The authorial beau monde

Third person narrative: Limited, Omniscient, Objective

Third person limited, with a little modification.

According to Wikipedia (that most unassailable source), third-person limited is:

Third person limited is when the narrator is an outsider who sees into the mind of one character…In third person limited the narrator is outside of the story and tells the story from only one character’s view.

However, some authors use an even narrower and more subjective perspective, as though the viewpoint character were narrating the story; this is dramatically very similar to the first person, allowing in-depth revelation of the protagonist’s personality, but uses third-person grammar.

In my time writing novels, being in critique groups, chomped on by the creative writing professors at UMKC, this has been pounded into me as being The Correct Way To Do Things. Well, either that or first person, which has a literary cachet that is only beginning to gain ground in genre fiction.

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Thank you, Stephen King.

I stopped reading you when I was 17. There was a reason for this: I’d run through everything you’d ever written by that time and I was burnt out on you, so I went on to glomming my next author, whom I have also never read again. Lather, rinse, repeat throughout my life. Glom, abandon, glom, abandon. Yes, I am an evil reader.

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“Eventually you will succeed.”

Does anybody actually believe this without a boatload of qualifiers?

Over at Romancing the Blog, there was a very nice article about a mystery writer’s convention comparing and contrasting how that genre’s culture stacks up against the romance genre’s culture (including ebooks, my pet topic, but I’ll pimp that later elsewhere). I found this tidbit interesting:

The motivating keynote and luncheon speeches sounded just like the ones we hear at RWA, discussing how important it is to write your story, to finish the book, to be persistent, hone your craft, and if you keep at it, eventually you will succeed.

Er, no.

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I rode this train for so long…why?

I have a buncha novels on my hard drive that have been sitting around collecting dust since, oh, 1990 some time, I guess. In ’93 I wrote one that got me an agent another that year that got me a contract—before they were shut down (because, according to the rumor at the time [get this] it was making too much money and it had been created to take a loss for tax purposes) (remember Kismet? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?); one in ’95 that got me an early-Saturday-morning phone call from Harlequin to pleasepleaseplease overnight the manuscript; and a fourth novel in ’98 that got me a different agent.

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I am so getting this book

Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander
by Ann Herendeen

Yeah, so I’m not really all about the bisexual historical romance (“a man in love with his wife and his boyfriend”), but what I am about is when self-publishing serves its purpose, which is to say, it gained an audience and a traditional NY publisher’s attention.

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