Third person omniscient is tricky, but I like the effect when it’s done well. Like most lazy literary fiction writers, I rely way too much on a first person limited POV.

My most recently published story (”And Dream Such Dreams” in OTHERWORDLY MAINE) has three POVs:

• Standard third-person limited (POV character: Gen. Joshua Chamberlain)

• “Diary” first-person limited (POV character: John Hay)

• “Inner monolog” first-person limited (POV character: Abraham Lincoln).

Hay’s diary and Lincoln’s inner monolog alternate scences. Chamberlain’s straight third person POV serves as bookends — first and last scenes.

I didn’t start with the idea of three differnent types of POVs in the story. It’s just that ended up what the story called for. I needed facts & events put in the story that wouldn’t be known to a single character. Since John Hay is just an observer of the history taking place, it seemed to work best “distancing” his first person voice in a staid diary form. This also had the happy benefit of making Lincoln’s inner monologs even more intimate.

My “Gunther Likes To Dig” (Asimov’s) used a bookend of “folk tale style” omniscient third person to frame the standard third-person body inside. Again, that’s what the story calls for.

I needed to get into the head of Gunther, but first person was too close and would reveal too much. Third person omniscient worked much better, and gave a fairy tale feel to the passages.

Now that I think about it, distance and intimacy were the deciding factor in both published exceptions to my usual third-person limited standard.

Everything else I’ve had published (I think)is third-person limited.

– Lee Allred

I despise third person omniscient, but I believe it’s because it was trained out of me at an early novel-writing age as “head hopping” aka the Unforgivable Sin. I don’t think there’s anything inherently WRONG with the “Meanwhile, back at the ranch…” method of storytelling, but now it will jerk me out of a story faster than anything.

As a reader, I don’t necessarily differentiate between first and third (limited omniscient) person because I’m a visual reader. The rhythm of the words gives me a soundtrack to the movie in my head.

As a writer, I use first and third person for very different things. One of my current projects is a mixed first and third person (female protag in first; male in third). It keeps me as close to her as can be and thus, her issues are much, much slower to reveal themselves because she’s in denial. It’s tight camera work.

If you’ll indulge me a moment (from this work):

Neither of us had spoken more than perhaps twenty words each since I’d opened the door and he’d asked me to dance. He’d known something was wrong and opened his mouth to ask, but I’d shaken my head, unable to give it voice. He simply took out a handkerchief and dabbed at my cheeks as if I had been crying, which I hadn’t been.

His third person POV allows me to be somewhat removed from him AND her, widens the camera angle and clues the reader into a more informed (wider) viewpoint. Doing that scene in HIS POV would have (IMO) lessened the impact of the way she denies her vulnerability.

Thus far, beta readers have liked the juxtaposition and really, I don’t think I could do it any other way.

But in any case, whichever way I choose to transcribe the movie in my head, it’s still a movie and the rhythm of the words is the soundtrack.

In the last year or so, I’ve gotten more leery of people who say you SHOULD write X way or you SHOULD write Y way. I subscribed to that for many years and I’m sure I missed a lot of good stories that way.

I regret that.

(You always catch something after you’ve published it…)

Re: third-person limited

I have, for years, been inquisitorial about staying in the pov character’s head. Anything that could be taken as a pov violation I eliminate, or heavily mark if it’s someone else’s work.

But lately I’ve been trying to loosen my standards. I’ve less and less convinced that being strict on this rule is necessarily necessary. For some stories, sure, yes, absolutely — but not for all. And I’m trying to experiment with when and how and where and why and to expand my pov vocabulary. I see too much success in the rules being broken to feel like I still need to be such a stickler.