McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

OK how about third person Inanimate

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KevinEvans:
I have seen it done, but I want more examples before I put my effort out. In short I need to write scenes than no one can know, but that the reader needs to see to understand the story. Third Omni doesn't quite seem right for something that is third limited every where else.

Regards,
Kevin

DragonEyes:
In a short story I wrote in the past, I had a character named the Narrator. He introduced himself as a kind of free floating consciousness that formed as a kind of accidental echo, but completely lacking form and function beyond seeing things and trying to understand the world. In the end, he turned out to be critical to the plot, but it still didn't really work out because there was little to engage the reader to the character to the narrator beyond a witty voice.

Doing it over, I think I could make him more engaging by letting things drop about him, but long-story-short, I think this form is a very difficult proposition. A key trick I've seen would be to keep it short and make it almost rhythmic or poetic in its presentation, without becoming an outright stanza'd verse. Stephen King did that in the Stand with his presentation of how the Cap'n Trips virus spread. It was a short chapter and moved with it's own kind of separate rhythm from the rest of the story.

Sort of like montage music played behind the writing.

Gruud:
Give this article (and its related ones) a read:

http://www.novel-writing-help.com/3rd-person-point-of-view.html

While I've not  seen anyone else talk about using a slidng sale of narrative distance in the way that he describes, the guy's whole site is pretty amazing, so I can't see him being too far out of step with this bit.

Does anyone else have an opinion (or industry knowlede) on that?

Oh, PS, using the method described, what you want to show should probably be "near" one character or another, such that you can give the unknowable stuff for a paragraph or two, then rejoin your POV character and move on with the normal narrative.

meg_evonne:
JR Ward does this funky thing where she switches to the villain's point of view and sets it apart with italics. I can't really recommend it though. I skip them or skip through them, find them boring, and somehow a cheat. I did it recently in a small, small (less the 250 words) for a villain who remained unknown, but I wanted to get a certain....shall we say disturbing creepiness to his history so the reader is questioning all the characters and wonder who this creep really is on the pages.

On the other hand, I loved the idea of a point of view from a true inanimate object--like a rock, a tree, a mountain or something. Don't think you meant that, but I'd really like to see it...

KevinEvans:
Thanks every one,

The story involves a steam explosion of a locomotive boiler. There are things that the reader needs to know that no one in the narrative observes. In order to bring tension to the story, the relentless progression to catastrophe needs to be shown to the reader, while the protagonists of the story remain oblivious.

I have seen it done in disaster stories, like a dam bursting, or a ship running on to the rocks. I am looking for other examples to refine the method.

Thanks again,
Kevin

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