Hi, I'm a new writer attempting my first novel, written in Third Person Limited. This is a real newbie question... Golden rule: Do not head-hop from one character to another in the same scene. Ok, I get that. But I have a problem - My scene involves the protagonist (a police inspector) describing a search of a well, down which a diver descends to look for evidence. I want the reader to experience from the diver's eyes what it's like to go down into that dark place. But to do this I would have to violate the 'one POV per scene rule. How should I tackle this?
It's not the kind of rule that can't ever be broken—but you're good to be concerned about it. Head hopping is distracting to a reader who wants to identify with only one character at one time. I'd say do ask yourself if it's absolutely necessary for both POVs to be included in the same scene. I do like the idea of the two separate experiences, though, as they will be very different. The police inspector will be left on the surface, while the diver is gone ...it's not as if they're interacting the whole time. So I think it's possible to do two (or more) separate scenes within the one chapter. Could you do the first scene with the police inspector getting things in place to start the search (maybe including his impressions of the diver—and what he hopes or fears the diver will uncover.) Then do the next scene from the diver's POV—maybe starting with the diver's insight into the police inspector's personality, competence or other traits that would be helpful to the plot. followed by the diver's actual experiences down the well? Then when the diver comes back out (presuming he does) to give his report, you can start a third scene back in the police inspector's POV as he receives the report and gives his formal and inner reaction to what's been found?
You can interrupt the scene. "How do they do it?", asked Lewis. "They're very well trained, Lewis. You can't imagine how terrifying it is," replied Morse, taking a sip from his beer. **** The cold dark waters closed over Constable Frost's head. 'E 'oo dares, wins, thought Frost to himself. ...etc... *** "That's how they found the evidence. Another beer, Lewis?"
Try your level best to not abandon the structural constraint of your POV. It's always the first casualty, isn't it? And we shed nary a tear. We need to tell a certain thing, show a certain thing, and we realize that the narrative mode we've chose is putting that thing on the other side of a constraint wall. It's in John's head, but we're in Parker's. It's happening where there are no characters to see it; we've chosen 3rd limited. I agree with Jan, in that if you've chosen scene breaks as a natural point to change POV, stick to that. Tell one side, then the other. They're bound to be wildly different. Faithfully sticking to your narrative mode will force you to reach for novel ways in which to deliver what you want to deliver rather than leaning into the obvious.
Many thanks to everyone for their helpful suggestions. Three POVs is it. Switching from the bright sunshine at the surface - down to the darkness at the bottom of the well - then back up to see what the diver has found makes a nice juxtaposition. Thank you.
See, this is exactly the sort of thing that made me switch to Third Person Omniscient. I was plotting an important scene and realized that I needed to provide the reader with information from the antagonist's point of view even though the scene started by focusing on the protagonist before the antagonist even showed up. I knew this would constitute a perspective error but I just really didn't want to give up on it. The more I thought about it the more it dawned on me that Limited basically didn't suit the way I tell stories - my style tends to be sorta open and cinematic, with the perspective acting more like a camera. Looking back I realized that head hopping had always been a problem for me since I don't like having the perspective constrained to one character, even on a chapter by chapter basis. Perhaps you should reconsider whether Third Person Limited is really right for your story, is what I'm basically saying.
In some ways, Omniscient is certainly easier to write. You can show or tell anything you want. But while Omniscient is great for displaying a plot, I reckon it's not so good at getting readers to identify with particular characters. You're looking down on them from above, so to speak ...not looking through their eyes. So it all depends on what you want the readers to get out of your story, really. I like Third Limited because for me it's the best at getting my story across. I like the emotional close identification it provides, and I also like the challenge of portraying something the POV character might not be aware of—while giving the invisible narrator/writer the ability to occasionally interpret what the POV character is thinking and feeling. I can compromise by switching to a different POV character in different scenes or chapters, if I really MUST show something from another perspective. No matter what perspective you choose, you gain something ...but you also lose something. The trick is to play around with the various perspectives and see how the story works best.
Or it makes one get better acquainted with things one sorta' just breezed by on the first pass. If I take away your electric bench planer, I force you to learn to use the block planer, which demands that you know the qualities of the wood much better because you are engaging it by hand and on a much smaller scale. If I take away all your screws and screwdrivers, now you need to learn to dovetail the joins instead, and who can argue that dovetails aren't a much nicer touch than screws? So many wonderful tools in the writer's toolbox, and most of us (myself included) are usually only reaching for a few of them.
Would that it were! This is a Henry Studley, an exceptional example with (apparently) all the tools accounted for and the case is museum quality. I saw a few of these come through the auction house when I worked there, but never quite as complete and in such amazing nick.
Aaaargh. I want one. Okay, I'm not a woodworker, and I probably would never touch it, but what a thing of beauty.
I'm a little confused, it seems you're saying 2 somewhat contradictory things here (unless I'm misunderstanding you). And I just said this exact same thing on another thread where you posted about Omniscient as well. Taken together, I'm not sure you've got Omniscient quite right. You might be talking about 3rd Objective, also known as Cinematic because the POV acts like a movie camera and never goes inside a character's head. Omniscient is actually sort of a mix of Objective (for narration) with rotating Limited, because it then goes inside the heads of different characters (head hopping?) I might be wrong, because I've also heard head-hopping as unmotivated switching between characters in a close POV. Sorry to come across so pedantic about this (especially on 2 threads). It's just that I'm currently studying POV and this is confusing me.
This breakdown isn't bad... at least as far as simplicity goes: Third-person objective: The facts of a narrative are reported by a seemingly neutral, impersonal observer or recorder. For an example, see "The Rise of Pancho Villa" by John Reed. Third-person omniscient: An all-knowing narrator not only reports the facts but may also interpret events and relate the thoughts and feelings of any character. The novels "Middlemarch" by George Eliot and "Charlotte's Web" by E.B. White employ the third-person-omniscient point of view. Third-person limited: A narrator reports the facts and interprets events from the perspective of a single character. For an example, see Katherine Mansfield's short story "Miss Brill." Full link here: https://www.thoughtco.com/third-person-point-of-view-1692547
That's a good breakdown, but I'm particularly interested in the 'head hopping' capabilities of each, which it sort of skims over. Maybe I should call it seeing through a character's eyes, as head hopping has another connotation. I suppose what confused me is that Fervidor seems to be saying Omniscient doesn't go inside a characters head. Of course, it's described as "interpret the thoughts and feelings of any character" in the blurb you posted @Homer Potvin. Maybe it's a matter of degree. I just read John Gardner's The Art of Fiction recently, and he makes a big point of the idea that omniscient absolutely requires you to dip into the heads of several characters and keep doing it. Or I might just be getting entirely too pedantic about slight differences of meaning.
It certainly can, but the nature of Omniscient requires that the writer be utterly lucid about it. My go-to bad example is Frank Herbert's Destination: Void, the first of his WorShip novels, written contemporaneously with the DUNE series. It's 3rd Omniscient, but Franky just wasn't on his game in that first book. The paragraphs are terse and punchy, which I normally like because I want a story to move. When it gets naval gazie, my attention wanders. Interspersed with those punchy, short paragraphs, he drops character internal thoughts, often without benefit of a thought tag and in situations where, logically speaking, the thought is arguably attributable to almost any character currently on set because the whole story takes place within the tight confines of an experimental ship, and for the most part, the characters share a number of sentiments, so it could be anyone. It's a fail, even though he does roughly the same thing in DUNE, but it works in DUNE because it's not a Gilmore Girls dynamic of witty, quick, back and forth repartee.
I just consulted The Art of Fiction and Gardner says that, when the dispassionate narrator's voice would be inappropriate, you can switch entirely into a close 3rd and tell the story entirely through a character's own experience for a while. Not must but can. So that sounds like it's a sliding scale of closeness to the characters. That makes me happy, and it agrees with @Wreybies' "It certainly can".
True, but the key word here would be "particular." You can only do that with one character at a time, or just one character if you take the purist approach. So you are effectively prioritizing your perspective character at the expense of the others. It doesn't really work for me since I find it hard to put that much importance on just one person, especially now when I'm basically planning an ensemble cast type story. Besides, who am I to tell my readers which character they should identify with? They're going to pick their own favorites anyway, may as well level the playing field. I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to switch character between scenes, strictly speaking. Switching between chapters is acceptable these days but apparently isn't considered pure Limited by some. Yes, and I'm working on my next reply, but I don't write these things very quickly. Especially not when trying to pay attention to two threads at once, while sleep deprived. At any rate, at least one of us is clearly mistaken, but at this point I'm not entirely sure which one. I don't think so, because I do address the thoughts of my characters. Needing to do so was the whole reason I couldn't stick with Limited. I guess camera might have been a misleading choice of word here since it describes Objective better. (I think?) What I mean is that I like to shift attention to whichever character I feel the narration should focus on at any given moment.
As I just posted on the other thread it now looks like each of us had part of the equation. In Omniscient you can move to varying closeness when you drop out of narration to a specific character, from an almost Objective level all the way to deep/close if that's what fits the scene's needs.
Specifically, the discussion me and Xioc just had concerned the question of whether the Omniscient narrator is allowed to directly read the minds of the other characters. We both basically agree that the narrator has access to the thoughts and feelings of everyone in the story, but my interpretation has long been that he can't actually go inside their heads and display their thoughts, since he's treated as a distinct character. Rather he relates what they think as a second hand account, like he knows it because he's been told. Xioc disagreed but now says we were both right, sorta, and that he misremembered a word in his source. I'm still a bit paranoid about it, though, because I can't remember where I got my interpretation from. Would appreciate to know if there's some kind of consensus on this issue. Something about that paragraph seems wrong. Ah, not saying you are wrong. I mean, more as if I'm reading a passage from the Necronomicon or something. Like a dark, alien secret my mind was never meant to grasp. It's probably the sleep deprivation.
Remember that, whenever possible, I eschew the idea of "rules" in favor of "tools" when it comes to how I engage. I created this image rather quickly and I am 100% sure it is not remotely all-encompassing and that there is something much better out there, but it serves to show my sentiment. There are borders and abutments with respect to narrative mode that allow one to stray into foreign territory to a certain extent. My original sentiment of sticking to your narrative mode at all costs is, as I mentioned prior, because the narrative mode seems to always be the first part of the foundation that we sledgehammer when the going gets complicated, and I think it's a mistake to immediately go that route when things get a little sticky. In this image, think of the overlap areas as zones of permission to borrow rather than obligatory land that is equally occupied by both concepts. From traditional 3rd omniscient, you can slide into limited and even authorial to a certain degree within the same chapter, without any kind of formal break. If you're going to include some genuine 1st person content, you're going to need a hard break because 1st and trad 3rd omni do not share a border. But 3rd close limited and 1st person do share a border and one of the things that typifies 3rd close limited is the delivery of internal thought, written in 1st person, delivered without thought tags, just like in 1st. We can do this because 3rd limited already possesses the solid constraint that sentiments expressed through the narrative will necessarily belong to the POV character - not anyone else - so there's no confusion in writing them as if they were 1st person. Omniscient certainly can dip into Objective, but a story intended to be Objective that dips in the other direction has abandoned its defining characteristic and is no longer Objective, hence the one-way only.
Okay, so I have been reading books in my genre but I find myself constantly losing myself to the story and I ultimately quit paying attention to how the story was written. I am currently trying to write my first piece. I find my self switching from first person point of view when speaking about the past to omniscient when in the future. Is this normal or am I proceeding down a path I should avoid?
Not if each POV is clearly delineated and not confusing to the reader. Definitely a potential recipe for trouble if not done well, though. All in the execution.
