: What are some Que and Clues on 3rd Person POV shift? I am writing in 3rd person limited POV. I have noticed I have section of text that seem to shift to omniscient. A lot of this happens

Vote Up Vote Down

(1) explaining the thoughts of a character other than the protagonist

(2) depicting events from which the protagonist is absent

(3) depicting the protagonist in non-conscious states (i.e., sleeping, dead… I guess)

Those are just a few. You can think of it this way: could your protagonist narrate this prose to his- or herself in the third-person? (Maybe that's a bit convoluted.)

If you do wish to switch, you can delineate the change at least subtly by starting a new chapter (and perhaps the reader will pick up on the pattern of omniscient- vs non- chapters). I've read books where the non-omniscient chapters feature, after their chapter-number, the name of the character to whose PoV the chapter is constricted.

If you're aware of what you're doing, it shouldn't be too big of a deal. Good luck!

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

If you're writing in 3rd limited, then you should only be sharing information that the POV character knows.

I don't think there are any specific words to watch out for - it's more the content than the style.

If there are parts of your story that absolutely MUST be shared that your POV character can't know about, you may want to look at what Rowling did in several Harry Potter books - she wrote mostly in limited third, but had a few sections (maybe even entire chapters?) written in omniscient.

(0)