Narrative Obligations · 8:58am Jan 16th, 2013
Icaught myself pondering the different ideas behind wrigint perspectives, and jotted them down in a notebook while I could.
I apologize in advance for any spelling errors. I'm lacking a spellcheck right now, and there are still words that give me a rather hard time when it comes to spelling them perfectly every single time. I spell things they way I say them, so aparantly I say things wrong.
Third person narrative should be a blanket of senses, almost a concious omnipresence that is shared with the audience. It must extrapelate pregoress, senses, setting, and foreshadowing. Thinkonf of the work that must go into third person narrative, I wonder why I have chosen it as a focus in many of my writings. Rarely have I delved outside of it. The more I ponder and try to improve, the more I see that there is a certain responsibility, or obligation as it were, for those who chose to work within this narrative.
There is also a sacrifice that is made in a third person narrative, and that is usually in character intamacy.Some may ry to compensate for this by taking advantage of the third person power over every character that's interacted with by the protagonist, but many times it may seem hollow and brief. This is because the narration must also drive the plot and focus on everything around the character also. As much as we try, we will always lose a bit of developmemt when we choose this narrative.
But it does have it's advantages. The whole world is at our grasp when we choose this path. Events indirectly related to the main protagonist are under our control. We can more easily foreshadow an event or expand on a historical period that is predominantly before or after a main plotline that may suit a great emotional response or understanding in the end.
I cannot say that this narrative is superior, considering the fact that I've seen some ingeneous writing conventions that blur the lines between these narratives and lead to some very satisfying outcomes. One example being magical orbs that send the user into the mind of a past memory, giving them multi-character exposition that fleshes out a whole experience. Reading it, I found that the convention gave depth to multiple characters and serves as a good excuse to break from the original narrative without actually "breaking" the flow. The author achieved this link by making the connection a strictly sensory one. Only having access to the host's sounds, touch, smells, sight, and even taste. But not thoughts. This preserved mystery.
While I continue to ponder and improve, I hope to also strech the limits of the narratives. Third person has the potential to be manipulated the most. When I wrote the first unedited chapter of Lifeled, I imagined the narrative to be a motion camera, taking in the actionas it happened. The artistic writing was meant to show a continual flow of action through the words, giving the reader no time to stop and think as the words flowed over them. My experience was little at the time (Still is meager) and I found that I ended up confusing the reader, and leaving myself in a rather embarrasing wake. I sounded so pretentious, but I sware that it wasn't the intent. I wanted to have a fixed, low-angle lense on the cameral that showed the action from the front and flowed backwards to take in the character's faces, and the living world around them.
The camera broke down and I was left with Micheal Bay shouting at me. I was lucky to have some people there to help me pick up the pieces. I took the impenatrable fog and fabric that I had sewn, took a knife in my hands, and cut a perforated swath over what I had wrote so that it could more easily be seen through and understood. The scraps I cast to the wayside in a sacrafice needed for my eternal growth as a writer. I still think about the remnants, sorrowing silently that I could not have been able to sew them into something more worthy for the story I created.
These are the end of my thoughts. Thank you for reading, hope I didn't bore you in my attempt to share what I have learned and percieved.
Very interesting. I actually sometimes wish I was writing in first person because I like that intimacy with the protagonist and the way you can get into her thoughts more easily. But like you said, third person is the most flexible. (I'm going with third person omniscient for my Celestia story, which lets me dip into the thoughts of any character I want...but sometimes keeps me from being as focused on Celestia's POV as I would like... There's always a trade-off.)
This is a thoughtful post. (Though I think you are a bit too harsh on yourself sometimes.)
Thanks for your insights.