Pros and Cons and Types of Third Person

Hey guys, I'm back to talking about point of view, which was requested by an anonymous follower. Again, there are people who have talked about this better than I can cover in a blog post. The two books I like are Characters, Emotion, and Viewpoint by Nancy Kress and Characters and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card.

Like I mentioned in a post a few weeks ago, there are three points of view:

First-person: I thought I was going crazy.
Second-person: You thought you were going crazy.
Third-person: She thought she was going crazy.

But I forgot to mention (and another follower brought to my attention) that there are plural versions too.

First-person plural: We thought we were going crazy.
Third-person plural: They thought they were going crazy.

The plural versions are used even less than second-person, but, they have been done. I know there are some science fiction stories that are written like this because the story is about a hive mind. What about plural second-person? I guess that could be done too.

I did a post outlining the common pros and cons of writing a story in first-person that you can read here. In it, I gave some suggestions on how to get around the cons, and then deflated some of the others. But today's post is all about writing in third-person!

Third-Person

She thought she was going crazy.

In third-person, the narrator is someone watching and experiencing the story, but not participating in it. It's like the narrator is looking over the character's shoulder.

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Tips for Sequels and Focusing Ideas

elementrolls asked you: I'm one of those people who tends to have a lot of ideas from the get go, but I have a hard time deciding what's just a fun idea (that I might explore in a sequel or another book) and what really needs to go in the story. Any tips on focusing?

One of the pseudo-problems I run into when brainstorming happens when I get a bunch of ideas and suddenly I think I have to either pick this idea or that idea, when most of the time, I can use both ideas. So if you have a lot of ideas, try to see if you can use most of them.

With that said, there is a point where you have to stop yourself or your story will get longer than Lord of the Rings, which isn't a bad thing, but most writers aren't looking to write stories that long.

There are also times when you don't want to use all of your ideas; for example, if you are writing a medieval fantasy, you might not want to throw in time-traveling aliens after you already have a quest story for the main plot. Time-traveling aliens just doesn't fit.

For sequels, a good technique is to look at how you can broaden or deepen your storyline so that the conflict goes farther or deeper than the book before.

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Pros and Cons of First Person, How to Deflate the Cons

By request (you can thank anonymous), I'm going to do some blog posts on points of view, talking about the pros and cons, and how to get around some of the cons. I'll be pulling from two sources, Characters, Emotion, and Viewpoint by Nancy Kress and Characters and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card. They are both good books to have for those learning the craft of writing, and they should be easy to remember since their titles are nearly identical. I like how the authors explain point of view in those books the best. They go in depth.

Now, there is a reason I'm pulling from those texts. There has been so much that has already been said on point of view that I didn't think I had anything new to add, but when I started putting this post together, I realized I did. Some of my opinions on point of view are different from the general rules. So, in this post, I'll list the general rules and then my own opinions on them after.

But let's start with the basics.

There are three points of view:

First-person: I thought I was going crazy.
Second-person: You thought you were going crazy.
Third-person: She thought she was going crazy.

Please note that narratives are hardly ever written in second-person point of view, but it has been done, by authors like Jay McInerney.  You usually see second-person in other forms of writing, like role-playing games or do-it-yourself books. Most novels and short stories are written in first-person or third-person.

Today, let's talk about the common pros and cons of first-person, and then I will go and debunk a lot of those with my own personal opinion and tell you ways you can get around some of them.

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