Hi Victoria, I am the proud owner of your books, and I cannot tell you how fantastic they are. I do have a query regarding third-person limited. Is it possible to express a character’s personal emotion that is not the main character? I hope you reply, and thank you again for your books. Regards, Brooke
Thank you so much for your kind words, Brooke!
The terms limited, unlimited, and omniscient narrator refer to the way your story is written. If you include the personal emotions of a character who is not the main character, then you are using unlimited or omniscient narrator, not limited.
I strongly recommend limited narrator with one Point-Of-View (POV) protagonist. This gives the reader the strongest connection to your protagonist. And this is one of the best literary disciplines to teach yourself as an aspiring writer.
If you use more than one POV for unlimited narrators, you weaken the reader’s connection to all of them. It can be done, but it’s best to design a pattern of POV switches so that the reader’s unconscious expectation of the POV switch counteracts their weakened connection to the characters. This is a much more complex discipline to teach yourself and best to tackle once you have some experience.
And if you use omniscient narrator, you transfer the reader’s connection from your protagonist to the story. Omniscient narrator was once very common, but in today’s literary climate readers tend to prefer a personal connection with a protagonist over the effort of making a connection with an impersonal story. It’s a good thing readers are not really interested in it, as it’s a fantastically difficult discipline to teach yourself, and even F. Scott Fitzgerald screwed it up.
I do strongly recommend not expressing the character’s personal emotions for them. That’s telling. Instead, show the reader how this character feels, through their dialog and actions and the things they notice in their described settings. Again—this is one of the great literary disciplines of our craft, teaching yourself how to portray your story through detailed scenes rather than exposition.
Showing rather than telling is also a much more powerful way to communicate emotion, as it makes space for unspoken subtext (one of the greatest of our fictional techniques) and gives the reader the chance to have their own feelings about what you’re showing them—which is what they really want.