Options for point of view in a story
At first I was going to tell my story told from my main character's point of view, but now I'm wondering if I should make it coming from the point of view of a third-person narrator.
I wanted the main character to display her thoughts and emotions to the reader, but I also wanted the reader to experience scenes with other characters without the main character knowing. The only way I can think to do this is to have it come from a third-person narrative point of view. What are my options?
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2 answers
First of all, don't confuse point of view with person. You can write in the third person and still tell the story from one character's point of view.
Second, third person is the normal mode of storytelling. All this stuff about limited vs. omniscient is largely a distraction. It is an analytical scheme used to classify the POV at various points of a story. Unfortunately what tends to happens with analytical categories it that people tend to turn them into prescriptions, and then they become puritanical about them and start insisting that a work must be in a single category from beginning to end.
This is all bunk, and you would be well served to forget all about it and just write your story in the third person in the way that seem most natural to you.
Sometimes when a story is not working, an analysis of the story may reveal that the way POV is used in that particular story is not working, and those categories might be useful for describing what is going wrong. But in no way does that mean that every story that uses POV in the same way will not work, or that any general rules for what you must do with POV can be derived from the failure of POV in one particular work.
Fill your head with your story and write it down as it comes to you. Until you have real mastery of story craft, don't mess with any fancy literary techniques, or mess with restricted persons or POV.
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Mark Baker has a great answer, but to add.
Chapters, sections and paragraphs can be used to jump between POV, and the narrators. I personally think that these can be used, but there is a risk of a mess. Chapters are fairly easy jumping points, because those are the most concrete. The readers accept time jumps and completely different scenes, when the chapter is changed. They are low risk place to make such jumps. With more careful planning you can go deeper to the levels of text, possibly even to within sentence jumps.
"STOP", but the enemies do not stop; because they already surrounded him, which he was not aware.
Such sentence makes sense, but it is tricky to make an easily understood story written this way.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25607. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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