Third person viewpoint

Orion101

Hello, just a quick question on third person perspective.

If a chapter is being written in third person, but closer to one particular character (ie. revealing some of their thoughts, feelings) should the observations on the other characters be restricted to their outward actions?

Hope the question is clear enough and thanks in advance!

philcoleman

Hi there, you could try experimenting with Free Indirect Discourse to achieve this. Also if you google the 'Uncle Charles Principle' you should get loads of info on how Joyce achieved effects similar to what you're after!

EileenG

Short answer: yes. If you are using one person's point of view, you have to restrict yourself to what that person thinks, sees, feels, hears and does. He can't refer to his own physical attributes, unless they are directly involved in the action - so he can curse his big feet that trip when he's trying to run away, but can't run his hand over his red hair.

And he can only guess at what other people are thinking, though he might be a really good judge of twitches and gestures and use those to interpret what's in their mind.

Orion101

Thanks both for the useful advice!

iguana

Some books use that type of "close" third person on a number of characters but it will only work if you can do it fairly evenly throughout. If 2/3s of your book is from one characters perspective and the other 1/3 is from a smattering of other characters it will jar badly to a reader.

Some writers which change perspective between characters do so by having different chapters or sections focus on one character, then switch in the next chapter. But I I have also read some very good books where the perspective changes from sentence to sentence, as if it is being written by an omniscient voice. But a writer has to be very, very good to pull that off successfully.