POV question

It's third person POV, but you've, well, not precisely head-hopped, but you've accidentally grabbed Grok's POV along with Thomas's. To keep this fully in Thomas's POV, make this change:

Before Thomas could worry too much about this, the forest thinned and they reached the bottom of a hill.
When the sun still shone Prident Hill had looked over the city – out across tents of every colour, passageways swarming with people, a vast blue lake and a thick green forest – but when Thomas and Grok reached the peak all they hesaw was black.

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Thomas can't know what Grok can see unless he asks or unless Grok tells him.

I think I may be following. And I think the answer (ironically) is filtering. One of the main reason not to use filter words without any purpose (Thomas saw, Thomas thought, Thomas realized) is so you don't overuse them when you need to cheat on POV but don't really want to. So, in this case, can you say Thomas expected to see it?

sara_ash said:

Thanks for that Cathy. I wasn't even asking about the 'they' bit (I hadn't even picked up on it. Oops!)

I was worried about the section before that e.g. 'when the sun still shone over Prident …'
Is it okay to include this even though Thomas doesn't know what it used to look like?

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Not unless you're writing in omniscient POV, and for that, the omniscient voice needs to permeate the entire novel.

You can, but it's not really the most effective use of the POV. The nice thing with omniscient is the ability to express what's in the minds of various people and give readers a view to things they can't otherwise see from one set of eyes. If there are only a few instances in the book, you might try it in third limited alone, by, as you say, using dialogue from other characters to take the place of the omniscient voice. That's the most common method. Or, you might try just this chapter as a way to give an omniscient voice a try. Who knows? You might like it. Just use cut and paste to copy one chapter to a new document and play with telling readers everything YOU, the author, know about the world before the catastrophe.

Might be fun to stretch your creative muscles.

If we use Third person Limited we can only mention that which our POV character already knows about or is aware of.

In simple terms, in Third person Limited for the duration of any particular scene, chapter or book as the case may be, we place ourselves in a little camera on the chosen POV character's shoulder.

That camera represents the POV character's visual restriction, and we mention only what is visible through that camera, or what is available via the POV character's senses.

That way we narrate, linking everything together to try and allow the reader to experience the unfolding events through the eyes and ears and senses of the POV character while keeping our presence as narrator as unobtrusive as possible.

There may be a six-foot spider tramping along a few feet behind our POV character and of course - as the narrator - we know about it but we cannot mention it unless and until our POV character becomes aware of its presence - either through one of his senses or by someone else mentioning it. And we also cannot describe it until he sees it (and we do, too, through that camera lens) or unless perhaps he recognises what it is from someone else's comment or the like.

The POV is that of the chosen POV character, not the narrator, the latter simply acting as the means of linking everything together so it can be read.

Using Omniscient means the only POV is that of the all-knowing narrator - a narrator who knows everything about everybody and what everybody is thinking about everybody else all the time. The narrator can focus in and out on, or spend as much time as he chooses with, any character he chooses and although he may convey the thoughts and feelings of any character to us, the POV is always that of the narrator, who can mention things the characters are not aware of because it's his POV and not that of the characters.

The Omniscient narrator can focus in on any character he wishes but doesn't need to 'go into the head' of a character to let us know what that character is thinking because by virtue of his omniscience he already knows what's in everybody's head and can share that information with us.

sara_ash said:

Can you write in omniscient POV but only go into the 'head' of one character?

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Yes, certainly.