Points of View

[Mary]

Stories are written in points of view. Writers choose them for all sorts of reasons, readers dislike them for all sorts of reasons, they each have their strengths and weaknesses.

Do you particularly like any? Dislike any? Have examples of fine work?

To give some terminology up front, the usual three (and one oddball cousin that nevertheless keeps appearing in fiction):
First person: A character in a tale is telling it.
Limited third: It's told by a narrator outside the story, but the narrator only has knowledge of one character's thoughts and feelings internally -- or at least only one per scene.
Omniscient: a narrator is telling it, and knows everything about everyone.
Epistolary: the oddball cousin. Told as an assembly of fictional documents. Letters are common, so are diary entries, but anything -- police reports, newspaper articles, classified ads -- goes.

[Sarah]

One thing that I've noticed is how 3rd person omniscient used to be common and possibly even the norm. Now people are taught not to use it and I have to admit that I find it annoying. The interesting thing about it is that when it's used in older books it doesn't bother me. It's almost like there's something that's hard to define that made it okay 50 years ago but not so much now.

[Sarah]

This discussion is being combined with another over here: Book Tense & POV.