I was just watching a YouTube video which tried to explain why narrating a novel in third person omniscient is wrong but third person limited is right.\u00a0 The young woman explaining all this was personable, eloquent and prepared with arguments for her thesis.\u00a0 Ultimately, she was foursquare against \u201chead hopping; meaning switching back and forth between points of view in a scene.<\/p>\n
And who knows, maybe she\u2019s right.\u00a0 Maybe subjecting the audience to the point of view of two people within a dialog is just too confusing for audiences.\u00a0 But you know what?\u00a0 I have a feeling if a story is interesting enough and the characters sympathetic, I\u2019m guessing that the audience is following along just fine and just wants to find out how the plot will progress.\u00a0 I think a lot of times editors edit even when they should be reading and feeling whether the story is achieving that minor miracle we call entertainment.\u00a0 And if E.E. Doc Smith used too many exclamation points and Robert E. Howard had Conan grunt the same way in too many scenes, I\u2019m sure a competent editor would have demanded these faults be eliminated from the final version of the book.\u00a0 But would that have added significantly to the entertainment value of the story?\u00a0 I don\u2019t think so.\u00a0 Sure twelve-year-old me and current me are different readers.\u00a0 We notice different things in the same book.\u00a0 I would see the pulp aspects of the writing and even the temporal changes in writing and culture that have occurred over the course of almost a century since these books were written.\u00a0 But I can still enjoy the story as a story.\u00a0 If it elicits emotions or makes me think about a scientific point the author is trying to make then even if the prose is far from deathless, I can be entertained.\u00a0 I don\u2019t need Shakespeare in space.<\/p>\n
So, here\u2019s my point.\u00a0 The book publishing industry is dying.\u00a0 And it\u2019s not dying because of the prevalence of the third person omniscient point of view.\u00a0 It\u2019s dying because the gatekeepers of publishing just as the gatekeepers of movie-making consciously squeezed all the fun out of novels in order to advance a social justice narrative that they thought was mandatory to push.\u00a0 So, the cure for this isn\u2019t better editing.\u00a0 It\u2019s better writing, writing that keeps the interest of the readers.\u00a0 Better plots and better characters and more fun.<\/p>\n
Of course, I went back and tried to decide if my narration was third person omniscient or third person limited.\u00a0 And by golly I think it was omniscient.\u00a0 Now I could go back and rewrite the novel by switching the point of view in all of the tens of thousands of words to third person limited.\u00a0 But then it wouldn\u2019t be my story.\u00a0 Because I don\u2019t think that way and so I would be stumbling about trying to rework the sentences to fit this requirement of the narration.\u00a0 Well, I guess editors have to eat so I can\u2019t blame them for pushing the party line that provides them with work.<\/p>\n
But I just can\u2019t see it from their point of view.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was just watching a YouTube video which tried to explain why narrating a novel in third person omniscient is wrong but third person limited<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[241,1289,1263,237,4,242],"tags":[76,265],"class_list":["post-35883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-fiction-by-me","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-book-reviews","tag-fiction-writing","tag-science-fiction"],"yoast_head":"\n