It’s all good! It just depends on how well you use your power.

On 2/17/2022 at 10:57 PM, Graeme said:

If you're going purest with Third Person Limited, you need to be careful when describing other characters. If it's not the 'main' character, you can't say. "John was angry" because that's reading their mind. You need to do something like "John looked angry" or better still "John glared as he clenched his fists" which allows the reader to interpret John as being angry without telling them explicitly. It's tricky and easy to get wrong, but most of the time only a purest would object to "John was angry" for a non-main character in Third Person Limited so it's not really that big a deal.

Totally agree, Graeme, and to me it is a big deal. A writer owes it to himself to get it right, or at least understand what is correct and pay attention. Better writing is better writing, and for me that is always the goal.    

Shifts in the point of view of third-person narration aren't particularly jarring, if handled well.  Emma Darwin has some valuable tips on how to execute such shifts so that the readers won't even notice.

However, when I encounter a shift from first-person narration to third-person in the middle of a story, I always wonder how the main character is supposed to have known what happened outside his sight and hearing.  That question usually jars me out of the flow and immediacy of the first-person story-telling, especially when the third-person material appears to be a scene that the author felt a need to work out, but intended to omit from the finished work.

Yesterday, I was flummoxed by a story I was reading on Nifty, in which the "I" telling the story became a different character from one paragraph to the next.  This was in mid-chapter, and the switch came without warning.  In fact, I had to read the new paragraph three or four times before it began to make sense, but sad to say, by that point I had lost interest in finishing the story.

I once encountered a story (also on Nifty, I believe) where, I kid you not, in the middle of a chapter and with no warning, "I" shifted to a different character three times in the space of two paragraphs, and one of those shifts actually occurred in the middle of a sentence.  As you may guess, that story had plenty of other problems that eventually rendered it unreadable.  A shame, too, because the premise was intriguing and the plot, imaginative.  It would have been a good read, if the writing hadn't been quite so unpolished.  I hope the writer got himself sorted out in his later work, because he showed promise.

4 hours ago, BigBen said:

Shifts in the point of view of third-person narration aren't particularly jarring, if handled well.  Emma Darwin has some valuable tips on how to execute such shifts so that the readers won't even notice.

However, when I encounter a shift from first-person narration to third-person in the middle of a story, I always wonder how the main character is supposed to have known what happened outside his sight and hearing.  That question usually jars me out of the flow and immediacy of the first-person story-telling, especially when the third-person material appears to be a scene that the author felt a need to work out, but intended to omit from the finished work.

Yesterday, I was flummoxed by a story I was reading on Nifty, in which the "I" telling the story became a different character from one paragraph to the next.  This was in mid-chapter, and the switch came without warning.  In fact, I had to read the new paragraph three or four times before it began to make sense, but sad to say, by that point I had lost interest in finishing the story.

I once encountered a story (also on Nifty, I believe) where, I kid you not, in the middle of a chapter and with no warning, "I" shifted to a different character three times in the space of two paragraphs, and one of those shifts actually occurred in the middle of a sentence.  As you may guess, that story had plenty of other problems that eventually rendered it unreadable.  A shame, too, because the premise was intriguing and the plot, imaginative.  It would have been a good read, if the writing hadn't been quite so unpolished.  I hope the writer got himself sorted out in his later work, because he showed promise.

I couldn't agree more. I have found that, on Nifty, as well as on Awesome Dude and similar sites, the writing is mostly about telling a story, and all the conventions of grammar, punctuation, and POV have been either ignored or never even considered. I realize that their audience is not as  concerned with the skills of the writer, as much as with the eroticism of the narrative, but I am happy to see that, on this site, proper writing is respected and rewarded. 

I am still new to this medium, but I am relieved to see how dedicated everyone is to the craft of writing.