POV Deep Dive: The Third Person

Arguably the most popular storytelling perspective, the third person point of view (POV) tells the story using “he/she/they” pronouns, though the viewpoint character is an active participant in the story events. The third person can also get the reader nearly as close to and connected with the viewpoint character as the first-person POV can.

The third person is limited to what the viewpoint character can know, feel, observe, perceive, wonder, hope, remember, or guess, which can add mystery to the larger context of the story or show the viewpoint character’s mistaken assumptions and biases as the story unfolds.

Note: The subjective-omniscient and objective perspectives will each have their own articles.

You decide how many characters your reader will get to know intimately. And different from the first person where the character is the narrator, in the third person you get to decide how much of your narrative voice is present in the writing or how strong your character’s voice can become.

In The Midnight Library, author Matt Haig allows the reader to become intimately familiar with Nora, the protagonist and viewpoint character, by keeping the reader out of the heads of all other characters.

In the following passage, Nora is visiting an alternate reality to see what would have happened had she made different life choices up to that point in the story.

There were two rings on her ring finger. Her old sapphire engagement ring was there — the same one she had taken off, through trembles and tears, over a year ago — accompanied by a simple silver wedding band.

Crackers.

She was wearing a watch. Not a digital one, in this life. An elegant, slender analogue one, with Roman numerals. It was about a minute after midnight.

How is this happening?

In the example, the third person achieves the closeness of experience the first person achieves using a stream-of-consciousness style when relaying Nora’s thoughts, as shown in the bolded reactions. And while Haig uses Nora’s observations to inform the narrative voice present in the story, that voice is slightly detached from Nora at the same time.

The third person narrator contrasts Nora’s experience by clueing in the reader to the specific changes Nora notices (her rings and her watch) and offering Nora’s thoughts on those changes as she steps into a life that is both hers and not hers.

And while The Midnight Library showcases only one character’s perspective, it’s not uncommon to see several viewpoint perspectives in a third-person novel. The key is to keep inside a single character’s head for the duration of a scene or chapter, which allows the reader to immerse themself in and experience the story one perspective at a time.

In Tommy Wallach’s novel, We All Looked Up, the reader follows four teenagers in alternating chapters as they process the news of an asteroid hurtling toward Earth that will inevitably result in an apocalyptic collision. The teenagers are left to figure out how best to spend the time they have left.

The alternating third-person POV allows the reader to compare how different characters handle the seriousness of the situation they face.

Compare the following two passages from We All Looked Up below, each from a different viewpoint character. The first:

Anita has spent the last couple of nights reading about the Stoics and Cynics, the Epicureans and the hedonists. Socrates believes that in a perfect world, every person would be doing the thing that they were born to do. Which meant that if you really believed your true calling was as a singer, to do anything else would be to break the most fundamental rule of the universe.

And the second:

But [Andy] didn’t choke. And when he rose to his feet again, he felt newly baptized in bitterness—the religion of Bobo and Golden and everyone else who’d discovered that there was no point or meaning to anything anymore.

While Anita is leaning on her philosophical education and moving with purpose and drive, Andy is diving headfirst into absurdism. And it isn’t long after this bit in Andy’s scene that he walks “aimlessly around the city and smoking the rest of Bobo’s weed.”

The reader gets to choose between optimism or nihilism, but they can just as easily choose neither and experience the range of human emotion as relayed by the selected characters instead.

As the reader gets to choose whether they identify with one character or many, the same reader choice may apply to timelines.

Karin Slaughter’s novel, Pieces of Her, is a dual-timeline thriller that follows Andy in the present as she tries to unravel her mother’s past and learn who her mother really is. The novel also follows Jane, a young woman who finds herself in more and more difficult situations and realizes life has spiraled out of her control.

The reader gets a puzzle: Why is Andy’s story relevant to Jane’s? How are their two stories connected?

In the present timeline, Andy is in a restaurant with her mom, and the pair are discussing Andy’s relatively recent move back home and Andy’s misgivings about her circumstances:

Laura insists, “There’s nothing wrong with being normal. Normal people have very meaningful lives. Look at me. It’s not selling out to enjoy yourself.”

Andy says, “I’m thirty-one years old, I haven’t gone on a real date in three years, I have sixty-three thousand dollars in student debt for a degree I never finished and I live in a one-room apartment over my mother’s garage.” Air strained through Andy’s nose as she tried to breathe. Verbalizing the long list had put a tight band around her chest. “The question isn’t what else can I do. It’s what else am I going to fuck up?”

“You’re not fucking up.”

“Mom—”

When the reader jumps to the past, they find another woman in a different set of less-than-ideal circumstances:

Jane hadn’t wanted him then, either, but she remembered keenly craving the after. To be held in his arms. To press her ear to his chest and listen to the steady, content beat of his heart. To tell him about the baby. To see the happiness in his expression.

He hadn’t been happy the first time.

“Come on, love.” Nick gave her a chaste kiss on the forehead. “Let’s get some sleep.”

Jane let him pull her down to the futon mattress. His mouth went to her ear again, but only to brush his lips against her skin. He wrapped his body around her. Legs intertwined, arms holding her close. He made a pillow for her head out of the crook of his elbow. Instead of feeling the usual sense of peace, Jane felt like she was trapped in place by an octopus.

Both women process their situations. Both are unhappy. But the reader doesn’t really get to understand their connection until well into the novel, leaving plenty of time for the reader to side with one woman or to root for them both.

Because the third person doesn’t ask the reader to step directly into the character’s shoes (just be close enough to see what kind of shoes they’re wearing), the reader can hang back, lean on the narrator’s voice, make their own judgements, and hold themself at a distance from the story events—if they choose.

Writing & Revising the Third Person Well

Though less popular for memoir since it almost always reads like fiction, the versatility of the third person makes it a popular choice for novels, because it’s often the easiest for the reader to digest.

The reader gets to experience all the joys of the story without being asked to carry the emotional baggage of the characters living through it.

There are a few considerations to crafting the third person well:

• intimacy
• immediacy
• perspective

Intimacy

In the third person, you get to decide how close you want your reader to get to your characters and to the story events.

Most commonly, the reader will view events objectively and will have access to the mind of one character per scene or chapter. The narration is limited to the thoughts and perceptions of that character and is limited by all the things the character cannot know, though a secondary narrative voice may be present for the reader.

In The Midnight Library, Nora only has access to her thoughts. She doesn’t have access to her alternates’ memories, even while inhabiting their bodies.

Questions to ask yourself:

• What information can my character reasonably know or infer from this moment?
• Have I inadvertently leaked the emotions, thoughts, or knowledge of other characters into my narrative voice?
• If so, how can I reframe that leakage to align with the character’s limited experience?

Immediacy

The reader cannot know more than the character knows about their own situation and you cannot articulate more than the character can reasonably articulate for themself, including those unnamed emotions requiring processing time.

In Pieces of Her, Andy’s dialogue is self-deprecating and emotionally heavy. Since Andy doesn’t directly name her emotions, the reader is also denied that naming except through what they can infer from the dialogue.

When revising, avoid intruding on your third-person character. Don’t over-explain or over-process what is happening to the character. Let the reader do that for themself.

If you find yourself getting too close to a character you shouldn’t get close to, consider whether the more immersive first person may be appropriate or whether you can balance the third person with the objective to focus on the “what.”

Questions to ask yourself:

• In this moment, what does my viewpoint character know, observe, or understand about their own situation? What is hidden from them?
• Is any information present that my viewpoint character can’t know, observe, or understand?
• Does the reader need to have this extra information my viewpoint character can’t provide? If so, can this information be included in dialogue or shared in another way?

Perspective

It’s phenomenally easy to head-hop when writing in the third person, but head-hopping must be avoided to retain the reader’s control over their experience.

Restrict your knowledge to the external facts that your chosen character can know, and dive into sensory cues and body language available within the scene at hand to fill out all the things the character couldn’t know but may observe or perceive.

And if there are pieces of information your reader must know but that which cannot be delivered through the viewpoint character, consider balancing the third person with the omniscient, which allows for some added creative freedom.

Questions to ask yourself:

• What knowledge does my viewpoint character have that they are willing to share?
• What body language, sensory cues, and other setting and circumstantial information can the viewpoint character pick up in this moment?
• Would balancing the viewpoint character’s perspective with another, such as the omniscient, bring clarity or meaning to the book?

Last Notes on the Third Person

The third person can do some serious heavy lifting for your story, because it allows you to explore different viewpoint-character perspectives and different timelines. It also affords the best mix of character immersion and world exploration within a single POV because of its versatility.

When determining who your third-person focal character is, consider whether a single character can reasonably know or deliver all the information the reader needs to know.

If you find yourself scrambling to include information and breaking third-person POV to do it, consider either adding another POV character to fill in gaps for your reader or using another perspective in recurring scenes to do for the reader what the character cannot.

Happy writing!

<3 Fal

P.S. Have you missed a few POV Deep Dives? Check out the first person and the second person.

P.P.S. Check in next week for a deep dive into the omniscient person.

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Fallon Clark

Fallon Clark is a story development coach and editor with more than a decade of experience in communications, project management, writing, and editing. She provides story development and revision services to independent and hybrid publishers and authors spanning genres and styles. And in 2018, she had the joy of seeing Forever My Girl, one of her earliest book projects, on the big screen. Fallon’s writing has been published in Flash Fiction Magazine and The MicroZine. Find her online at FallonClarkBooks.Substack.com, or connect with her on LinkedIn or Substack.