McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

3rd Person Omniscient

<< < (2/2)

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:

--- Quote from: Quantus on April 09, 2013, 08:39:07 PM ---Never read it, but based on my relatively limited understanding of the subtle distinctions of terms it would be Third Person, Objective

--- End quote ---

I've usually seen that referred to as camera-eye third; you get description as if you had a camera there in the room but never inside anyone's head.

There is an annoying tendency to blur the distinction between having a clearly defined omniscient narrative voice (if not necessarily a personified omniscient narrator) as in, say, Alexandre Dumas, where pulling back from what is going on at the moment to tell us a bit about the history of France at the time is all in voice, and between the kind of quasi-omni you get in... IME, some kinds of fat thrillery books is where I have seen it most, where the sort of information that an omniscient narrator might give is actually given by constant head-hopping and dozens of POVs at the "two paragraphs from the viewpoint of a passing newspaper vendor" level.  I find the latter very irritating as a style, because it slops about all over the place; the discipline of presenting a complex fictional universe through a limited number of viewpoints is both more impressive and gives you options for doing much more controlled things which each individual character's biases and particular focus and how you can go from that to build a world for the reader that is more complex than any individual viewpoint.

Wordmaker:
I find 3rd-Person Omniscient very difficult to write. I find I get caught up in description and minor details and lose focus on my characters. So I stick to 3rd-Person Limited. I like being in my characters' heads, but I also enjoy the freedom to have multiple POV characters, which is why I tend to avoid 1st-person.

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:

--- Quote from: Wordmaker on April 17, 2013, 02:13:32 PM ---I find 3rd-Person Omniscient very difficult to write. I find I get caught up in description and minor details and lose focus on my characters.

--- End quote ---

Doing omni right is very difficult, but I find it an interesting challenge.  It does inherently come with a differing scale of focus on the characters in the story, but characterisation of the voice telling the story is the compensatory gain.  In that way it's almost closer to first-person than to limited third.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page