Choosing Viewpoint: The Third Person Limited

Is it inevitable that a writer will have certain default settings when they start writing, from which they might diverge only with conscious and deliberate thought to achieve a specific purpose or objective?  Perhaps.  It may simply be how our human minds function, that in writing, as in any other field of endeavor, we must have some base level, a foundation that we do not question or think about from which to begin, and only some impetus, some factor that renders that original tableau untenable or suboptimal, incites us to stop and think critically about the matter.  For me, and for many other authors of modern genre fiction, the third person limited viewpoint is that default.

Again, this viewpoint can be rendered in either past or present tense, but I see fewer examples of authors trying to do a third person limited present tense presentation.  Third person limited past tense, though, might be the single most dominant viewpoint in genre fiction today, although first person’s proportion is increasing, particularly in genre fiction targeted at younger audiences.  Given the popularity of what the transparent prose writing style espoused by Sanderson and adopted by many others, this should not be surprising, because the third person limited viewpoint lends itself best to that style.  As far as possible, it is a way of giving a reader a tight view of the action and the characters, without a distinctive narrative voice to cloud and complicate matters.

With third person limited, the story is told from an outside perspective – “she did this,” not “I did this” – but that outside perspective is kept tightly focused on just one character at a time.  If we are writing in third person limited, it is from one character’s “perspective” at a time, usually only changing at chapter breaks.  We’ll get to know what that character is thinking, and the narrative will be somewhat affected by how they view the world, but we won’t get inside the heads of other characters unless we switch to their perspective at a later point.  Distinguishing this from a first person, the narrative voice itself should not change or be hugely impacted by the character in focus, just on what information the narrative focuses.  For instance, a third person limited viewpoint focusing on a character who is a chef might include narrative that notes the local markets, or characteristics of the local cuisine, or maybe they’d be more attuned to aromas, while the same narrative voice focusing on a different character who is a cobbler will spend more time dwelling on the quality of pedestrians’ footwear.  Same “voice” (which, again, should be minimally intrusive and noticeable in third person limited), but different emphases.

Third person limited presents an author with most of the advantages of the first person viewpoint in terms of characterization, immersivity, expositional tools, and so forth, but without the disadvantages we discussed in last week’s post.  Its greatest weakness is what I call the storyteller’s conceit.  Because there is no framing story, no first person, “in-world” storyteller, and no distinct, outside narrator, the third person limited is inescapably an author’s device.  It requires that little step for the reader, to get over the conceit of knowing that this is a story being completely invented by the author and presented to them in a digestible way.  This might seem insignificant, but it does matter, especially for a certain subset of readers, and it is why the third person limited perspective is so rare in older storytelling.

The other disadvantage to the third person limited perspective is that it somewhat hampers linguistic innovation.  It truly does lend itself to the transparent prose style, and attempts to apply a more distinctive style tend to falter or fail.  Plus, it can make certain kinds of exposition exceptionally difficult, because if the viewpoint character wouldn’t think about it in terms that would explain it to the reader, you must break perspective in order to convey that information to the reader, or else risk the reader not understanding something that could be important to the plot later in the story.

I like the third person limited.  It bothers me that it is my default because I want to consciously think about and decide on viewpoint and perspective when I begin writing a story, not because I don’t like the results I achieve writing in third person limited.  Despite its occasional expository difficulties, its characterization opportunities and immersive worldbuilding potential more than compensate for that in most instances, and it makes for an approachable, clear, and highly intelligible presentation for readers.  Even if I train myself to make viewpoint decisions more deliberately and analytically, I am likely to continue writing many stories in third person limited, because of just how effective it is.

Even so, it is not my favorite viewpoint.  That would be third person omniscient, and we will discuss that next week in the third and final part of this series on viewpoint.