Third-Person POV: Omniscient, Limited, and Which Is Best for Your Story

Rosemi Mederos: 00:01

If you have plot bunnies coming out of your plot holes, it's time for a writing break.

Hello again, she said. We're talking about third person today, both omniscient and limited.

First, however, you might've caught the country song in last week's episode as a nod to Dolly Parton's passing, but now we can say Goodbye, Dolly, and end it on a happy note.

There will be endless tributes to her music, and rightly so. But on Writing Break, we want to honor the legacy Dolly herself often said mattered more than her musical legacy.

In: 1995

Today the Imagination Library serves one in six American children under the age of five and operates in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The program has gifted 332 million books and counting.

And the good news is that the Dollywood Company has confirmed the Imagination Library will continue sending books in her absence, and they've encouraged donations to the program as a way to honor her memory. Check the links in the show notes for more information.

The Writing Break cafe is open, so let's head inside. Before we discuss third-person POV, let's drink a toast to Dolly and catch up on some publishing news.

between now and September of: 2027

And I know that calling it hush money is going to get me in trouble with publishers, but I mean, c’mon, let’s call it what it is. I could call it something worse, but I won’t. No, hush money, we’ll keep it at that.

HarperCollins reported its fiscal year results, and they're solid: sales are up 6% to $2.29 billion, with fourth-quarter revenue jumping 15%. Overall profits, however, dipped 3% to $287 million, but that's partly due to a $13 million write-off from the collapse of library supplier Baker & Taylor. You might remember we discussed the end of Baker & Taylor back in February. One of the listeners wrote to me and said, “I never even heard about Baker & Taylor. Which is good. That means he’s focused on his writing. You just let me take care of the business end, OK? But here we see some of the fallout of that one supplier closing.

There are two details to note in HarperCollins's reported earnings. First, HarperCollins openly said it expects more "cash-rich" AI legal settlements in the year ahead. Whaddaya mean, HC? I think it means publishers have discovered that suing AI companies pays, and they're planning for more. For authors, that's mostly good news: the more valuable those claims become, the more incentive publishers have to defend your copyrights. But it also means the licensing-versus-litigation fight over AI training data is going to be an ongoing part of this industry. For how long? I know not. And is it even helping authors at all when the stolen material has already been used to train AI? And now we have the ISBN database giving them physical copies and signing NDAs that say they’re not going to say what titles they gave. A whole different kind of hush money. Anyway, I'm not saying give up. Keep fighting the good fight, but it does feel futile and like we're in some kind of publishing purgatory.

The second thing to note about HarperCollins's earnings is that digital sales rose 4%, which includes a 16% surge in audiobooks.

AI narration program through: 2026

The economics here are hard to listen to. Human narration runs roughly $200 to $400 per finished hour, so let's say it's between $2,000 and $4,000 for a ten-hour novel. Yes, AI narration can save an author or publisher thousands per title. For authors with international ambitions, AI-assisted translation plus AI narration suddenly makes foreign-language audio edition financially plausible for indie authors.

However, antes de que empieces a traducir tu libro. One: disclosure requirements mean your audience will know what you've done, and listener acceptance is not widespread . . . yet? I don’t know. Platform-run narration ties your voice files, your workflow, and your audio editions to a single distributor. If you ever wanted to have a wider distribution or change distributors, you might find that what's convenient today is constraining tomorrow. And the quality of these AI narrations is still subpar.

Anecdotally, I'll say that I have listened to a couple of AI-narrated titles and found that enunciation, pronunciation, and intonation leave much to be desired. Plus, I forget most of what I listen to when AI reads it, but when a human reads an audiobook, I remember much more. Maybe that needs to be studied; maybe they already have studied it. Maybe that important human-to-human connection can beat that mean green in the end.

Still, as the aforementioned 16% audiobook growth at HarperCollins shows, the audiobook format is booming, and who or what will narrate our future is anyone's guess.

ith publication set for March: 2027

The book lays out AI's threats to work, democracy, security, and truth, from the person who built much of the foundation and has spent the last few years warning us about what he built. Ha!

Even better, he co-wrote it with . . . , no, not AI; instead, Hinton hired human and science journalist Patchen Barss to tickle the keyboard. Even the godfather of AI brought in a professional writer; regardless, I bet people are going to think AI wrote it.

Links to all of these news stories can be found in the show notes of this episode. Now, it's time to head to the Overthinking Couch to discuss third-person POV.

As we talked about last time, in first-person POV, the narrator is visibly a character. They have a name, a body, and a character arc.

In third person, the narrator has none of those things, which is why so many third-person narrators end up with no personality at all. The writer forgets that someone is talking.

There are two types of third person: omniscient third and limited third.

Let's start with the baseline. Third person is any narration that refers to all characters as he, she, they; the narrator is not a character inside the story and is not speaking as "I" or “we.” But that description covers an enormous range. The real question of POV is, whose head is the narrator allowed into, and how far in do they go?

In third-person omniscient, the narrator knows everything: every character's thoughts and feelings, events happening simultaneously in different places, things no character could know, sometimes even the past and future of the story's world. The narrator rests above the story like a goddess due to all of that omniscience.

The key thing to understand about an omniscient narrator is that the narrator is a presence. Even when it has no name, the omniscient narrator has a voice made up of an attitude, an intelligence, and a way of judging or winking at the proceedings, but that voice does not belong to any character in the story. The omniscient narrator can glide into one character's mind, pull back to survey a whole room, then drop a piece of information nobody in the scene possesses. When it's done deliberately, that movement is controlled and purposeful. When it's done accidentally and the narrator starts drifting between heads within a scene without intention, it's what critics call head-hopping, and it's no good.

With an omniscient narrator, you get scope. It's the natural fit for stories with large casts, big worlds, and long time spans, anywhere the story itself is bigger than any single character's experience of it. It buys you dramatic irony because the narrator can let the reader know things the characters don't. And it buys you flexibility of tone; the narrator can comment, summarize, and compress information.

What you lose with an omniscient narrator is intimacy. The reader knows about everyone, which often means we don't get to feel with any character on a deep level.

In third-person limited, the narration is limited to one character's perspective at a time. The narrator can only report what that character experiences, feels, and knows. The camera sits on one character's shoulder, and it does not leave until you give the reader a clear signal that it's moving to someone else's shoulder; usually it’s a scene or a chapter break.

Within limited, though, there's a spectrum. At one end, you have a more distant limited, which is when the narrator describes the character's thoughts in the narrator's own voice, at a slight remove. At the other end, you have close or deep third, where the narration soaks so thoroughly into the character's voice that the line between narrator and character nearly disappears. The vocabulary, the rhythms, and the opinions in the narration become the character's own. You're reading the words "he" and "she," but the prose is thinking their thoughts in their words. Where you sit on that spectrum is a dial you control, and skilled writers move it within a single book, pulling close in emotional peaks and easing back for exposition.

Limited grants us intimacy and identification; the reader lives inside the character rather than outside observing them. And it buys you control of information, which is the engine of suspense, mystery, and surprise: if your POV character doesn't know something, the reader doesn't either. If something crucial happens across town, your character and reader learn about it at the same time. That constraint is why multi-POV limited has become such a dominant structure: it's an attempt to get omniscient's scope without giving up limited's intimacy. We'll talk about multi-POV next time.

So, once you know you want to write in third-person, how do you decide the type of third person to write? Ask yourself three questions.

One: is my story bigger than any one character's experience of it? If yes, go with third-person omniscient or multi-POV limited.

Two: where do I want the reader's sympathy to live? If you want your reader to connect deeply with one character, go with limited.

Three: does my narrator have something to say? If the telling itself is part of the pleasure, consider omniscient because it makes the narrator visible and gives the narrator a voice with opinions and personality.

And whichever you choose, the reader should always know, at any given moment, whose experience they're experiencing.

Let's return to last week's example of Vivian the professional mourner. Once again, Vivian the professional mourner is on the clock and wailing away when a man sits down across from her.

In limited, the reader experiences the story through Vivian's perception, and everything on the page has to be something she can see, hear, smell, infer, or assume. Assumptions, of course, are fair game, as long as it's clear that's what they are. Authors writing third-person limited sometimes leak into omniscient, so watch out for that.

Again, every scene should tell us something new and important or advance the plot, and it's better if a scene does both.

With close third person, the author has to avoid sounding like the author. The narration doesn't have to be Vivian's voice the way it has to be in first person POV, but the closer you sit to her, the more the vocabulary and judgments in the narration should belong to her trade and her temperament, not to the author.

So, how about we try last week's Overthinking Prompt in third-person this week?

Think about the moment Vivian the Professional Mourner sees a man sit down across from her. What would make it strong third-person POV narration, both limited and omniscient? Compare deep limited vs distant limited as well. Overthink about it. Write it out if you've got the time. If you do write it out, leave it in the comments or email it to me. I would love to read it. Remember to avoid cash register narration, "and then narration", and head-hopping narration. Listen to last week's episode for more explanation on that.

Next episode, we're talking about multi-POV manuscripts, how to give every POV character a distinct voice, and how to keep your audience oriented when the narrator changes every chapter. Until then, thank you so much for listening, and remember, you deserved this break.

Writing Break is hosted by America’s Editor and produced by Allon Media with technical direction by Gus Aviles. Visit us at writingbreak.com or contact us at [email protected].

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