POV perspectives: are the differences that significant?

[ElectricBlue]

The new old hotness is third person deep pov. It's more than just a stylistic choice someone leveraged in the 90s, saw some unique success, and everyone followed suit.

Is Deep POV also called "close" or "intimate" third? From my quick skim of your link they seem to be the same.

I discovered the power of close third very early on in my erotica. I was discussing the differences between first and (what I subsequently discovered to be) close third with a fellow writer, and she said, "You get so close to them on the pillow, when I just want to close the door and leave them be."

I always have to quote HectorBidon, who wrote this about a story:

I've always been partial to first person narration for conveying the intimate details of a character's inner life. But this story wonderfully shows how third person narration can be used to convey the inner activity of two characters, even during the intricate steps of their dance. We see the evening not as we would see it in real life---where we know our own feelings but can only guess at our partner's---but privy to both sides, able to see the uncertainty and hopefulness and playfulness and arousal on both sides as flirtation turns to courtship and courtship turns to foreplay. It's two intimate stories, really, interwoven at every scene. A tour-de-force of patient, loving, doubly imagined detail.

 

[SimonDoom]

I have heard some very negative critiques in this forum about "third person omniscient" POV. The claim is that it's too broad, and it jerks the reader around too much, hopping from one mind to another.

I can understand this idea, but I did notice that Dune is actually written that way, and it's both very popular and well written.

As are many, many well-regarded, famous novels. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky often wrote in 3d person omniscient. They did OK.

 

[XerXesXu]

Deep POV = 'show don't tell' on steroids.

Approaching hooves.

'Bill heard hoofbeats approaching from a distance. He started and hurried to the window, looked, but immediately jerked the curtain across, shrank back from the remaining slit and stared intently, his chest tight and heart beating furiously. In the room above, John also heard their approach. He idly glanced out of the window, then seeing the uniforms, threw the window open and leaned out, shoulders broad and head held high in fraternal welcome.'

 

[Euphony]

For anyone else wondering what 'deep POV' was:
"What Is Deep Point of View?
Deep point of view is a way of writing fiction in third-person limited that silences the narrative voice and takes the reader directly into a character’s mind. While third-person limited writing attaches to a single character and refers to them by their name or pronouns, deep POV takes it one step further—eliminating filter words and writing as the character instead of about them. For example, consider the following sentence:

He peered out the window. “Are they coming for me?” he wondered as he listened to the sound of distant hoofbeats.

The above could be written in deep POV as follows:

He peered out the window. Were they coming for him? Hoofbeats rumbled in the distance.

Not a phrase I'd heard before, thank you @Euphony , but summarises the typical difference between my first and final drafts (whether in 1st or 3rd person, so I'm not sure why it's called a POV).

Yeah, 3rd Intimate/Deep POV, Limited, whatever branding someone is currently calling it is exactly that.

Aggravating AF honestly when you are working on your craft by googling but the ideas are essentially the same from most camps. Some just have a preference in naming it (or more accurately, trying to market a thing done long ago in the past and across writers as their "unique" thing. *rolls eyes*)

You say tomato, I say Kumquat or something. Lol.

 

[Euphony]

Is Deep POV also called "close" or "intimate" third? From my quick skim of your link they seem to be the same.

I discovered the power of close third very early on in my erotica. I was discussing the differences between first and (what I subsequently discovered to be) close third with a fellow writer, and she said, "You get so close to them on the pillow, when I just want to close the door and leave them be."

I always have to quote HectorBidon, who wrote this about a story:

Yeah, sorry. See my post below (wrote it before seeing yours so we are basically restating each other)

I used "Deep" and "Intimate" not for preference sake but b/c the two books I highly suggest (though for different style learners) used those terms so they stuck.

Another book in the subject area absolutely worth your time is:

My main qualm (and why it came in 3rd so didn't make my original cut) is she uses YET another term for essentially the same thing, though, in her defense, she's not steadfastly demanding 3rd intimate in every instance but if you set you benefits/argument up that it makes the most logical sense across most cases... yeah. Haha.

Anywho, it's interesting, a little more pop culture/digestible than "Rivet." I guess if I'm going technical I want deconstruction so I can tear down ideas to the studs if my dumb brain needs.

"Method" dips a toe in both camps but, we all learn on a spectrum so this may be goldielocks for many/most.

If you have more film/tv story development, skills, or knowledge, this is your jam. They aren't required (I did okay with light prior exposure to the concepts) but if you got 'em, you'll have a killer foothold to scurry up the mountain face.

 

[Euphony]

As are many, many well-regarded, famous novels. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky often wrote in 3d person omniscient. They did OK.

All omni does is more date a piece than speak to ability or narrative efficiency.

IIRC, somewhere in the 90s, "deep/intimate/Kirkland brand POV" was resurrected (it's been around forEVER, just not the dominate style) and somebody stood out b/c of it (and underlying ability)

Publishing houses took hold, copycats started having success and publishing houses reset the POV culture to generate new "demand" for essentially old hat.

It's been re-reciped in the ensuing, and IIRC Rivet touches on it some. But the bulk of all of it is, it's stylistic choice that somebody managed to set as predominate culture.

What matters is not what the dang thing is, it's that authors don't half ass it expecting the POV to do the work. There are quirky limitations you can stray from so it's good to internalize a checklist of what you're allowed and not. ("Deep POV" by Marcy is the far more helpful book in doing this. Bite sized efficiency FTW.)

 

[ElectricBlue]

What matters is not what the dang thing is, it's that authors don't half ass it expecting the POV to do the work. There are quirky limitations you can stray from so it's good to internalize a checklist of what you're allowed and not. ("Deep POV" by Marcy is the far more helpful book in doing this. Bite sized efficiency FTW.)

I think I arrived at it intuitively, then discovered what grammarians and writer gurus called it.

I'd not heard of Deep POV before today - I'd come across "close" or "intimate" third maybe four or five years ago (when someone pointed out in The Floating World that that's what I was doing). I must have noticed it in contemporary fiction, surely? and subconsciously registered that it "got in closer" than omniscient third usually does. It's ideal for erotica. It's pretty much my automatic style nowadays, unless I'm writing first person, obviously.

Automatic writing - now there's a thought...

 

[SimonDoom]

All omni does is more date a piece than speak to ability or narrative efficiency.

I'm not sure about this. Larry McMurtry, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove in the 1980s, wrote in the omniscient. In general, he switched from one POV to another at chapter breaks, but not always. He let us know what every major character was thinking at one point or another. Jonathan Franzen's novels The Corrections and Freedom take us inside the minds of multiple major characters. Tom Wolfe's novels were told in the omniscient. For a modern sensibility I think the key to omniscient is for the author/narrator not to intrude too much on the characters' points of view. It's OK to tell a story from multiple points of view but if the author's point of view intrudes upon those of the characters it doesn't feel right.

 

[Euphony]

I'm not sure about this. Larry McMurtry, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove in the 1980s, wrote in the omniscient. In general, he switched from one POV to another at chapter breaks, but not always. He let us know what every major character was thinking at one point or another. Jonathan Franzen's novels The Corrections and Freedom take us inside the minds of multiple major characters. Tom Wolfe's novels were told in the omniscient. For a modern sensibility I think the key to omniscient is for the author/narrator not to intrude too much on the characters' points of view. It's OK to tell a story from multiple points of view but if the author's point of view intrudes upon those of the characters it doesn't feel right.

Not asserting it wasn't done, never done, etc., just that 3rd Int/Deep came back?/into prominence again around the 90s. Doubtful it was "better" but it became more the publishing house style which generated more adherents starting a cycle of writers seeing other writers do it so copycatting. Enough reader exposure and they develop more of a taste for this new-old. Zero to do with talents who rise above and more to do with the marketplace.

Cormac McCarthy essentially breaks norms all the time but master craftsmen have more than earned that right and don't need the guide rails most do to keep the narrative train on proper track, even when they explode the locomotive's boiler over stoking the fire.

If you took a random assortment of pieces and had to time stamp them, omniscient is going to factor in the "possibly older work" side of the ledger. More context clues will better suggest origin.

Singular examples, hell even singular authors, aren't enough, statistically.

 

[Britva415]

"Dating a piece" isn't about statistical likelihood, though. If you dated the pieces mentioned based on the omni voice, you'd have been wrong.

To go further, you'd have been wrong too if you were to say, "Well, the style was dated."

 

[mildlyaroused]

I generally maintain the position that there is little objective difference between the first person and the close-third person perspectives. In both cases, you are entering the character's mind, and only their mind.

But you cannot deny that they feel different, both to write and to read. Even if authors are faced with the same limitations when writing, they come across as different. That's just fact.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I generally maintain the position that there is little objective difference between the first person and the close-third person perspectives. In both cases, you are entering the character's mind, and only their mind.

But you cannot deny that they feel different, both to write and to read. Even if authors are faced with the same limitations when writing, they come across as different. That's just fact.

Agree this. I can't put my finger on exactly what the difference is, but close third feels subtly different to first. Slightly tighter control, perhaps, I'm not sure (setting aside that you can be in both heads).

I'll ask my editor. She's good at teasing this stuff apart.

 

[XerXesXu]

I'd not heard of Deep POV before today - I'd come across "close" or "intimate" third maybe four or five years ago (when someone pointed out in The Floating World that that's what I was doing). I must have noticed it in contemporary fiction, surely? and subconsciously registered that it "got in closer" than omniscient third usually does. It's ideal for erotica. It's pretty much my automatic style nowadays, unless I'm writing first person, obviously.

https://forum.literotica.com/threads/deep-pov.1585644/page-3#post-96748139

Now, where did you leave your driving spectacles?

 

[ElectricBlue]

https://forum.literotica.com/threads/deep-pov.1585644/page-3#post-96748139

Now, where did you leave your driving spectacles?

Haha - I don't remember seeing it called deep pov before, probably because I've always know it as close or intimate.

What are you, some kind of slightly disturbing but mostly harmless fanboy, that you know where my skeletons are hidden?

 

[Areala-chan]

My choice in deciding tense for a story comes down to how much of a mystery I want the main character to be feeling, and how immediate and intimate I want the setting to be. One of the biggest challenges for the I/T category (at least the way I see it) is how all the dominos fall into place for the relationship to progress beyond the point of no return. There's already an inherent tension in the 'courting' stage of a relationship, where people dance around one another because they aren't sure if their feelings will be returned or rebuffed. That gets ramped up even harder in that category, so part of the charm and enjoyment for me when I was writing "Crash Into Me" was having my MC grapple with the simple fact she has no clue how her sister feels about her. Locking the reader inside Colleen's head puts them in exactly the same position: not with regards to "will they or won't they?", because category convention dictates they sure as hell are going to at some point, but rather "how the fuck will they?". Colleen couldn't read Lynn's mind, and even the little clues Lynn has been giving off for the whole story aren't overt enough for Colleen to pick up on how she really felt.

I loved that.

With "Kendra", I wanted to retain an air of mystery about Kendra Daniels, specifically because her history in the game is so sparse. That left me room to build and play, but I didn't want the reader to have access to any of that save for what they can suss out through Kendra's actions as seen by Sasha, or through what Kendra explicitly reveals when they're together. Everything else is up to interpretation by the reader, and Sasha is very much an unreliable narrator because she's wearing the rose-tinted glasses of the 'on a pedestal' stage of a romance. First-person present tense here let me unveil the details of Kendra's life in a way that hopefully didn't feel insulting or demeaning to the reader, because there's no way for that information to come out except through Sasha's narrative lens. If she doesn't see it, or worse, doesn't accurately register it, then the reader isn't crying 'foul' at me for deliberately keeping secrets the way a past-tense third-person POV sometimes requires.

I had more fun writing "Kendra" than I've had working on a story in a long, long time, and most of that fun came down to the POV. Gimme that sweet, sweet first-person present narration, baby.

 

[XerXesXu]

Haha - I don't remember seeing it called deep pov before, probably because I've always know it as close or intimate.

What are you, some kind of slightly disturbing but mostly harmless fanboy, that you know where my skeletons are hidden?

I can remember when Deep POV was last discussed - in a thread titled 'Deep POV', 7 months ago.

Have you considered whether it may be something other than close or intimate, perhaps 'Cinematic'?

 

[M_K_Babalon]

I've heard the advice a couple of times "never head hop." Well, of course you can head hop. It's a powerful technique to tell a story from different sides. You just have to be careful to make each hop very clear. Hopping heads at the beginning of a chapter, for instance.

It's common enough in fanfiction. But usually each head hop is another chapter.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I can remember when Deep POV was last discussed - in a thread titled 'Deep POV', 7 months ago.

Have you considered whether it may be something other than close or intimate, perhaps 'Cinematic'?

Only seven months ago, huh? My dotage progresses!

Cinematic would be a good description of my style - I've had that comment made many times, how cinematic, filmic, visual my writing is.

 

[StillStunned]

Approaching hooves.

'Bill heard hoofbeats approaching from a distance. He started and hurried to the window, looked, but immediately jerked the curtain across, shrank back from the remaining slit and stared intently, his chest tight and heart beating furiously. In the room above, John also heard their approach. He idly glanced out of the window, then seeing the uniforms, threw the window open and leaned out, shoulders broad and head held high in fraternal welcome.'

For Deep POV, I'd actually go deeper:

"Hoofbeats approached from a distance. Bill started and hurried to the window, looked, but immediately jerked the curtain across, shrank back from the remaining slit and stared intently, his chest tight and heart beating furiously. In the room above, John glanced out of the window. The riders were wearing uniforms. John threw the window open and leaned out, shoulders broad and head held high in fraternal welcome."

On the difference between close 3P and omniscient 3P, if you can imagine the narrator injecting some information that the POV character (or characters) couldn't know, it's omniscient. Otherwise it's just close 3P with multiple POV characters. Essentially, omniscient 3P has a storyteller who's outside the story, telling it to readers who are also outside the story. With close 3P, the narration works on the premise that the narrator only knows what the active POV character could know.

Head-hopping is more than switching POV: it's moving the narration outside the POV character's head to show the reader something from another character's POV before returning to the first character. Like in the example I gave above, where the author wants to tell the reader that the POV character recalls painful memories, they skip to the POV of someone else to describe the look in the first character's eyes, then skip back again.

 

[TheLobster]

Funny, I didn’t know this technique has a name (“deep PoV”). I’ve used it a few times, mostly because I find it jarring to convey character’s thoughts in any other way. For example,

“Are they coming for me?” he wondered

looks like dialogue but it probably isn’t. Some authors use cursive for this purpose but that’s overloading its meaning because you’re already using italics for emphasis.

Typically, if I want to be “literal” about what the character is thinking, I’d use no special punctuation at all:

Are they coming for me, he wondered.

At this point it’s quite obvious that the tag can be dropped. I never considered this to be in any way deep

 

[Plathfan]

Typically, if I want to be “literal” about what the character is thinking, I’d use no special punctuation at all:

In cases where quotation marks are omitted, it is customary to use italics.

Personally, instead of "Are they coming for me?" he wondered, or "Were they coming for him?" which both feel somewhat clunky, I'd probably opt for the most direct and simple option: "He wondered whether they were coming for him."

And if I want to be more figurative, then maybe: "He glanced outside the window, wonder in his eyes."

 

[lovecraft68]

I'm going to leave myself open for some abuse here, but I'll say it anyway.

I've been writing here for 14 years, writing in general a couple more. I am still what I'd call unrefined and raw.

I know the basics of what first/second/third POV are. When we get into terms like Deep Third POV and go on and on? I'm lost at sea. I don't think its that I can't understand it, but I'd need to apply myself to it.

I just tell stories, some longer, some shorter, some sexy, some gory and violent(those aren't here) some fun some far more serious. I love writing, writing is liberating and although work at times, frustrating at times, its an amazing thing to be able to do.

I've been called a hack, a pantser, I've had people who consider themselves very good writers express frustration with me claiming "I see so many flashes of good writing from you, you should take it more seriously." I've also had people telling me "Great use of this or that, wow, you nailed this technique, you really...." if I did those things it was never intentional, just how the story came out.

No desire to. I am what I am, and that, to repeat, is someone who likes to tell stories.

Nothing wrong with knowing the technical aspects or studying the minutia of the craft, but its not for me.

I'm the writing equivalent of book smart vs street smart.

 

[Areala-chan]

There really is no better teacher than getting into the trenches and doing the work one's self.

 

[Plathfan]

Storytelling is a gift, an innate talent. Mastering all the technical aspects won't compensate for the lack of it.

 

[StillStunned]

Storytelling is a gift, an innate talent. Mastering all the technical aspects won't compensate for the lack of it.

True, but understanding what you're doing, and how to do it better, can enhance your writing.