Elements of Fiction Writing - Characters & Viewpoint

by Orson Scott Card

limited third person is the best. It combines the flexibility of omniscience with the intensity of the first person. It’s also an easier choice for a beginning writer, partly because it doesn’t require the same level of mastery of the language, and partly because it will simply be more familiar and therefore feel more “natural” to writers who have grown up in a literary community where limited third person predominates. (This is also the best reason for avoiding present tense; except for the academic/literary genre, present tense is very uncommon and so feels surprising, distracting, and “unnatural”; the more common past tense feels natural and invisible. Ironically, this makes past tense feel more immediate while present tense feels more distant; most readers are more likely to feel that a past-tense story is happening “now” than a present-tense story.)