Point of View–Third Person

I assume that most people who read this will already know about the three different points of view. That said, most people don’t know much about them other than that first person is told from a character’s perspective, no one should use the second person ever, and the third person uses a narrator, either inside or outside the story. This information is all true, but it doesn’t tell us much about how to write from any of these perspectives. Without thinking about it, most writers default to the third person, erring on the side of omniscience. This is a habit, and like any habit, it should be broken, or at least harnessed so that it is only used in the situations that call for it. I’m starting with third person mostly so I can point out  the common pitfalls I have seen writers fall into when they use it carelessly.

First, why do writers default to the third person? For some, it enables them to use their own voice to tell the story, rather than a particular character’s. This saves them the effort of having to really understand their characters at a complex level, in order to understand how their character would tell their own story. Also, I think writer’s drift towards the third person because it gives them greater freedom to tell their story from multiple vantage points. Lastly, people drift towards the third person because it is the point of view of film, where we can’t literally see through the eyes of another. I think that writers have a tendency to think of stories from the perspective of film, because it is a convenient and common, modern type of storytelling.

All in all, none of these things are necessarily bad. That said, the real benefits of this perspective are often neglected, and when an alternative point of view might serve the story better, writers are reluctant to use it because they have not practiced any form other than third person.