Third Person writing has two variations, Limited and Omniscent.

Third Person Omniscent is, basically, God-Cam. Many people don't think of themselves as God. But as the Writer you are the God of the universe you create in your writing. Your decisions decide what happens, who lives or dies, even what color shirts your characters wear. In Third Person Omniscent you can reveal anything and everything about your characters, be it their dreams, thoughts, actions. You can jump from character to character, showing the thoughts of every character in a scene. You can show any moment in the past or the future. You can insert into a scene events that occur a thousand miles away.

A third person omniscent narrative looks like this:

"It took Marcus two months to crawl through the desert. Every day he worked on his rage, using it to drive him onward. He scrounged for moisture under every rock, sometimes digging down through the ground for several feet, until his hands were raw. During the same two months Marcia, miles away, slowly began to lose hope. For the first week she waited by the city gate every day, hoping and praying Marcus would walk through. But by the end of the month she would just check with the city guard who closed the gate each day. On the same day General Xerxes' army was overrunning the city of Thera, thousands of miles away, Marcia finally admitted Marcus was lost. If only she had known that a day later Marcus would stagger up to the gate."

A limited third person narrator would be forced to show a scene from the point of view of just one character at a time. But there are advantages to it too. It allows the writer a degree of distance. Imagine how hard it would be to write a first person viewpoint of a mother watching her only child being stabbed and slowly bleed to death! But a third person limited viewpoint not only provides the writer (and reader) with enough emotional distance to describe it calmly, but it allows an "immediate" occurance. While a first person narration has to be narrated "later on" a third person limited narrator can describe, as they said in the movie Spaceballs, what is happening "now now." Everything you write is happening "now" while "then" occurred earlier; however you have the option of making "then" "now." Got that?

While a third person omniscent narrator can describe the same thing, the narrator is always there. You always see events from the narrator's point of view. You are always outside events, looking in. With a limited perspective you have a sense of immediacy, you get very close to the viewpoint characters, you see their thoughts and know everything they know, and no more. But the viewpoint character is not telling the story, and thus not a constant reminder that the character survived and is looking back on events from the future. This allows a great sense of uncertainty and a great deal of drama to your writing.

To sum up (and I once again must give the credit to Orson Scott Card):

1. First-Person and Omniscent narrations are by nature more presentational than a limited third-person narration. Readers will be constantly aware of the narrator. If the goal is to get readers emotionally involved with the characters with minimal distraction, a limited third-person perspective may be best. However if you are writing humor, a first-person or omniscent narration can help create comic distance.

2. An Omniscent Narrator allows brevity. An Omniscent Narrator can rapidly span great distances or cover great periods of time, with many characters, without the need to write hundreds or thousands of pages.

3. First-person narrations feel more "factual" and less fictional.

4. The limited third-person narrative style is best for someone uncertain of their ability as a writer while being confident of the strength of the story. It allows a plain tale to be plainly told, cleanly and unobtrusively.

Which style you choose is up to you. But the most important thing is to be consistent in whatever narrative style you do choose. Failing to be consistent can ruin the reader's suspension of disbelief, and nothing will ruin your story faster.



Again, this is adapted from Characters & Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card, c.1988 from Writer's Digest Books. ISBN 0-89879-927-9.