In case it helps, some indicators of POV are: > Ulfius trudged Ulfius is mentioned, and there's nothing here to indicate that he's being seen by someone else. Now, there could have been a paragraph before this establishing someone else's point of view ("Frank stepped out of the tent to check on the activity of the camp...") but the most likely guess, without that, is the Ulfius is our POV character. > increasingly damp boots The person who can tell that Ulfius's boots are damp is Ulfius. More evidence that he's the POV character. > mental tally Again, only Ulfius knows what's in Ulfius's head. In the next few lines (removed) we mention other people, but we're seeing them, so that doesn't pull POV away. One could argue that the King's son "hanging back to watch how it was done" is a shift of POV, since it could be taken as seeing inside the son's mind. But my assumption is that Ulfius sees the son hanging back and intently watching the interactions. > Ulfius smiled faintly to see "to see" brings us back inside Ulfius's head. Also, a faint smile is hard to see unless you're right in front of someone; Ulfius is feeling his own smile as an action, not observing it as a sight. > A change from the little girl who used to laugh at his This is, again, clearly a thought. This all could be omniscient, but the fact that we don't dip into anyone's head but Ulfius's, and the fact that we're following Ulfius's motion around the camp, makes it look much more like third person limited from Ulsius's POV.
Maybe: She straightened her skirt and sat down on one of the logs. The movement was slight, but it garnered near immediate attention from Ulfius. He sighed and gave in to a greater duty than that assigned to him. Leaving his post, he approached the campfire and made quick work of lighting it. Within seconds, she felt the much needed warmth and gazed into the flames. Ulfius made an imposing but somehow comforting figure on bended knee in front of the fire. "There we go", he said while slowly standing. "Are you O.K.?" "Fine." She flashed a smile that did not quite meet her eyes. He took a deep breath and gave a curt nod. "Then it's back to guard duty for me." She looked back at the flames as the sound of his retreating steps got farther and farther away.
I know this is kind of old, but I really don't want see what this has to do with it being an omniscient narrator. It doesn't work primary because every sentence begins with the subject. Secondly, the pacing is off. Its not the sentence length so much as the same amount of information added to the story in each sentence. In the first sentence a character sits. In the second another character observes the sitting and decides to do something similar. In the third he figures sitting would be too unoriginal and kneels instead and starts a fire. The speed at which things are described is too constant. Like the characters in the story, the writing is sitting around. The sentences probably have to be longer to avoid that, but it's not the action of the sentences being short that is the problem, it's that the information provided in each sentence is too similar in nature. Lastly, some minor things just don't make sense. One of the criterias for something to be labelled as a campfire is for it to be on fire. If he is lighting the campfire, that implies it was a campfire before it was on fire. Or maybe that he is lighting something already on fire- Yeah, I don't know. He lit fire to the campfire. Doesn't make much sense. So being pretty new at writing here is what I came up with following my own advice. I only added extra stuff the the end because I feel like something else has to happen in that sentence. It could be anything. She straightened her skirt and sat down on one of the logs. Noticing her, Ulfus broke from his watch and approached with tinder in hand. After the campfire had been started they ate together and talked about the magical hippopotamuses they had just cooked. So there it is, that's still omniscient narration, but it flows better. I'm not saying my rendition is great or anything, its not. I'm just making the point that the narration being omniscient isn't the central problem. Worrying about that will just distract from the actual things that made it awkward to read.
It's very difficult to judge the overall success of a piece of writing from just a tiny snippet. However, in general, I'm in agreement with @BayView and @GingerCoffee that the problem with this little snippet (from our point of view as readers) is a lack of insight into WHY the scene is taking place. You're right. At the moment it's just he does this, she does that. A writer can achieve so much depth and intrigue if they are willing to dig into thoughts and feelings as rigorously as they reproduce the external details of what a scene looks like on the surface. Perhaps it's the lack of emotional depth, rather than sentence structure, that makes this piece feel mechanical to you? I'd study the examples @ChickenFreak and Bayview gave you, and think about what they were trying to get you to see. Do they have a point? (Don't worry if they didn't get the details of your story correct—she's not a woman, she's an 11-year-old girl, etc. They weren't trying to write your story. They were trying to show you a different FORM for tellling a story.) However ...your original post concerned the sentence structure, so I'll try to stick to that, @King Arthur . I know how hard it is to tinker successfully with sentences once you have them in place for a while. They seem set in stone, don't they? However, give yourself a bit of distance and you might find it easier to see them differently. The best way to liven up your sentence structure is to vary it as much as you can. Vary the length of sentences, and also vary the structure. I think you've kind of cottoned on to that idea, but I suspect you're still trying to keep the structure as close to the original as possible. Probably because you see it that way, and it's difficult to see it another way. This is where the POV question makes sense. It's difficult to change these sentences around without knowing which of these characters is actually the POV character. However, I'll assume it's Ulfius, for the purpose of this exercise. (If she's the POV character, she won't know why Ulfius breaks away from his guard duty, so that will change the scene a bit. All she'll see is him breaking away. She won't know it's because he's just seen her sit down.) Here's my effort: Ulfius watched her straightening her skirt. When she sat down on one of the logs in front of the cold firepit, he broke away from his guard duty and strolled up the gentle slope to join her. Someone had already laid shavings inside the pit for kindling, so he collected a few sticks, set them on top of the kindling, knelt beside her and struck his flint a few times. The shavings caught and soon tongues of flame were licking through the nest of wood. He looked up at her and grinned.
