Let's Talk About: Point of View, part 6

theticklishpear:

Last time I finished up with second person; today we’ll tackled third. Third person point of view narration is the most commonly used, though it’s more complex than most people think. There are two distinct subsets of third person—omniscient and limited—but did you know there are subsets of these? Have you heard of psychic distance? It’s an integral idea to third person that many beginning and intermediate writers haven’t heard of. Let’s take this slow.

The question to ask yourself is: Do you need your reader to hear the thoughts of more than one character all in the same scene?

If your answer is yes, the third person omniscient POV may be for you.

Do you want some distance between your character and the audience?

If your answer is yes, the third person limited POV may be for you.

Third Person Point of View:
he, his; she, hers; they, their’s perspective

This POV features a narrator who relates the actions, reactions, and sometimes thoughts of the characters. Often thought of as the default perspective, third person is the most common point of view authors employ.

Fun fact: Omniscient means all-knowing, originating from the Latin “omnis" meaning "all" and "sciens" meaning "knowing." Often used to refer to gods.

Since narrators aren’t characters, they aren’t restricted to the thoughts an actions of one character like the character-narrator of first person. This means that the narrator for a third person omniscient POV can portray everything (or rather, everything pertaining to the scene) all in the same scene. There’s no need for scene or chapter breaks. This differs from the third person limited and first person multi-character restriction. With first person or third person limited multi-character narration (where you have the limited points of view of various characters), a chapter break is required to start the new POV character.

When an author wants to have multi-character narration without being restricted to chapter breaks or the limited POV, the third person omniscient narration POV comes in handy. All you, as the author, need to be sure of is that each character has their own paragraph. While you don’t need the severe chapter break, you need to differentiate which character is having the thought. It may look something like this:

The door of the tavern screamed as a man stumped in with an old, wrinkled cape wrapped about him. Aleria scowled. He couldn’t have come in like a normal person? She wondered, Why does he always have to make a scene?
Durn glanced up at the door from the picked over pieces of his chicken. Just like Emerett to come sweeping in, he thought, chuckling. He waved to their final companion. “Here!”

A slightly more specific subset of the omniscient third person is the universal omniscient. This narrating POV can see and tell the reader literally everything. Unlike the regular old omniscient narrator who can tell the audience everything about what the characters are thinking in one location at a time, the universal omniscient can tell the audience about anything and the thoughts of anybody taking place anywhere. The universal omniscient narrator could tell a reader about a mouse in the sewer halfway across the world from the characters who happens to pick up your demon virus and brings it directly into the character’s city.

Next time I’ll tell you about some of the problems that plague third person omniscient narration and some tips on how to alleviate them.