Third Person POV

In All Its Forms

November 11, 2008

 

Mary Rosenblum:  Hello, all!  I thought I'd talk about third person POV today for our Lunchbox Forum. This is a complex POV with a lot of different forms and it confuses the heck out of many novice writers.   In it's simplest form, third person POV is simply the use of he, she, or the character’s name to designate the character  He ran to the store. She made the bed. Carolyn fixed breakfast.  

 So the author is describing the scene instead of letting the character describe it as we do with first person.   However, this is the POV that can create the strongest sense of the reader actually participating in the scene.  So it tends to be used a lot in fiction where action and adventure important.   And third person comes in a number of 'flavors'. We have:

limited third person POV

·         omniscient third person POV

·         narrative third person POV

·         cinematic third person POV

Confused yet? That's why I'm doing this forum.  Each POV has its own strengths and weaknesses.   need to choose the right version of third person for your story.  Or your personal narrative.  

Let's start with limited third person POV.  This is the POV that essentially seats your readers inside the head of the POV character.   The readers only know what the POV character hears, sees, touches, tastes, smells, and thinks. Nothing else.  If the bad guy is behind our POV and that character can't see him, neither can the readers.  The narrative distance...the distance between the POV character and where you have to 'stand' in order to see what the author is describing is zero. There is no distance between readers and character. They all perceive the scene the same.  This is a very effective POV for letting your readers live the adventure you're creating and is used in fantasy, suspense, mystery, and SF.  

Omniscient POV is used a lot by novice writers....unfortunately!  This is where the author puts us into the heads of all the characters on stage as needed.   We hop from Candy's thoughts and perspective, to George's, to Andrew's and back to Candy's.   While this can seem attractive and is tolerated in romance where the author wants the readers to know what each character thinks of the other in the romantic scenes, it weakens your reader connection to the characters enormously.   Readers engage with characters by sharing that character's thoughts, perspective, emotions. When you constantly shift from one head to the other, we never get time to establish that intimate bond with any one person, to engage. So we end up seeing all the characters as cartoon figures, even though we have lots of information about what they are thinking.  So you sacrifice reader engagement for information.   Now this CAN work, but it works best in very plot driven stories where the characters CAN be cartoon characters.  That's a hard story to pull of well, but not impossible. Douglas Adams' Hitch hiker books were highly plot driven, the characters were hardly deep and richly developed and they were not only a HUGE romp to read, they were best sellers.   If you can make it work, it can work very well. Is it easy to make it work? No, not at all.   So in our omniscient POV, you have increased the narrative distance a bit, simply because we're hopping around from head to head, not really engaged with any one character.

 Let's move on to Narrative third.   Here, you are pulling the readers off the stage and out into the audience.   In narrative third, the author tells the story. This is the most common form of third person I see from novice writers. They may choose a single POV character, but they tell the readers everything that is going on.  If you read a scene and ask yourself 'where do I have to stand to see everything that is happening' you'll find that you're off stage, seeing everything.  Now you do see the bad guy with the knife creeping up on the main character.   The author is telling the story.   Again, this can be made to work It works best where you do not have a main character that readers want to engage with.   Maybe you're telling a 'come uppance' story, where the strength of the story is how two rather unlikeable characters get their just desserts.  We don't really want to engage with someone we don't like, so we're happy to stand back, let the author tell the story, and enjoy the little moral lesson that the characters get.   Fairy tales are a prime example of narrative third person.   Once upon a time a little girl had a lovely red cape that she was so proud of....  The author is telling us a bedtime story. We're not expected to identify with Little Red Riding Hood or learn from her. We're content to watch the story that the author tells.  You see it in literary fiction where again, the readers expect to stand back from the characters and observe them rather than 'be' them.  It works well only where ...as with omniscient third...reader identification with the characters is not important. That is, it will not work at all well with character driven fiction.  I see a lot of is a story that is essentially designed to be a character driven story, but the narrative third distances the readers so much that the character never becomes real enough to make the story work.  

Finally, we have cinematic third person POV.   This is when you become a camera panning across a scene.  You describe only action, you include no thoughts what so ever. You are a camera only.  This can be very effective for the portrayal of violence, where you need to give readers a bit of safe distance from the gore. It is very effective with large battle scenes where no one single POV is going to see everything that you need to show your readers.  It is used a lot in prologues, where you want to whet your readers' curiosity about forthcoming events, but you can't give too much away. The cinematic third allows you to hide any character knowledge that might let your readers guess too much too soon.  It can be effective in, say, mystery, where you want to show your readers some clues but not too many. Again, but staying out of the head of, say, the villain, we will see that person's actions, but we are not able to access the knowledge that will explain too much to us at that point.  

 So all these forms of third person are useful in the right context. The problem is that novice writers can't really distinguish between them at first and thus will tend to use the wrong type of third person for the story. Choices are important for personal narratives, too.  Here we are dealing with real events that are being written with the techniques of fiction.  First person tends to be the 'safest' POV here...it reminds the readers that I, the author, am telling you about my life. But sometimes you are telling a story that happened to family or friend and 'I' isn't going to work. You were not there.  Here, a 'limited third' POV is going to be a mistake. If you put the readers into the head of the character, it's going to feel like fiction. How can you know exactly what this person was thinking? You don't, really. So you're much better off to use a narrative third person POV and include the occasional aside as you, the author, comments to the readers.
JuliaB:  So it's okay to mix and match these povs? I thought you had to stick to one.

Mary Rosenblum: Julia, it's fine to mix and match with a novel.   Just as you can switch POV from chapter to chapter, you can switch the type of POV you're using.  Say you are in the POV of your amateur sleuth in a mystery novel. In Chapter Four, you decide to show us someone sneaking around. So for Chapter Four we see this shadowy figure doing something that suggests a clue.

JuliaB:  Okay, but for short stories, there's not that much time to change.

Mary Rosenblum: And exactly, Julia, in a short story, this would be much much more difficult to pull off.

JuliaB:  That makes sense.

Mary Rosenblum: You don't have a lot of time and words to engage your readers with a single character, so switching POV in any form is going to cost you.   Yes, it CAN work, not it is not EASY to make it work.   The one you should probably avoid most of the time is omniscient.   That tends to be a very weak POV in the best of circumstance.  are hurling your readers from head to head like a baseball. They get whiplash.  

The less narrative distance you have, the stronger your characterization will tend to be.  If your story is very character driven, if it depends on our caring about the POV character, go for limited third.  If it's more plot driven, if information is more important than a strong character connection, you can use more narrative and thus feed the readers more information.  Since a limited third person POV includes ONLY what the POV knows and perceives through his/her senses, you have to be clever about how you reveal necessary information to your readers, especially if you don't want your POV to have that knowledge! That can get very tricky, but nobody said writing is easy and that's your job as writer.  In limited third, you have to reveal information through action, dialogue, and your POV's thoughts.   In narrative third you, the author, can slip in information, too.  This is why so many novice writers use narrative third. It’s the 'easy' way to give information to the readers and most novice writers feel that they have to give readers way more information than is really necessary. Spoon feeding the readers and thus needing to rely on narrative third is something that nearly every novice writer suffers from at the start.

So, to review:

·         Limited third person: inside the POV character's head, you only perceive what that character perceives through his/her senses or thinks about.

·         Omniscient third: You hop from head to head as needed so that we know what everybody is thinking. Bad idea, almost always.

·         Narrative third: You, the author tell the story, adding needed information as necessary. This is almost always done badly by novice writers, but it can work. Think fairy tale voice, though.

·         Cinematic third person: You are a camera, recording only what a camera would record -- no thoughts, only visual action as viewed from a specific distance.

Questions? Have I totally overwhelmed you all? (I hope not!)

JuliaB:  No, actually it seems pretty clear to me.
Gail:  I have a very convoluted question...

Mary Rosenblum:  Good, Julia. What is it, Gail?
Gail:  My novel is written in Ltd-3rd P/POV (from the viewpoint of the two main characters.)   However, in the epilogue it is revealed the "narrator" is actually a descendent. In a novel, it is better change POV at chapters rather scenes within the chapter.  Will this "allow" my use of an occasion chapter written in the Narr. POV?

Mary Rosenblum:   Gail, you can run into trouble this way if you don't define a narrator for the readers right away.  Your narrative intrusions will seem to be just that...narrative intrusions.  If we start the book with a clear sense that somebody is telling this story, you can segue into the limited third for most of your scenes.   Just be sure to make a clear transition back to that narrator when he/she takes the stage. That curiosity...'who is telling this story?'...can be a nice plus factor. But if you don't make it clear that 'someone' is talking, you can confuse readers as you go from limited third to narrative third. Does this answer your question?

Gail:  I see...would it be better to begin with a brief prologue to introduce the narrator... or, would it be better to eliminate the narrator altogether and just keep the POV limited to the two main chars.?

Mary Rosenblum:   I don't think that's necessary, Gail, but I would make that first chapter a very clear narrative voice. I think you can, as I said, gain a lot from that reader curiosity about who's talking, as long as you satisfy it at the end.  As to which is the best way, that depends on your story.   You may need more information than you can easily supply through a limited third POV.  Try it both ways and see.

Sunshine:  What is the difference between lst person and limited 3rd person?

Mary Rosenblum:    Sunshine you asked a VERY good question.   Really strong third person limited is as much character voice as first person, but you are not as limited by the rigid requirements of actual first person.  A first person narrator will NOT tell us anything that he/she doesn't notice, doesn't care about, or doesn't want us to know.   But in limited third, we can sneak peeks at his thoughts so we know what he knows even if he would 't tell us if he had the option.   But by casting the narrative into your character's vocabulary and voice, it will FEEL like first person, we'll really feel that we ARE that character.

Yarnsome:  Do we need to use the same POV each time a character is on stage? Like ltd 3rd for one character every time you use his POV? And narrative POV for another character, whenever you switch to his POV?

Mary Rosenblum:    Yarn, I would mix limited third and cinematic rather than narrative third if you're going to mix POV types in a novel or long story. But no, you can change. Say you're using limited third POV for your main character, but briefly, you want us to see that person's actions from a distance for some reason. You could switch to cinematic there.  You'd need a very good reason to do so. Remember... and here's one of the few 'always' I'm going to give you....the story ALWAYS comes first.  Does that switch in POV really benefit the story or is it just easier for you?

Yarnsome:  Thanks. I wasn't sure if there would be reader identification issues if I changed the character's POV. It sounds like you're saying only do it if it is best for the story.

Mary Rosenblum:    That's exactly what I'm saying Yarn. Often, what I see is a switch to narrative because the author thinks 'oh, my reader need to know this now' and so they just tell the readers. But you can find other ways to let readers discover that information through action and dialogue and thus maintain your limited third.
Writing4Me:  If Omniscient is used for romance, and switching character is limited would it be okay to use Omniscient? Would limited third be good for romance?

Mary Rosenblum:    Writing, you see a lot of omniscient in romance, but there is also a...pardon me all your romance people...a very high tolerance for weak writing in the genre.  Which is why a lot of pro writers use pen names when they write romance.  Now there is a tradition of alternating POV between male and female POV so that readers find out what each thinks of the other. But I suggest you're better off doing that at the scene break. You are nearly always better off to do it at a scene break. No matter how clear you are in your POV switch mid-scene, you're going to lose some readers and force them to reread.  It's tempting to switch from head to head when you have two POV characters in a novel and they're both in a scene at the same time. Personally, I find it very awkward to ignore one POV character while sticking to the POV of the other character, but it's one of those 'grit your teeth and do it' moments.

KMart:  Do you have some titles that we could look at to see exactly what you described?

Mary Rosenblum:    I’m trying to think of titles that most people have read or can easily get from the library, let's see what I can come up with.   Let's look at Tolkien. He does mostly a subtle narrative third with lots of limited third scenes.  He almost has to use narrative third considering the huge wealth of world information he's getting to us.   Orson Scott Card, in his early 'Ender' books used a very strong limited third POV.   Ender's Game is a great example. You are in this kid's head all the way through the book.  Any fairy tale is an example of narrative where the authorial voice tells the story.  Cinematic  third is mostly used for specific scenes.  I can't think of an entire book done in that form.

Well, I hope this helped. I'll post the transcripts in the usual place: Writing Craft: Forum Transcript.  You all have a good week and I'll see you Sunday at our casual chat!