I disagree with the camera analogy. I don't have my book with me right now. cameras are all fine when you're writing 3rd objective in which the narrator never enters a character's head and the reader never learns any emotion or thought from the character. works great for movie scripts. not so great for novels.
Like you said, it's not that different from 1st person POV. So try writing the narration in the voice of the character. use his language. his words. forget about internal dialogue and use the narrative as an indication of what he's thinking.
My books are all packed up so i can't give you an example, so I'm going to do what i consider to be something horrible. lol i'm going to give you an example of *gasp* my own WIP.
He grabbed a pair of pants off the pile. They smelled okay. He pulled them on, dragged on a somewhat dodgy smelling shirt, clean socks. Clean socks were important. They protected a soldier’s feet from blisters and sores. An army marched on its feet or some horse shit like that.
Except he wasn’t in the army anymore, was he?
He hung up the phone, realized he was smiling. It felt strange, the muscle movement tugging at his beard. Figure skating. What the hell. He lived through Kabul and Kandahar City, he could live through classical music and sparkly costumes.
The two examples above are from one character's POV Srgt Luc La Fontaine (ret) he's 30, spent his whole adult live in the army, he's gruff. I like to think that in the narrative I've captured his voice. Not that much different than 1st.
THe next example is from the other POV character, Marin, 17 yrs old, religious, at odds with his family, looking for a mission from God.
Marin told the man to sit down and he’d bring the coffee and muffin. He turned away to fill a mug and reconsidered his initial impression. Maybe the man wasn’t homeless after all. Without the beard, he looked tired but respectable. He had that same look Marin’s father had. Cautious, on-guard. He wondered if the man was in the army like his dad had been.
Marin laid in the soft grass. A magpie somewhere screamed at a squirrel, who gave as good as he got. Down the street, someone was mowing the lawn and Marin imagined he could smell the green scent of fresh-cut grass. He wondered if tomorrow he’d come home to find the outside of the house painted pink, like last summer.
Sentence structure is different. Marin is much more formal than Luc. He's thoughtful, he's deliberate, his sentences are longer, more complete. He notices things like what people are wearing, what things smell like. Luc, right now, is so shut into his own head that as long as his clothes don't smell he doesn't notice what they look like, what colour they are nothing, so i don't write that. I only write what the character directly sees, thinks, smells, feels, knows. If it doesn't matter to him how a room is decorated, I don't write it.
So don't think of 3rd limited as being a camera. THink of it more like you wearing the character as a suit, looking through his eyes, hearing and recording everything he feels, sees, touches, thinks, in his voice. without internal thoughts, which to me only emphasize that distance.
Sorry for using my WIP as an example. it's a first draft.
