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"His painstaking attention to detail was not only professional but enlightening. The specifics that Paul provided made my book more interesting, and showed me that the simple nuances of editing can turn a sentence into keen prose and paragraphs into distinctive voice.
--Dean Ream, author,
In The River's Mist

Third Person Point of View group familiar

Can be omniscient as well as seemingly at one with each of the characters, almost as if the narrator is one of the characters. In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain used a highly stylized colloquial narration that reflected regional speech of an area of the South.

A more subtle example follows from the novel Dead Man's Walk by Larry McMurtry:

"Matilda Jane Roberts was naked as the air. Known throughout Texas as the Great Western, she came walking up from the muddy Rio Grande holding a big snapping turtle by the tail. Matilda was almost as large as the skinny little Mexican mustang Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call were trying to saddlebreak. Call had the mare by the ears, waiting for Gus to pitch the saddle on her narrow back, but the pitch was slow in coming. When Call glanced toward the river and saw the Great Western in all her plumb nakedness, he knew why: young Gus McCrae was by nature distractible; the sight of a naked, two- hundred pound whore carrying a full-grown snapping turtle has captured his complete attention, and that of the rest of the Ranger troop as well."

The narrator in this passage sounds almost to be one of the Ranger troop, as "distractible" as the others by the imposing sight of a naked, stocky woman clutching a big, squirming turtle by its tail. There's also attitude here; having identified two men by their full names, in subsequent reference to them the narrator uses the last name of one and the first of the other. Implication is made that Gus McCrae is easier to know than Woodrow Call.

Group familiar third person narration is an effective way to put the reader in the milieu of a story, being with most or all of the characters in a situation.

tip #4 of 17