I also base my ideas on Characters and Viewpoint by OSC and on the definitions given in The Writer’s Encyclopedia by Writers Digest Books, plus information from a recent copy of Writer’s Digest on Mastering POV.

First Person---grammatical use of I and we. The story is told through one character’s eyes. Author vice is not used and the reader can only know what the POV character knows, sees or hears about. Straight forward easy to understand.

Second Person---grammatical use of you also using I. It is a first person narrator that talks to the reader trough the use of the word you. You know that day is going to go bad when a bird does its thing on you head as soon as you walk out the door. Have you ever had a day like that?

Then we get into the whole Third Person mess. Which shouldn’t be a mess, but seems to be.

There is Third Person Limited --- This uses grammatical he, she, it, they. But it is like first person. The reader sees through one character’s eyes. Each time you switch POV character you need a clear break. A scene change or a chapter break. You cannot switch POV character in mid-scene. There are different degrees here of limited—but I am talking basics here.

Third Person Unlimited (this is the much misused and overstated and mangled Omniscient). The narrator is for all purposes GOD. It uses grammatical he, she, it, they, but the reader is given all the character’s thoughts, motivations, feelings and reasons. The reader will even get the gate guards thoughts as the main character’s cross the threshold. It is also called the all knowing. Now you can have a Omniscient narrator that states thoughts and actions---Author Voice, without showing the feelings.

I have seen Limited third Omniscient throw out, I have seen Omniscient used as a bird’s eye view as if the story were being told by a person watching a TV show that has no idea who the characters are or what any of them think or feel. (Bird’s Eye style) and bunch of other terms that mix and match in a mess of disorder.

So, I thought I would throw this out here and see what everyone else thinks. Am I missing the boat somewhere? What is Third Limited Omniscient? Where did this Bird’s Eye one come from? (A scene like this---Two people waked out of the store. One wore a blue shirt and the other wore a red shirt. The in the red shirt ---blah blah—and you never get names until they call each other by name and then it seems to switch to Omniscient)

My pennies worth.

Shawn

We have the standard 3 groups:
1. The narrator(s) - 1st person
2. The audience - 2nd person
3. The character(s) - 3rd person

Any group (even the reader) can be singular or plural from the narrator's perspective. The narrator can refer (or just consider) the audience as a single person or as a group.

How much does each group know about the other groups?

How does that effect the story?

Not a rhetorical question now - actually asking.

Nothing bad in iventing terms or using new techniques than the stardard ones!

I've used many methods when I write. 1st Person POV. 3rd Person Cinema-Like. 3rd Person Limited. 3rd Person Limited to Some Characters. 3rd Person Limited to a Group of People. 3rd Person Limited to One Person with Glipses of a Hidden Character's Thoughts (in brankets). I like variety --gives you food for thinking.

So, you may do whatever you want as far as writing goes--but I wonder if it will sell that way. How many books or stories can you name that are done outside the bounds of a traditional POV?

Just some thoughts--but if you sent a submission in on onion skin paper what would you expect? Rejection for sure. Everyone knows that you need good paper or else. Ridiculous to send it in on that sort of paper.

But hey, I wanted to do it my way and the heck with the "rules".

<shrug>

My point is that it seems that many writers write whatever they want and however they want and then explain it away. Bad grammar gets the same treatment—labeled “that’s my style.” I speak at young writer’s conferences, the last one I did was the May 2001 Young Author’s Conference in Kaiserslautern Germany, one of the biggest things that I get asked is if spelling, grammar and the “rules” really matter.

My answer, only if you want to get published.

I’m not trying to be confrontational---thought I realize it sounds that way. But lately I have seen a very sloppy trend in this area—especially as it pertains to POV and grammar. Just what is third limited omniscient? No idea.

Third person omniscant limited is basically third person.(my pre-hs education deprives me of some of the particulars of literary jargon). However, the difference is that third-person omniscant limited can only see what the characters can see (would this just be called 3rd person limited then?). This also allows the author to place the reader in the minds of everyone in the scene. You cannot however point out a nuclear chain reaction (a la "The Sum of All Fears"). If there is a better name for this (which I'm sure there is) please tell me and I'll use it.

the Great Uberslacker
BTW, I'm not saying I'm right, I'm telling you what I know of. If someone wants to tell me I'm an idiot go ahead, I might learn something. (Just don't hurt my poor self-esteem to bad)

If somebody writes a story that has no point, a rough style, follows no understandable timeline, and has bad grammar and spelling to boot, I don't want to even waste my time with it. It's not worth reading because there is no idea clearly expressed in it. The same goes for movies. I don't know how many movies I consider an utter waste of time because the director didn't know how to put two clips of film together and have them mean anything.

Now, given those rules, there's something to be said for breaking them, to an extent. As I've not read a lot of rule-breaking literature (it tends to tick me off) bear with me while I use film examples.

Take a look at 'Out of Sight'. Personally, I loved that movie, and I haven't met a lot of people who didn't. Steven Sodergergh is a director who has learned well how to follow the traditional rules of film. But in this movie, his timeline is all wacky, his flashbacks aren't always clear about where they start and end, He shows us characters' 'imagination' sequences without explaining them, and he tosses in freeze-frames in seemingly random places.

So . . . what's the point? This guy knows how to play by the rules. Look at Erin Brockovich, that was a pretty straightforward film whose only really daring quality was the subject matter. (BTW, that film would have been MUCH worse without Thomas Newman's soundtrack! TN ROCKS!)

Out of Sight, on the other hand, breaks almost every rule in the book. There are no traditional character roles & stereotypes, there is what on the surface appears to be a frighteningly blatant case of 'deus ex machina' (Bob slipping on the steps) and those damn freeze-frames in the middle of the love scene are CERTAINLY not standard film fare. (BTW, I really like those freeze-frames. If anybody wants to know why, feel free to ask, and I'll explain my thoughts.)

But Mr. Soderergh, having learned how to play by the rules, knows how to break them effectively. He breaks them in ways that are startling, sometimes even shocking, but he uses that discomfort we feel to make a point, or an impression.

The point is . . . if you haven't learned to play by the rules, then you will have no idea how to break them effectively, and yes there are good and bad ways to break the rules. What comes across is that you're sloppy, because you are, and lazy, because you haven't even tried to write something good. You're expecting your readers to do all the work without doing any yourself. That's a very selfish way to tell a story.

But, when you can take the jarring sensation that your reader feels upon stumbling across those broken rules, and make that a part of the impression your story makes, without alienating your reader in the process, then you can break any rule you want to your heart's content.

The 3rd limited Omn. That is 3rd limited. You can choose one character to tell the story through or more, but you don't tell about the bug on the wall, or the sunset no one saw. You can only see through the eyes of the character seeing the scene.

And I agree very strongly with the --- you can't break the rules until you know them--inside and out.

Both reading and personal experiance have led me to that one.

Third person one. We are limited to description of physical objects and actions that would be noticable from a camera or peephole. We cannot read minds, feel emotions, or see things that would not be ordinarially visible, like a thrombosis forming in a varicose vein. This is the form that most movies, perforce, use.

Third person two. We are limited to viewing the action around a given character, into whose thoughts and perceptions we can also see. We are aware of everything that the character is aware of, but nothing else except for things that may be seen or felt by the character but not consciously noted. This differs from first person mainly in gammatical person and literary convention (i.e. the convention of having first person accounts being presented as a later retelling of the events of the story by the POV character). This is the form I favor.

Third person three. This is a common form, where the narrator freely chooses what to tell the reader. The feelings and thoughts of characters present in any scene, or even of characters not present in a scene, as well as events in the past or the future are fair game as well. The sole criterion for inclusion is literary effect, and that is at the discretion of the author (the narrative may also profess that something is unknown or unknowable even if it is not, for literary effect). Many great works of literature, and many more (possibly most) bad ones, are written in this person.

Third person four. The narrator knows everything, and is under constraint by the rules of this format to reveal everything that has an effect on the story. As I said before, Tom Clancy is a good example of this style. The only limitations are that the events are related in a logical order. This is usually chronological, but could be methodological (tracing related causal event threads back and forth, according to how the events connect rather than in what order they occur) or spatiological (tracing either towards or away from the epicenter of the climactic action). Full Omniscient is actually fairly rare in fiction, and is more often used when presenting a comprehensive theory reconstructing actual events in an attempt to definitively explain them.

The other main option for fiction is first person. I would put these into several catagories as well, though I do not believe that there is a set convention for catagorizing such accounts, so I will label them just as I please.

Artificial Document, or Journalistic. In this form, the first person account is framed as a series of letters, journal entries, or reports putatively created by the POV character.

Personal Narrative. In this case, the first person account is framed as being recalled and told later, either as a memoir or cathartic account. It absolutely requires that the POV character survive the events of the story in some way able to relate the narrative later (one interesting story I read was written in two parts, the first told to a cyborg that wanted her to relate the narrative so as to be able to completely erase her memories of the events of the story, the second apphended as a justification for her actions in later deactivating this same cyborg, who was the leader of her society). For purposes of this form, survival includes survival as a ghost or angel, so long as the POV character is able to later relate the events of the story.

Informal or internal conversation. This form assumes that the POV character is in the habit of talking to themselves about what they are doing all the time. I find it an unconvincing format, and belive that it is usually used by persons that would be better served by writing in third person strict limited Omniscient, but it does have its own literary merits. It can be successfully used to help an author construct a self-justifying character that does bad things without facing the fact that they are bad. It also can produce publishable material, but because the constant self-justification that attends this use of the form, the material produced is not cheerful (thinking of something by Dostoyevsky, though that was actually cast in Journalistic mode). An alternative is to have the narrative cast as an internal conversation with a person that the character believes is watching them and can read the character's mind, God or a guardian angel, for instance. Or in SF, perhaps a telepath or cybernetically linked audience. In the latter cases, this might technically count as a Personal Narrative rather than an Informal use of first person, since you are making it explicit that the narrative is being passed on while the character is still able to do so. But if you have the person believing that they are being heard but do not evoke the reality of the intended recipient, then it is a clever use of internal conversation rather than a Personal Narrative.

For instance, the Lord of the Rings is presented as a transmited epic narrative, as are the Earthsea books of LeGuin. In them, the thoughts and feelings of various characters are accepted as interpolations (from other sources) or speculations, even where they are not specifically presented as such. Of course, Tolkein and LeGuin take different tacks in creating the feel of a transmitted narrative. Tolkein makes use of "source" material, "earlier versions" and "histories" and so forth that he had previously invented. LeGuin simply leaves frequent explicit references to the story being an epic story (this is a story of before he [Ged] did such and such that is told in the Deed of Ged and so forth) retold by herself (I don't know whether she actually did any extensive invention of background sources, such as writing an actual "Deed of Ged", though she certainly might have). But they both clearly are different from stories that are not so clearly marked "long ago and far away." The inclusion or exclusion of material (along with language and other devices) is chosen to heighten that effect.

On the other hand we have books like Catch 22 where POV isn't important as a means of creating a feeling that the story has been assembled from existing sources or anything like that. In fact, the POV is terrible, in some important scenes simply wandering in and out of peoples heads with no attempt to make sense of what is happening from any one person's POV. In all, I would say that the POV is used freely to try and convey the senselessness of these men's lives (I think that MMM Major's wife has a POV at some point, but I'm not sure and I'm not going to read the book right now to find out) and the lack of any higher level order to what is going on around them. Except that I'm not sure that this is a conscious decision and not simply a failure to maintain a coherent POV .

One problem is that this general format is very common in how we tell stories informally in which we are not major participants (you know, "Susan was going to the market the other day and she met Ralph, but he was still mad at her because of what Carol told him, and Susan didn't know that Carol told him that so she was just flustered at him for being so rude and all"). We commonly guess at what people are thinking and feeling and then present those guesses as givens without tagging them as inferences or outright speculations on our part. So of course if a person isn't thinking rigorously about POV other than maintaining third person then they are likely to fall into this sort of unconstrained "wandering Omniscient" by default.

The obvious cure for this is to learn to explicitly acknoledge that some of what is being narrated is just inference, i.e. "I [He] guess[ed] that Susan didn't know why Ralph was being so rude." But as has been mentioned above, there are several reasons for including what must be inferences into the story for various literary effects. At the same time, we have to remember that casual inferences that don't conspire to present any particular effect will surely end up giving the impression that we least desire, namely that the story is simply being made up on the fly without close attention to literary quality.

Almost always, it is a good idea for me to stick with limited third person POV and follow proper grammar. However, if I think it may be more effective for me to break a rule, I will. Grammar is no more ironclad a barrier than POV conventions are.

Does this mean I'm less likely to get published? Not if I'm right, and "breaking the rules" makes the story more compelling. An editor will react to the story's strength just as another reader might. At least so I hope.

Which is not to criticize those who always follow the rules. I've always admired people who write sonnets, even if I'm more of the free verse type.

I’m currently writing a fantasy novel and it’s written in third person but I never change POV. You see everything through the main characters eyes. Since I’ve started writing the novel I’ve read several books with similar genres, re-read Enchantment by OSC, Eye of the World and I just finished re-reading the first Homecoming book by OSC. Now in all of these books I’ve seen the author going back and forth telling the story through different characters eyes. While I was finishing up the Homecoming book last night I notice this and it started to bug me. I started a chapter told through Elemak’s pov and I was like “I don’t give a rat’s ass what Elemak is thinking, I want to see what happens to Nafi!”

My novel is basically written in first person without writing it in first person. It’s told completely through the protagonist eyes. I think my story will work better this way, but I hope doing so isn’t thought of as amateurish. Someone pointed out the Ender’s Game was told through only Ender’s eyes except for the vignettes at the beginning of each chapter. It’s not that I’m unable to write from a different pov I choose not to. What do you think?

Don't let someone saying that first person point of view is amateurish make you not write the story in first person point of view if that is the way that works best for the story you are telling.

You're the writer, and only you know the real story that's inside your head. If first person point of view will convey that story to the readers best, then use it.

If present tense will convey the story to the reader best, then use present tense.

If no dialogue will convey the story to the reader best, then leave out the dialogue.

The "rules" are mainly conventions that say what works best MOST OF THE TIME, but some stories need to go against convention.

The thing you need to remember is that if you're going to do something differently from what you have been told is the rule (or convention), you need to have a good reason for doing things differently. If you have that good reason, don't worry about what the reader will think of your rule-breaking. Just make sure that your unconventional writing works.

As for third person limited to one point of view, that really isn't all that unconventional. If you want examples of books that are written that way, there are hundreds of them. One that I found particularly interesting (because the single point of view character is never named in the whole book), is Michael Swanwick's STATIONS OF THE TIDE. (I hope I got that title right--and I hope I'm remembering correctly that the point of view stays with "the bureaucrat" as the character is called.)