Mary Rosenblum, your web editor, has published three SF novels, four mysteries, and more than 60 short stories in multiple genres, as well as nonfiction! She also teaches writing and is a LR instructor.  Most recently, her SF short story Jumpers can be found on the SciFiction Magazine website.

 

 

The Third Person Points Of View

Which One To Use, and Why?

 

By Mary Rosenblum, LR Web Editor

 

           

 

            You’ve written a great story and you turn it in to your instructor, or you give it to your critique group,or your trusted reader.  Gee, you hear back, This is written in omniscient.  Maybe it would be better in a Limited Third Point of View.  Or, This is very narrative.  Try the Cinematic third person here and see if that doesn’t make it stronger.

 

            Okay, hold on, I hear you say.  What is omniscient? What is limited third person?  And why choose one over the other anyway?  Why not just do what I usually do?

 

            Third Person Point of View or POV is not a single point of view.  You may chose to use one of several third person points of view; Omniscient, Limited, Narrative, or pull back to Cinematic if it benefits your story.  And yes, every writer develops a fondness for a particular type of POV, but that it not a good reason to use it.  Each of the multiple POV voices has particular strengths and weaknesses.  Chose the voice that suits your story, and will add the most to it.  Point of View is a powerful tool.  Use it intentionally, rather than from habit. 

 

            Third Person Point of View:  She said, He said.

 

            Third person POV is the most common voice for fiction and nonfiction alike.  The author describes the characters, the scene, and the action.  The pronouns are he, she, and it.  Or the characters are referred to by their names or titles.  The teacher erased the board.  Mrs. Johnson stuck her head into the room and frowned.  “What are you doing here?” she scolded.  It is sometimes referred to as ‘narrative POV’, but actually, Narrative Third Person is only one of several types of Third Person POV.  Let’s look at all the forms that Third Person can take, when to use them, and why.

 

            Omniscient Third Person

 

            This is one of the two voices that most beginning writers start out with.  In omniscient third person, we simply skip from character to character, dropping into his or her POV as needed.  We know what Anne thinks in paragraph one, and we hear John’s thoughts in paragraph three.  On page, two, we ‘overhear’ Mrs. Gentry thinking about how she will break Anne and John up.   While this POV gives the reader the maximum information, it prevents the reader from becoming intimate with any one character and starting to care about that character.  Since the main power of fiction is the character who seems so real that his or her troubles matter to us, this sort of distancing POV can really get in the way of establishing a character bond.  However, if your story is strongly plot driven or in the literary genre, where character intimacy plays only an occasional role, then the omniscient POV can work.  However, for most genre and mainstream fiction, where you want your reader to care about your POV character, it is a weak voice to use.  As a rule of thumb, most of the time you are better off to stick to the thoughts and perceptions of a single character in short fiction, and two or three main characters in novel length fiction. 

 

 

            Narrative Third Person

 

            This is the other voice that is widely used by novice writers.   Here, the author tells the story, but without using the first person, ‘I’ voice.  Even though the author does not put himself/herself into the story directly, the characters and their actions are filtered through the author’s perceptions.  Take a look at the example below:

 

            Annie hurried into the living room as soon as she got home.  She had had a very nice day at school and was excited about her birthday party on the next day.  Her brother had promised to take her fishing and she was even more excited about that.  She called impatiently up the stairs when she didn’t find him waiting for her.

 

            Who is telling us about Annie?  The author.  Me.  I tell you  that Annie’s day was nice, and that she is excited about her birthday and the promised fishing trip.  I tell you  that she is impatient as she calls her brother.  The piece has a ‘fairy tale’ feel to it, a ‘once upon a time’ distance that keeps us from getting personally involved in the scene.  You  are not there with Annie.  You are sitting on the sofa as I, the author, who was there, tell us what she saw and heard.  You do not see Annie for yourselves.  This is also a weak voice if you want your readers to care about your characters or to be frightened or thrilled by your plot.  Clearly nothing bad can happen to us…someone is telling us a bedtime story.  The monster is not under our bed, it is safely stuck between the pages of a book.  If we want the reader to fall in love with Annie and ache for her difficult choices to come, that will be difficult to achieve.  As with the monsters, Annie is not sitting on the bed with us.  She is also stuck in those book pages and someone is telling us about her.

 

            However, this is a good voice to use if you intentionally want to distance your reader from the story.  If you are telling the history of a young Cambodian girl in a death camp, the details might be too awful for the average reader.  By ‘telling’ the reader about her ordeal, you erect a buffer that saves your readers from experiencing those horrors with her directly.  If the story is too strong for your readers, a narrative third person will weaken it. 

 

            Another reason to use the narrative third person is to strengthen a story that is inherently weak.  Your story might be a simple tale of a love triangle.  Been done a thousand times, ho hum.  But if you use a wry, tongue in cheek narrative voice, the humor might bring this been-done-before story to a fresh newness that really catches reader attention.  If your narrative voice does not add to your story, if it is nothing more than a running monologue, then do not use it.  If you the author are narrating a story, then you are a character in that story, just as a first person character is.  Even if you don’t participate directly in the story, your voice should make it more interesting to the reader than it would be on its own. 

 

 

            Limited Third Person

           

            This is the strongest and most flexible of the third person POVs.  In Limited Third, the reader is ‘limited’ to the perceptions of the Point of View character.  In other words, the scenes are described as if the reader is seeing through the POV character’s eyes, hearing with his/her ears, and able to overhear that character’s thoughts.  It is powerful because it allows the readers to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ events and to decide for themselves what is going on.  Let’s look at Annie’s arrival at home once more: 

 

            Annie skipped into the living room.  She got an A on her essay, an A!  Not even miss smartypants Miranda got an A. She twirled on one foot, only wobbling the tiniest bit.  Her birthday tomorrow with a chocolate cake and Mom had promised it would have three layers!  With flowers on it.  “Jeremy?  Jeremy!”  She swung from the banister.  “Where are you?” Up playing those stupid video games.  “We’re going fishing, remember?  You promised!   Hurry up!”

 

            So how does this differ from the first example?  All the same information is included: Annie gets home, she had a good day at school, she is excited about her birthday and the fishing trip, and she calls her brother impatiently.  How do we learn it?  Annie skips into the living room.  She is thinking about her A.  Clearly it was a good day.  Nobody told us that.  We guess it was, because of her pleasure at the A.  Her thoughts about the birthday cake with flowers on it lets us guess that she is looking forward to it, is excited about it.  That twirl on one toe rather confirms her happy, excited mood.  She calls Jeremy and seems annoyed when he doesn’t answer.  He’s playing those stupid video games.  “Hurry up,” she calls.  Clearly we can assume that she is impatient. 

 

            Both scenes give us exactly the same information. Which one seems more real to you?  Which one let you see the scene in your mind more clearly?   Notice that her thoughts are not in my voice and vocabulary, but are rather the type of sentence fragments that a young girl like Annie might actually think.   Because I use her vocabulary and voice, the thoughts and description seem to come through her perceptions rather than through mine.

           

            The strength of Limited Third is that it allows the readers to figure out what is going on for themselves, just as they do in real life.  This adds to the reality of your characters and your story.  Nobody whispers in our ears:  Annie was happy.  We figure it out by watching and listening to Annie.   If you mimic reality in your prose, your readers will forget that they are sitting on the sofa and begin to live the story along with your characters.

 

 

            Cinematic Third Person

 

            Finally we come to Cinematic Third Person.  What is this POV and how do we use it?   This is the ‘camera pan’ third person.  In Cinematic Third Person, we mimic the camera on the movie set.  We are in the POV of no character at all.  Rather, we have ‘dollied back’ to view the entire scene.  We have stepped off the stage and out into the movie seats.  We are watching the action up there on the screen.  We are not part of that action, we are outside it, looking at it.

 

            So when do we use this essentially distanced POV?  No, it would not be suitable for an entire book length work, or for most short stories.   Readers would find it difficult if not impossible to identify and care about any character here.  However, it is ideal for sweeping action scenes.  Let’s pretend our story is set at the Battle of Gettysburg.  If we are in one soldier’s POV, then what will we see?  Smoke, a blur of action, arms swinging swords, horses rearing, the chaos of battle as seen from the field.  Now this can make a powerful scene.  But what if that is not what we need here?  What if we need to let the reader see the entire battle, all the various small skirmishes going on across that huge field?   If  we slip into the POV of one of the Generals, yes, we’ll see more, but we probably can’t see the entire battle, and maybe the General isn’t a POV character in this story.  Suddenly using his POV is going to confuse the readers.  

 

            Instead, we’ll pull back, back, until we see the entire battle spread out before us.  Now we can see the General, the soldier struggling amidst the horses, swords, and rifle smoke.  We’ll see the enemy cavalry gathering for a charge beyond the distant trees, and the woman hurrying along the road from the nearby village, determined to be there to find her lost brother.  From our Cinematic perspective, we can see everything, all at once.  This is a useful technique for describing battle scenes, large acts of nature such as earthquakes, or any other huge action scene were one human pair of eyes is too limited to take it all in. 

 

 

            Choose Wisely

 

            Third person is not a single Point of View, clearly.  Each of the Third Person POVs has its own strengths and its weaknesses.  Before you begin to write, stop and take a close look at what you are doing.  Which POV will work best for this story?  If you are going to use the narrative third, is your voice strong enough to add to the story?  Is your plot the driving force for this story?  Will it matter that you distance your characters though the narrative voice? 

 

            Or is it character identification that drives your story?  If we need to care about the characters, maybe a Limited Third Person is the best choice.  Let the characters act out the story.  We’ll figure it out, and those characters will become real to us.  You’ll bring us to the edge of our seats as we hold our breaths, hoping that they succeed.

 

            Is this a strongly plot driven story, where the characters simply move the plot forward?  Do we need to know what everyone thinks?  Is it critical to the story?   Then the Omniscient POV may be your best choice, although it is more difficult to write a strong plot-driven story than it is to write a strong character story. 

 

            Do we need to see the big picture, does a human pair of eyes limit us?  Then let’s drop into Cinematic Third Person for the battle scene, or the storm, or the avalanche. 

 

            For most fiction, the limited third person is usually the best choice, since it allows us to know and become intimate with the main character(s).  Narrative third, where the author actively tells the story, is a second alternative, although a strong narrative voice is a must.  Remember…your voice needs to add to the story.  Omniscient is rarely a good choice.  Occasionally a strongly plot driven story will benefit from this POV, but only rarely.  And Cinematic POV is useful in limited circumstance…where we need to see, but we don’t want to limit ourselves to a single human perception.  It rarely works in a story from beginning to end. 

 

            Choose according to your story’s needs, and you’ll improve your writing enormously.