Relationships & Partners and Writing Skills Tips. (A Writing Advice Guide Book

Clash About Point Of Views From Two Writing Guides

You guessed it this chapter is the side by side comparison of the Point of Views Lecture 15 by Professor James Hynes in Writing Great Fiction: Storytelling Tips and Techniques (a more recent author of 2014) how should be done versus the Point of View instructions from Gabriel Arquilevich the author of Writing for 100 days from back in 1995.

Let's divide into the modern author lecture who still uses quite old timey language.
Lecture 15: Point of Views See Through Other Eyes

As we've seen throughout these lectures, writing fiction is all about making choices, and deciding what point of view and voice to adopt in a narrative is one of the most important choices you have to make. This choice not only determines the perspective from which the story and plot are viewed, but it can determine what actually happens, and it has a powerful effect on what characters you include and how you depict them.
In this lecture, we'll take a quick tour of the most important types of point of view; then, in the next two lectures, we'll look at the first person point of view and the third person point of view in more detail.

Point of View Tour
If you imagine your story as a landscape, you can think of point of view as the dome of the sky arching over the story. The different possible points of view are points on that curve: from the highest point, overlooking the entire landscape, to the lowest point, where a character or a narrator can see only what's directly in front of him or her.

The all-inclusive point of view is the omniscient third person. This is the point of view in which the author and narrator appear as the same person but it is not always necessarily the case. This sort of narration sees, knows and usually reveals everything about the characters in the story. The point of view is often called godlike, because like an all powerful, all knowing deity the narration can see into the minds and hearts of its characters revealing their most intimate secrets.

A little closer to the ground but still fairly high up on the curve is the objective third person point of view. One of the best examples of this point of view is Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. In this novel, although we see everything every character does, we never get inside their minds.
Unlike an omniscient point of view, which generally shows us what characters are thinking and feeling, the objective third person is more like a video camera, recording and reporting everything it sees but allowing readers to make up their own minds about the characters' feelings, thought, and motivations.
This may be the most lifelike point of view because it reproduces what it feels like for each of us to move through the real world, trying to infer what other people around us are thinking from their speech or actions but never really knowing for sure. Although it's perhaps more lifelike, it's also colder than third-person omniscient, which engages more deeply and intimately in the lives of its characters.

Lumna10's Author Note: Big Problem here James Hynes, you're describing sub categories I have never heard of my whole life since I learnt to write English. Where is this coming from? Aren't you supposed to cover the How to write as well as the what to write? You're a pretty stupid professor. This is what I call getting overcomplicated. Meh, I can't believe this guy, honestly. Glad, he never taught me. If I ever had his classes my headache would be as bad as the headache from the Professor in my Precalculus class I literally dropped from he was just as bad as teaching and this Professor is. What is it with older men and using overcomplicated ideas? My point is the "how" is not ever included.

About halfway down the dome of our imaginary sky is the close or limited third-person point of view. More recently, this has come to be known as free indirect discourse. In this point of view, the narration uses third person pronouns, and like the omniscient third person, it gets inside the ninds of its characters. But in many narratives of this sort, the whole story or novel is generally told from point of view of only one character.
Because this close third-person point of view can often shift among several characters in the same narrative, it can easily tum into the omniscient third person. George Eliot's Middlemarch is written in this way, as is Faulkner's Light in August.
The traditional omniscient third person is often more remote from its characters and capable of making sweeping judgments about society, whereas modern novels written in the more intimate close third person generally shy away from that.
Still, the close third person allows the author occasionally to pull back the camera and either comment directly on the action as the author or show us something the point-of-view character can't or doesn't know. Free indirect discourse is the default mode of much contemporary fiction.
-James Hynes.