Don't forget about Cormac McCarthy's third person objective... the narrator is everywhere but is not (or chooses not to be) in anyone's head. Yayyy... POV mashup!
I took that to be DeeDee's "third person". I've been trying to write third person objective. I feel that third person subjective/omniscient is a bit have-your-cake-and-eat it. If you want to write phenomenologically, go first person subjective. If you want to describe, go third person objective. Everything else seems like cheating to me, even though I do it. It's easier to write "Bob felt sad" than describe a sad Bob.
You can and usually should still describe in third person subjective limited. “Bob felt sad” isn’t really different from “I felt sad”—they’re both pretty featureless.
For example, all the third person subjective limited words in the post linked to below arguably summarize as “Henry felt sad.” But it’s still third person subjective limited. https://www.writingforums.org/threads/how-to-combine-character-development-with-plot.155546/#post-1628463
Ah no I meant third person objective rather than third person subjective. It's easier to describe someone's feelings than to describe their actions in a way that would convey those feelings. I think most of the third person stuff I've done recently (which is most of the stuff I've done recently) I've started out trying to stick to third person objective. But I give up after not very long. Too hard.
Is your goal to write things in the hardest way possible, or the most effective way possible? Against whom are you "cheating"?
I know. You implied (or at least this is my interpretation) that third person objective describes and third person subjective doesn't. I'm saying that's not accurate. But nowhere in my (third person subjective limited) example did I describe Henry's feelings. It wouldn't have been wrong if I had, but I didn't. I still don't see the "cheating" idea.
I agree - there was no indication of omniscient or limited or close or any other subset of 3rd person. That's why I was confused when you started talking about omniscient. By semantic, do you mean I think you're using words in a way that makes it hard for me to understand what you're saying? Then, yes, my objection is semantic. I would say that third limited is not a synonym for third close - third close is a subset of third limited. If I write from the POV of only one character, and there's no independent, omniscient narrator, then I'd call that third limited. But third limited may or may not be "close", which, to me, means a POV that is inside the character's head to the point that the narrative voice matches the character's voice, there are no filter words, etc. I think there may be three (or more?) axes at work. One, what pronouns are used - to determine the basic first/second/third Two, how much information does the narrator have/share - omniscient down to limited Third, what voice does the narrator use - independent and distinctive ominscient, through objective/cinematic, down to close I'm not prepared to swear by those three categories, but I definitely disagree that I mean "limited" when I say "close".
Embarrassingly, in a thread discussing the fine points of different POV, I accepted third person subjective as analogous to third person limited without really really thoroughly reading. Corrected my posts, with strikethroughs to leave my original wording. None of this changes the fact that third person limited is not omniscient.
Yeah my bad, I meant third person omniscient. What I meant was that third person omniscient can describe a person's inner thoughts; third person objective cannot. If you read my post again, I was actually responding to your post previous to that which a) has no Henry and b) describes feelings.
OK, I've gotten lost and am starting over. Do you think that describing a character's inner thoughts is bad? (You're talking omniscient versus objective; I'm more interested in limited, which can also describe inner thoughts.)
Not bad per se -- it is pretty much the standard. I guess an analogy for what I'm thinking might be voiceover in films. There's nothing wrong with it exactly, but it tends to yield lazy scriptwriting (show, don't tell). Inner thought in an otherwise third person objective viewpoint kind of feels the same to me, so I've tried a few times now to write without inner thoughts but rather to convey them through objective descriptions (facial expression, body language, actions). But it's easier said than done.
But, to state the obvious, film isn't literature. Also, inner thought doesn't necessarily violate show-don't-tell, unless you have a pretty literal definition of the "show" part.
Unless it's a Scorsese film like Taxi Driver or Goodfellas where taking an info-dump whenever you need to let's the characters interact more naturally. Same thing for Trainspotting and Apocalypse Now. It's a flop 99 times out of 100, like you said. But when it works it's fucking awesome.
Oh absolutely, in many films it's amazing. Adaptation, which raises the problem, has an fantastic voiceover narration.
Yes, it's analogy. By definition they're not the same. Nonetheless they share capacities for objective and subjective description.
Yeah, I'm still not really getting your point. It seems to have something to do with a preference for sensory-only information, but that's as far as I'm getting.
That's okay, I think the person my post was addressed to got it, and it's kind of off-topic: I'm conscious this grilling has rather hijacked this thread. And yet for completeness....
Just remembered... Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller ... second person subjective iirc.
Wow. Usually when I'm adamant about something I can remember having said it. Can you show me the post where I (adamantly) said the OP was in third close?
Ah, my humblest apologies, I missed your "if"... without it, the above seemed rather baffling. Then yes, I agree, although the inner thoughts were italicised as if to distinguish from normal prose, which would be exceedingly odd if it were limited/close, or indeed any subjective viewpoint.
Let's tidy up a bit . "First" or "Third" person means who's telling the story - one of the characters in the book (As I walked down the road I saw a puppy), or somebody not a character in the book (As he walked down the road he saw a puppy). With third person (narrator is independent and not a character from the book), you can have two major variations, depending on what the scope of our narrator's knowledge: limited or omniscient. "Limited" obviously is called so because the narrator's knowledge is limited - they are limited to one character's knowledge. If you imagine a character sitting in a room, then with "third limited" POV the author can only describe what this character sees, or knows: "John looked out of the window and thought what a wonderful day this was." If there is a monster over the hill and that monster is coming to eat our character, then the narrator cannot tell us that until the character in the room somehow sees, or hears the monster, or somebody comes and tells them about it, or the character learns about the monster from the radio. If the author wants to tell us, the readers, about what the monster does while it still sits at the other side of the hill, then he author can switch the POV to that of the monster. Then they can have a scene told from the monster's perspective (but then the monster won't be able to know that there is a person in the room, unless said monster can see through walls, or smell the human from a distance) : "The monster woke up from it's winter sleep and looked hungrily about. There was no food in sight." Either way, "limited" POV means narration is limited to this one character we are following at the moment. "Omniscient" means "know-all". With omni POV the narrator knows everything about everybody. Then the narrator can tell us both about John, sitting in the room, thinking it's a nice day, oblivious of the hungry monster over the hill: "John looked out of the window and mistakenly thought it would be a wonderful day, oblivious that a giant monster had just awaken only a few miles away and looking for a juicy human snack." From here, you could specify the POV further, depending if that independent narrator stays close to the character's thoughts, or is standing aloof at a distance. There are several ways to call these divisions, but the easier to understand is "close" (or "subjective" if you prefer) and "distant" (or "objective"). In Third Omniscient Close/Subjective the narration sounds very much like the way character talks themselves. Everything we hear is very subjective i.e. personal: "John squinted at the sun. It was bloody annoying to be waking him up so early, it was barely eleven in the morning. To hell with it he thought, and went back to bed. Over the hill, the hungry monster peaked its ears and hungrily sniffed the air, then sighed in deep sadness and wiped a tear off it's giant eye. Being so close to extinction was really depressing." In Third Omni Distant/Objective the narration can sound like your university professor, who, obviously, has a very different voice from both our lazy character John and that wild monster. How "objective" or "distant" the author wants to be is up to them. They can sound like Mr.Spock, or Dalai Lama, or Stephen King, or even themselves - anybody that's not the character: "Tired from watching Netflix all night, John could barely manage to drag himself to the window and draw the curtains. There was too much light and he needed a bit more sleep, so that he could watch the new episode of The Grand Tour tonight. Through his droopy eyelids, he had no chance noticing the two monstrous ears poking out from behind the hill. But that didn't matter, because humanity had nothing to lose if a lazy person like John got eaten by a monster. Sitting in its warm cave, the vicious hungrisaurus listened to its rumbling stomach and plotted the end of the human race." So, there you go, you can have as much description or thoughts as you like with either. The main thing to keep in mind is to keep the POV consistent, choose one and stick to it.
First, fair play to you for going to that effort. You seem to have managed to accommodate a lot of contesting viewpoints there. The following seems to me to be a good test of the robustness of the language. A1: There are ten characters in the book; the narrator describes all of their inner thoughts and the world. What is the narrator? A2: There are ten characters in the book; the narrator describes most of their inner thoughts and the world. What is the narrator? A3: There are ten characters in the book; the narrator describes some of their inner thoughts and the world. What is the narrator? A4: There are ten characters in the book; the narrator describes one of their inner thoughts and the world. What is the narrator? A5: There are ten characters in the book; the narrator describes none of their inner thoughts and the world. What is the narrator? B1: There are ten characters in the book; the narrator describes all of their inner thoughts but not the world. What is the narrator? B2: There are ten characters in the book; the narrator describes most of their inner thoughts but not the world. What is the narrator? B3: There are ten characters in the book; the narrator describes some of their inner thoughts but not the world. What is the narrator? B4: There are ten characters in the book; the narrator describes one of their inner thoughts but not the world. What is the narrator? B5: There are ten characters in the book; the narrator describes none of their inner thoughts nor the world. This is not a story. The ones most will agree on are: - A1 is omniscient; - A5 is objective; - A4 and B4 are limited; - B4 is subjective; - B5 is stupid (irrespective of whether you consider any of those as subsets of others). By my reckoning, A2 is also omniscient. That not every character has his or her thoughts on page does not make the narrator less powerful. By the same token, A3, by the same A4. This is what I said to BayView way back when: the difference between omniscient and limited is quantitative, not qualitative. In the OP, the subjective stuff is italicised, marking a difference in viewpoint, so I've presumed we're in A-territory here. If we're in B-territory, different story, since none of the narrators to my reckoning are omniscient. The big question mark here is A5. I don't consider objective to be omniscient. On the number line, I'm clearly a hypocrite, but then zero is qualitatively different to positive or negative numbers, so maybe I have an out By that schema there's subjective, objective and omniscient, with the number of subjective realities a modifier. I have seen this schema elsewhere on writing sites, but I have seen others too. Which is considered "usual terminology" I don't know, and I see little evidence of a consensus here too
