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[–] MirrorMan ago 

That's why I love third person limited. You can take it to the extreme and never include a single thought. What boils my blood the most about writing is when a writer does not expect the reader to participate. Everyone likes to make inferences and jump to conclusions based on limited information. If you dissect everything, cut it up into the tiniest digestible pieces, and try to force feed the reader, then the conversation dies. A story is a conversation not an essay. If you are writing effectively you can imply many things and trust the reader to fill in the blanks. The time to go all in on explicit details is when describing action.

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[–] Vaati 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

I don't mind when third person gets into a character's head, but it is obnoxious when overdone, and I'm most definitely not a fan of first person.

But this guy's issue was that he was simultaneously stuck in his character's head and that he expected too much of the reader in the way of inferences. If you asked him, he always had an elaborate story (like, an actual story a sequence of events) behind why his character was so morose. There would never be any hints at all in the writing he shared with the peer review group, yet he was shocked every damn time we met up and no one in the group had any clue what his characters were upset about.

We kept telling him that A) he needed to give us more than that the characters were upset if he wanted us to be able to work out what happened and B) his introspection wasn't that interesting and he should try and write about whatever event led the character to be upset instead, but he never listened. It was like he had this weird chip on his shoulder where anything close to a conventional story was too passe for him, and everyone in his class including the professor was obviously too dense to pick up on his subtle genius.

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[–] MirrorMan 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

Nothing is worse than the misunderstood genius. I'm loathe to join a writing group because I know I will run into plenty.