I'd say that's highly unlikely.)
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