The Backward OX

Foxee

Okay, the idiotic little flamewar has to stop. I swear, I've heard wittier exchanges from the second grade.

If we're not going to discuss the OP anymore and we're going to attack each other instead I will lock the thread.

__________________
If the staff were bent on policing your thoughts there would be nothing but a smoking hole where the debate forum used to be.

The Backward OX

oops

Dawnstorm

Shall I try or is it too late?

A character is a person who does things in a story. Let's call our character Timmy, and the thing he does is standing around with no money in his pocket looking at an ice cream stall.

Now, let's have Timmy tell us about it:

"I had no money in my pockets, but the ice cream looked so delicious!"

All the words are Timmy's, and the experience is Timmy's, too. See? This is what people call 1st person PoV.

Next:

"Timmy had no money in his pockets, but the ice cream looked so delicious."

Now the words are no longer Timmy's. Someone else is telling it. Hence: 3rd person PoV.

But: the perspective is still Timmy's. Most readers would get, I think, that the ice cream looks delicious to Timmy, not the anonymous narrator. This is why the narrator doesn't have to spell it out. ("...looked so delicious to him.")

Lots of things can be included in this constellation. For example:

"Shit. No money in his pockets. And the icecream looks sooo delicious!"

While in theory it's possible that what we have hear is a narrator whose so sympathetic to Timmy that he finds himself cursing at his misfortune, most readers would attribute the "shit" to Timmy (without any added "he thought"). Similarly, the multiple o's in "sooo" are probably not a feature of the narrator's language; rather, they reflect Timmy's emotional anguish at not having that ice cream. See? The words belong to someone else, but the perspective is still Timmy.

So, in all examples so far, we were in Timmy's perspective. This makes Timmy the PoV-character. 3rd-person narration with PoV-characters (point of views that are not the narrator's) are usually called "3rd limited" or "3rd close".

Now, it's entirely possible that we get not only the words of the narrator, but also the perspective of the narrator:

"Timmy had no money in his pockets, but the filthy, tooth-rotting ice-cream enticed him to linger and stare and salivate. Silly boy. He should eat spinach."

See? A very opinionated narrator, and not Timmy's perspective at all. This passage has only a narrator, and no viewpoint character at all. Timmy is the character the narrator is looking at, not the character through which the narrator is looking at the world. That is the difference.

I'm not sure that's any clearer, but there you go. Personally, I don't like this way of looking at PoV much. I hate the terms "limited" and "omniscient", because they - IMO - miss the point and are misleading. And first person has a very similar distinction ("narrating I" vs. "experiencing I") so that a three-PoV-model is a bit unbalanced. To be honest, I still think you're best off with your gut instinct. The post I agree most with so far is Lin's. These are analytical terms, and not very helpful when writing. They're sometimes convenient for communication, but they're not as comprehensive as some seem to think.

lin

Read Foxee's mention of "never". Better yet, reread my post in which I said that writers in fact DO use second person.
Not "never use", DO use. Got that?

An example: "Bright Lights, Big City", a best seller by Michael McInnery, totem of a generation of literary losers (along with Brett Easton Ellis' crap) and possilby the stupidest fucking way to blow of a gimmick that could be very workable in a different kind of story.

Any time you try to rule out something from writing, all you are doing is describing the areas in which your own imagination is crippled.

A general rule I wish more people would get.

__________________

lin

I seriously doubt that. I keep thinking you've said the lamest thing possible, then your next post will usually show me that I underestimated you severely.

__________________

Truth-Teller

Aww, fuck you Lin.

How's that for lame?

The Backward OX

MODERATOR ALERT

***LOCK THREAD***

***LOCK THREAD***