First, second, and third person
Reader Charles writes to ask:
“Hey what POV is your book FROSTBORN: THE GRAY KNIGHT, I think it’s first person.”
FROSTBORN: THE GRAY KNIGHT is actually in third person limited.
What does that mean?
Third-person limited is when all the pronouns of the point of view character are in third person – “He walked into the room and opened the door” and so forth. First person is written using the first person pronoun. “I walked into the room and opened the door.”
Second person is the second-person pronoun. “You walk into the room and open the door.” That tends to get used more in computer games than in books.
The difference between third-person limited and third-person omniscient is that limited sticks only to the POV of a particular character. Like, in my GHOSTS books, when I’m writing from Caina’s point of view, we’re restricted to seeing things through her eyes. We don’t automatically know what the other characters are thinking. I very often use a rotating third-person limited POV, where we start with one character and switch to the POV of another.
Third-person omniscient ignores that, and switches back and forth between the thoughts of different characters within a scene. There’s nothing wrong with that, and some of the best writers have done it – Agatha Christie and JRR Tolkien, for instance. Like, the famous scene in THE TWO TOWERS when Sam confronts Shelob, it’s in third-person omniscient, and the POV shifts freely between Sam, Gollum, and Shelob.
That said, third-person omniscient is a lot harder to do well than third-person limited, so most writers tend to stick to third-person limited.
So most writers tend to stick to either first person or third person omniscient. Some genres tend towards one or the other, though there are no hard and fast rules. Epic fantasy tends towards third person omniscient, while urban fantasy, romance, and mystery often (but not always) use first person.
-JM
Third person limited is a lot more fun for me as a (your) narrator, because it offers the chance for the straight narration to take more of point-of-view approach. For instance, if the character is pensive and they put down a mug, I try to impart the overall mood or emotions into those smallest of actions. Or during large-scale scenes; say, for example, battles from the Frostborn series that take place from Gavin’s point of view. Even though Gavin has been through many such battles and has suffered tremendous heartache and tragedy in his life, he’s a very, very young man who is still innocent about many things in the world and is still learning the ways of the sword. Thus, he can be quite overwhelmed by the scope of things. I try to impart those feelings into the action. (Even moreso for my beloved Jerome in the Dragonskull series! You know I have a narrator crush on him, LOL.) Those are just two small examples. It’s a technique that I latched onto when I started narrating Romance novels early in this career, and it stuck with me to where I’ve since applied it to every genre. But I think, hope, feel, that this helps the listeners identify – or sympathize or empathize or commiserate – more readily with the characters, and live inside their heads.
In reading as a hobby, I’ve grown to dislike third person omniscient for those very reasons, as it tends to pull me out of the human interest, especially when the transitions are clunky.
Perhaps a better example would be that Cloak Games was all in Nadia’s point of view, in the first person.
In Cloak Mage, we get Nadia’s scenes in first-person, but we also get scenes in third-person from other people’s viewpoint, albeit rather tight third-person.
Rather than leave “tight” hanging there undefined, OR typing a bunch of stuff for a second time, I will just dump this:
https://writingandreflections.substack.com/p/what-is-seen-and-what-is-said