posted
I know we have this discussion alot, but this is board specific. I keep seeing the comment "We don't know who's POV you're in" when, I suspect that the author is going for 3rd person omni (of varying forms dependin on which piece we're talking about). So, is there a way, in the first thirteen lines, to let the readers know that's what you are doing? Besides just announcing it in the lead-in to the 13 lines. This is assuming that you want a subtle narrator voice, of course. Or is this, in fact, a bias on the board for 3rd person limited POV?
posted
Mary, there is an EXTREME bias on this board for third-person limited. I find it highly annoying sometimes.
One problem is that I've rarely seen amateurs do omni well. I actually asked at one point where I could see well done omni, but part of the problem is that it's not normal in modern scifi/fantsy to write that way. limited viewpoint is far more common.
Here's the trouble...omniscient point of view is more than just hopping between paragraphs, deeply entrenching yourself in a viewpoint in each one. When you choose omni, you have made a decision to not get personal with any one character, and to only show us the necessary thoughts of all the characters. It needs to feel like a camera's eye view, where the camera can occassionally burrow into someone's head, but not usually.
But yes, people on this site got hold of some idas on POV and they won't get them out of their heads. If you write a sentence that doesn't begin with the name of the POV character or a relevant pronoun and follow through with what he/she saw, then they claim you've lost the POV.
That doesn't mean short people can't play basketball well; it just means they have to be more skilled in order to compete.
For various reasons, 3PLO (3rd-person limited omnicient) is the best choice for creating reader identification with a character. Since that is generally desirable, 3PLO should be the default choice when writing a story.
That does not mean a good story cannot be written in 3rd-person omniscient (or some other POV); it just means it must be written more skillfully.
I suspect that people may react by criticizing lack of a clear POV when the bigger problem is just lack of clarity. If the first thirteen lines are both clear and interesting, I doubt many people will complain about lack of 3PLO POV.
posted
I recently wrote a story using 1st person limited POV. Ultimately, I wanted to draw the reader into the story and see everything through the protagonists eyes. In the end, he is betrayed and destroyed, and I wanted to the reader to feel the outrage and injustice in the same way as the character. I also used present tense, which meant I had to make sure my main character did not slip into talking/thinking about things in the past.
I think virtually any POV, and tense for the matter, can work, provided it is appropriate to what you want to accomplish. A story about events on a world wide scale, might be better 3rd person omni, whereas, the internal struggle of a single person can be done in 3rd person limited or 1st person limited.
posted
Christine, I was thinking the same things about omni-present when I was reading "The Hobbit" to my children recently. The whole thing reads like Tolkien is telling the story to his children. And I've noticed that no one does this kind of POV anymore. I don't believe that it's because writers aren't as talented as they used to be-- on the contrary, I have seen some awesome writing from many here! So why is 3rd person limited best? I just don't understand why there is only one way that "works."
posted
One problem with picking a POV for a story is whether you can do it well. 3rd person limited is the easiest POV to write for most people, myself included. I think one of the reasons so many people are against the Omnipresent is because it is regularly mangled. A writer decides to use Omnipresent because they feel it will remove the limitations of POV, but the story is unclear and confusing.
If I wish to help someone by reviewing a story, I hate it when it is so bad I can't muddle through it. So for me, I try and see if the first 13 lines hold to a POV, if not, I don't bother. Time is valuable, and I'm still trying to figure out how to get more time in a day. So I would bet there are quite a few people like me that like to be helpful, but don't wish to have to politely tell someone how thier POV doesn't work and it wasn't readable.
3rd person limited is the one POV that might be readable even if the story isn't that great.
LDS
[This message has been edited by Lord Darkstorm (edited May 19, 2004).]
quote:I just don't understand why there is only one way that "works."
There isn't.
The first story I sold was written in first person, present tense. The story works. But I had reasons for choosing to write it as I did.
Third-person limited-omniscient past-tense writing should be the default, though. That is, you should generally use it unless you have a good reason reason not to.
Why? There are various reasons, but I generally boil it down to these two:
1. 3rd person limited omniscient allows the closest identification between character and reader. 2. 3rd person limited omniscient past tense feels more like truth.
Unless you need to use a different point of view or tense in order to achieve something that you feel is worth sacrificing some identification and truth for, why do it?
posted
We need to keep in mind that the preference for 3rd person limited is a pretty recent development. It's not universally the easiest to write or most effective, it's just the POV that most writers use now. In the 19th century, it was virtually unheard of; third person omniscient was by far the preferred POV. There have also been times when 1st person was by far preferred. 3rd limited is easiest for us, because that's probably 99% of what we read, so we pick up on how to do it a lot better than other POVs. The stories we tend to like now work a lot better with 3rd limited. We like character driven stories that let you deep in the psychological workings of the character, and 3rd limited works great for that. A story that's based more on the setting, like LOTR, might do better with omniscient, or something like Dickens, who used omniscient almost exclusively.
So 3rd limited is just the preference of our era, not inherently better. It's also the preference of our era's publisher's so I agree with EJC: make 3rd limited the default, and only use something else if you have a specific, good reason.
posted
Yes, 3PLO is the current default. If you want to do a story in some other POV, then you need to clearly signal the reader that it is in some other POV.
And you need to be prepared for a certain amount of criticism of your POV choice.
With a narrative voice, you begin by having the narrator acknowledge his or her own existance in the story. This can be explicit ("My name is") or implicit, the way Tolkien does it. But it should be clear to most readers very soon that there is a character narrating the story.
First person...I generally distrust first person stories that aren't explicit narrative voice. But that is simply because most novice writers do it very badly. Well done first person is obvious in the very first line. "I" is your "name up front" in that case.
Full Omniscient...this is a special case of narrative voice, actually. And again, it is a matter of tone. Well don't FO sounds like an omniscient, impersonal, inscrutable character relating the story for reasons that ordinary mortals couldn't guess. Again, that tone comes across in the first line.
Frankly, what you usually get is somewhat sloppy POV. The newbie writer is just taking notes on the action of the story as it is imagined. No control of POV is contemplated or exercised. One moment we get a character's physical description, the next we are sharing her thoughts. Then we have the conversation where the reader is privy to the thoughts of both characters, not just their words. There are lame attempts to invoke suspense by specifically withholding plot information, even though the information is known to every major character in the scene.
And then, there is 3rd person objective. Oh, woe unto you, screen-play writer, for you imagine that you are a novelist. And you aren't. Elaborate descriptions of visuals and sounds abound, but there is no hint of mental activity...on the part of the characters or the writer. Soon the mental activity of the reader is largely unconscious as well. Given the choice between reading the world's most brilliant screenplay and watching Tomb Raider on TV, guess which I consistently choose? Okay, not consistently, I watched Tomb Raider on TV already, and I'm not going to do that again anytime soon, but I'm not going to be reading any screenplays either, and I certainly won't re-read them.
Myself, I'd stick with 3PLO and narrative voice. That way, you don't have to be brilliant to succeed. And I tend to stay with 3PLO, now that fiction is relieved of the necessity of pretending to be anything else, it is the logical choice.
quote:Well done first person is obvious in the very first line
I'm currently reading Iain Banks, "The Business". 1st person, but not obvious until page 3 or so. I'd say it's well written.
I'll agree that it's an exception. It's quite tricky to achieve this; usually either the first or second line will give it away. The book in question opened with a long telephone conversation with alternating lines of strongly characterised speech (one character has just had a number of teeth extracted!). So there's nothing but dialogue for the first 2 pages.
posted
Wetwilly, this may be an exception to his usual style, but I just finished "Great Expectations," by Dickens this morning-- written in first person.
Thanks for the explanations, everyone. I can see how 3rd person limited would be best for a beginning writer like yours truly.
~L.L.
[This message has been edited by Lullaby Lady (edited May 21, 2004).]
posted
Pattern Recognition was well written too. That doesn't mean that it was a good idea to cast every single line of the book in present tense.
There are some things that I just have to put into the catagory of "Stupid Showoff Stunts"...things that do absolutely nothing for the story, which are only done so that the author can prove he's so brilliant that even when he's breaking a fundamental rule of writing his work is still great.
When sticking to that rule would have made the book about 40% more meaningful and readable, I say it's about on par with the trick where the hero throws aside his weapon so that the villian can treacherously pull out a backup weapon and thus the hero gets to prove his manly prowess by fighting at a huge disadvantage. Sure, it proves that the hero is a much better fighter (presuming he doesn't get killed) but more importantly it proves that he's an idiot.
posted
Kinda like when people in movies take off their helmet at inopurtune time, just so you can see their prettyboy face. (like in Fat and the Furiest, the guy's on the front of a speeding semi being shot at.)
Posts: 1895 | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
"I had to make sure my main character did not slip into talking/thinking about things in the past."
I don't see how why a person can't think about the past. I do all the time. So if your writing in first person, your writing as the charecter so you could write about the past.
Example:
" I open the door to my bedroom and look around. Things don't look the way they used to. My room used to have all the trappings of a little boy, but now I was 'all grown up'. My room reflected that.
I walk inside slowly, and sigh."
Generally, I write in whatever POV 'feels' right. In my recent work in progress, Gray, I first started writing it in 3rd person limited. But I started it in first person, and it 'feels' better.
[This message has been edited by Eric Sherman (edited May 24, 2004).]
posted
I've been thinking about it somemore, and I think that 3rdOmni is best for things where compression of time needs to happen, like in the journey sequences in the Hobbit. Or for stories with casts of thousands that are plot driven rather than character driven.
Posts: 2022 | Registered: Jul 2003
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posted
Writing in present tense can be very tricky, because you may fall into past tense when you shouldn't:
quote:" I open the door to my bedroom and look around. Things don't look the way they used to. My room used to have all the trappings of a little boy, but now I was 'all grown up'. My room reflected that.
I walk inside slowly, and sigh."
Unless the room no longer reflects that the narrator is "all grown up," it should say "My room reflects that."
It's just a tiny error, but unless one is in the habit of writing present-tense fiction, errors like this tend to creep in, and they can be tough to spot.
posted
Mary - absolutely. Omniscient lends itself well to "telling" summaries of what happens during long periods with only scattered interesting events.
Of course, a lot of people would at this point assert that you ought to be "showing" anyway, rather than "telling", but there are definitely times when that kind of summary is useful.
My current work-in-progress is set during the colonisation of an extra-solar planet. This is, of course, something that occurs over quite a length of time, and I have events that need to happen both before and after. Plus things going on that the reader's likely to be only marginally interested in. So I have a lot of summary, and so many of my chapters either start or end with a passage that is, I suppose, in omniscient, simply because it is describing what happened, rather than how what happened seemed to some particular character who was there.
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