“Narrators in the objective point of view refer to characters in the third person and display omniscient knowledge of places, times and events. They do not, however, enter the minds of any character. We see the characters as we do people in real life or as we might observe them in a play (thus the term dramatic).” K. Griffith, Writing Essays About Literature, page 46. I have never tried this method of writing POV before, and I have never read any works that uses it. However, I believe a story I am currently replanning and rewriting would benefit from being written like this. This is because there are two timelines in the story, which is a dramatic-thriller I suppose. It starts in the middle, then one timeline continues on from that point while the other goes back two weeks. Learning what has happened before will explain a lot of the characters’ actions, and most importantly why the main character really was in the location he was in at the start (the middle) of the story. The story was originally written in third-person limited, but it always felt unnatural to me how he never thought back to what had happen, which would have ruined the suspense and the whole point of the story. Now my question, has anyone else tried to write in this style? Have you read anything written like this? My best guess was plays, but while they can help me with dialog, they won’t do much for descriptions. Do you think there are any disadvantages I should be aware of? Assuming I am a decent writer, do you think you would enjoy a story written in this POV? Do you have anything else to say about it? Note that I will write the story like this no matter what you say, but I am curious and I want to learn.
I think it would be pretty difficult to write in this POV. If you could do it well, then I think it would make for a great book! If you can illustrate their thought through their actions, then the reader has to guess at the thoughts of the character. I think it would be more intellectually engaging.
I imagine this is a style that is excellent when you want to describe larger scale events and the actions, history, and themes are of a larger sort where individual perspective might get in the way or otherwise root things in a more opinionated/subjective feel rather than a more unbiased and absolute objective one. I've used this style occasionally and it works great with horror (especially if you want to describe the immense horrifying power and might of some inhuman and likely shapeless aberration) as well as larger scale battle segments. It's also great for summarizing large battles that you don't want to have to go through the tedium of perhaps describing an individual characters personal experiences within it. The disadvantages that it can feel a bit less like a story and more like a report or a documentary but then again, I imagine there are cases where that's what you might want to go for.
