I don't know how to word this question best, or at least it seems that way when I search in Google. So let me try the forum now.

I have recently finished my draft (yippee!). Now I am going through my 75,000 words of mess and polishing off the 1st of many edits. One of the questions that comes up is; what am I allowed to write about what the POV doesn't see.

Up until now, I have simply avoided such lines as the following altogether, because somewhere I got scared off using them because technically the POV can't know it. Right?

EG,

Matthew didn't see the car that was following him.

(seriously bad example, but you get the idea.)

Can you write things like this in 3rd person POV, or not?
Some examples of what you have seen or read would be great. I think being able to end scenes with the tension that something like that builds could really add to the story.

There's no law which says you can't do it - it simply means that you have slid out of the head of your viewpoint character and are giving a more omniscient, authorial perspective on events for a moment. As long as you are aware what you are doing, and why, there is no absolute reason not to do it. The downside is that too much authorial intrusion can break reader engagement with your POV character.

Rosy

Declan, strictly speaking 'third person' isn't a point of view, it's just grammar. In a narrative told in first person, the narrator is the character who calls themself 'I'. If you're writing in third person, then there's still an implied narrator: someone has to know, and be be telling the reader, that 'Emily got home from the mine, and John poured her a drink.'

You then have to decide between two possibilities:

1) that narrator only knows about what's going on inside the head of one character, and can only see and know what that character can see. This is usually called 'third person limited' or sometimes 'limited subjective', in the sense that what's told and explained and understood is how that character would see/explain/understand it - which may not be true.

If you limit the pov to one character at a time, you can still switch between different, limited PoVs: the usual advice, at least until you're confident handling PoV, is only to do that at chapter or some other major break. But the narrative is always rooted in a single PoV.

2) that narrator knows what's going on inside the heads of more than one character and at more than one place, can switch at will, and knows what will happen. This is usually called 'third person omniscient' or sometimes 'knowledgeable', and many writers consider it the natural, most fluent and grown-up way to write. Many writing teachers will tell you not to do it, for reasons I don't understand.

If you have an omniscient narrator, then obviously they can tell you what a character doesn't see, or doesn't know, or doesn't understand.

The key is to decide whic you're doing, and do it consistently through the book. What doesn't work is to take the reader deep and long-term inside one head, and then suddenly write a sentence as the hat-check girl sees it, or tell us 'little did he know that it was his last day on earth.'

Some good, basic advice here (tho' I don't agree with all of it)

http://helpineedapublisher.blogspot.com/2010/01/points-of-view.html

and here:

http://helpineedapublisher.blogspot.com/2010/02/more-points-of-view-says-who-says-i.html

Emma

<Added>

And this might help with the point that Rosy highlighted, about how deep you are (or aren't) inside a character's head:

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/psychic-distance-what-it-is-and-how-to-use-it.html

Wow. Thanks for the really quick replies. You guys are awesome.

Well, my WIP is definitely in third-person limited (mostly), with the majority of the POV being that of the protagonist, and a smaller percentage belonging to the visible antagonist (as opposed to the voice on the phone that instructs him).
I say 'mostly' 3rd, because it is interspersed with journal entires (1st person obviously) from a bloke on a boat 500 years ago. All POV changes occur at clear scene breaks, and the journal entries are in stand-alone chapters.

Therefore, I guess I won't be adding any of the sort of bits I asked about above. Doesn't matter. It will build my skills to find other ways to achieve the tension.

Thanks for the links Emma. The Morgan site is really interesting. I may just have to consider her manuscript appraisal service too.
Shame there is no group for Adventure/Political Thriller here.