Viewpoint is one of those areas of writing where there seems to be a tremendous amount of confusion. A lot of the confusion stems, I think, from the imprecision and lack of standardization in the terminology, so I’ll start with that.

The term “viewpoint” itself can mean several things:

1. “The position or vantage point from which the events of a story seem to be observed and presented” – Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

2. The type of viewpoint

3. The viewpoint character

The first meaning is the broad overview sort that’s supposed to encompass everything, but often ends up just confusing people. I think of it as the angle from which the author chooses to tell the story – from inside the story or from the outside looking in? After the fact or as it happens?

The type of viewpoint is basically whether the narrative is in first-person (“I hit him”), second person (“you hit him”), or third person (“she hit him”). Second-person is rare; usually, the choice is between first person or third person. Plural viewpoints (“We hit him,” “They hit him”) are even rarer than second-person, but they do get used on occasion. The examples I know of are short stories.

The viewpoint character is the character through whose eyes the reader sees the story. The viewpoint character can be the protagonist, or he/she can be a major secondary character or sidekick (like Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories), or she/he can be a minor character who’s in a position to observe most of the key plot moments. He can even be an omniscient narrator who doesn’t appear in the story, as with Steven Brust’s Paarfi novels.

Thus the answer to the question “What’s the viewpoint in this story?” could be:

1. The story is told “from inside,” as it happens

2. Third-person subjective

3. Jane Smith, identical twin of Judy Smith

Most of the time, people don’t stop to clarify which answer they’re looking for when they ask the question, which leads to lots of misunderstanding. This is especially true when people are talking about type of viewpoint (first, second, third), because viewpoint types can be broken down into finer and finer detail…and there doesn’t seem to be much agreement about what those sub-types ought to be, much less what they are called.

For instance, that viewpoint type I listed up there, “third person subjective,” is also called tight third person, third person personal, intimate third person, limited third person, and limited omniscient, depending on what source you’re looking at. And each of those terms breaks third person viewpoint down in slightly different ways, some of which map to each other (as “third person subjective” = “third person personal” and “third person objective” = “camera eye”) and some of which don’t.

One of the most useful ways of looking at all these different ways of breaking down point of view, for me, came when somebody pointed out that all these categories are trying to sort out different combinations of three different factors. The first one is the easiest and most obvious: whether the narrative is in first, second, or third person.

The second one is where the narrative falls along a range from subjective to objective. The more of the characters’ personal thoughts, feelings, opinions, etc. make it directly into the story, the more subjective it is; the more everything is conveyed by describing strictly what anyone and everyone could see/hear/touch/etc., the more objective it is.

The third factor is how limited/omniscient the narrator’s knowledge is or is not. This is especially relevant in third person, where an omniscient narrator can stop and tell the reader about the prehistoric geology of the landscape the characters are walking over (which none of them know anything about), or give a quick two-page summary of the entire future life of the cab driver who’s taking the protagonist from the airport to her hotel.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention multiple viewpoint in here somewhere, even though it isn’t really a viewpoint at all. Multiple viewpoint is a structure, in which different scenes are told through the eyes of different viewpoint characters and/or using different types of viewpoint. The most common multiple viewpoint uses tight third-person throughout, and shifts from one character’s point of view to another’s between scene breaks.

There are, however, books written in multiple first-person, and books that have both multiple viewpoint characters and multiple types of viewpoint (i.e., when George is the viewpoint, the scenes are in tight-third person, but when Jane is the viewpoint, they’re in first person, and when Kitty is the viewpoint, they’re in camera-eye). All of these are just as much “multiple viewpoint” as the more common ensemble-tight-third type, which is why I say it’s a structure and not a type of viewpoint at all.

Being an analytical sort of writer, I find it useful to look at and try to comprehend all these different ways of looking at point of view. Not everyone will. The good news is that you don’t have to worry too much if you don’t find the terminology or the various divisions helpful in your writing. The terminology really matters only when you’re talking about writing and books to other readers and writers. Since most writers do talk quite a lot about books and writing, however, it’s usually a good idea to have at least a passing acquaintance with the different terms, and an awareness of all the differences, so that one doesn’t end up having a three-hour discussion only to find out that you were using different terms for the same thing, or talking about two completely different aspects of viewpoint.

For starters, none of them seem to consider the question of type of narration (that is, first person or third person) to be an aspect of viewpoint at all. Out of seven books from the 1950s or earlier, only two deal with the question of “grammatical form” explicitly in the section on viewpoint. One of them spends roughly two pages discussing “the logic of the use of the first-person observer,” but spends nearly as much time on the question of person in the sections on “distance” and “plot.” The other book dismisses the whole question in half a page with the admonition “Use the grammatical form with which you feel most ‘at home.’”

Instead, these books talk about viewpoint as being more an aspect of the author and less about the book or story or characters. The emphasis is on what the writer’s attitude is and what the writer wants to say; the viewpoint is the angle or perspective from which the writer chooses to say it.

By this interpretation, there are really only two basic viewpoints: from outside the story, which is synonymous with omniscient, and from inside the story (i.e., seen through the eyes of a character), which covers everything else. One of my favorite books further subdivides the “inside the story” viewpoint based on whether the author’s chosen character is a major character who is directly involved in the action, or a minor character who is more or less passively observing the action.

A slightly different classification of viewpoints (from the appendix of the second book) separates viewpoints by Internal (i.e., inside the head of the main character) and External (the story is told by someone who is observing the events, whether that someone is the author or a minor character in the story). The textbook author notes that either first-person or third-person may be used for either type of viewpoint, and then proceeds to the meat of his discussion of viewpoint.

Both books focus their discussion of viewpoint mainly on when and why an author would prefer an internal vs. an external viewpoint, with particular emphasis on when and why an author would choose a minor character as the angle from which to tell the story. The what and how of viewpoint – the technical difficulties and techniques of writing first-person or omniscient, for instance – don’t enter the discussion at all, not even in the book that’s supposed to be all about technique.

I couldn’t even find the term “viewpoint character” in either book; they talk about the “observer author,” “objective narrator,” “authorial angle,” and so on instead. It’s kind of disconcerting. On the other hand, there’s something to be said for the older approach, which pretty consistently takes the view that all these technical tricks are something the author can and should figure out for him/herself, through careful reading and analysis of a variety of great stories. It would have driven me crazy when I was starting to learn my craft, and really wanted to be told what was possible and how to do it, but at least it doesn’t give the impression that there is One Right Way to handle everything.

The other thing I like a lot about this approach is the unabashed acknowledgement that the author is the one who’s in charge and picking the viewpoint angle in order to say something, in the same way a film director picks camera angles, or a landscape painter or photographer picks the direction and height from which to portray a scene. A lot of the time, more recent writing books are so quick to start explaining the techniques of writing first-person, or the difference between tight-third and omniscient, that they don’t spend enough time pointing out that there are reasons for choosing one over another. And the whole internal/external way of looking at viewpoint seems to have gotten lost along the way as the internal viewpoint (whether first or third person) has become almost a standard. I think it’s nice to know that there’s more of a choice out there than first-person vs. subjective, tight-third person vs. omniscient, even if I’m fairly sure I’m going to be writing a main character/internal viewpoint 99% of the time.

First person seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it viewpoint. I’ve heard folks say that it’s the easiest viewpoint for a beginner to use, that no one should ever use it, that it allows for more believability, that it’s always autobiographical (and therefore, in some obscure fashion I’ve never really understood, suspect in fiction…as if first-person should only be used in actual autobiography or memoir). I’ve heard readers say that they like first-person because it’s so immediate, or because the reader always knows the main character survives, or because “all first person stories sound like they’re written by writers.” (What?)

Let’s start with a definition: first-person is any story in which the narrator or viewpoint character uses “I” outside of dialog. The most common variety is as-it-happens narration, as if the main character is telling the story to the reader nanoseconds after the events happen, but epistolary fiction (a story told in letters, like Sorcery and Cecelia, or in emails) and journal excerpts are also common. Stream-of-consciousness writing – the sort that tries to mimic the chaos and distraction of the narrator’s thoughts, second to second – is usually used in short fiction (probably because it’s very difficult to sustain at length).

I think that a lot of the mistrust of first person comes from the fact that it’s something all of us do regularly in real life. Everyone has written letters or emails; lots of people have kept a diary or a journal at some point in their lives. This makes it seem easy and predictable, something everyone already knows how to do…except that when you’re writing fiction, it’s never easy or predictable. Since experienced writers and editors know this, they get suspicious of anything that looks too easy.

At the other end of the spectrum are the new writers who think first-person is the trick to making writing easy and predictable. They’ve written emails, they’ve kept a diary; how different can this be? So they plunge ahead and make all sorts of mistakes, which lead the experienced writers, critics, editors, etc. to shake their heads and blame it on trying to write first-person. And next thing you know, how-to books and writing teachers and advice blogs are forbidding anyone to use it.

The truth is that, like every other viewpoint, first-person has both strengths and weaknesses. There are some beginner mistakes that are nearly impossible to make in first person; there are others that are an order of magnitude easier. The trick is in knowing what they are and in knowing whether your particular writing strengths and weaknesses are complimented or reinforced by the natural strengths and weaknesses of the viewpoint.

The first and most obvious characteristic of first-person is that the writer is stuck in the narrator’s head for the length of the story (or at least the length of the scene, if it’s one of the rare multiple-viewpoint-first-person novels). It is glaringly obvious whenever the writer strays outside what the narrator can see, hear, know, or reason out for him/herself. If head-hopping is something you have trouble with, first-person will keep you from doing it if you are paying any attention at all. Of course, you’ll probably find it incredibly difficult and frustrating when you can’t just jump to some other character and show how he/she feels or thinks, and you’ll be driven half mad figuring out how to let the reader in on important events or information that the narrator didn’t happen to be present for, but I did say that it wasn’t going to be as easy as it looked, didn’t I?

The second and only slightly less obvious characteristic of first-person is that whether it’s letters, diaries, stream-of-consciousness, or standard narrative, every line has to be in the voice of the narrator-character…not that of the author. This can be a lot trickier than it sounds, precisely because everyone uses first-person a lot in real life. When you’re used to speaking in your own voice, it can be hard to imitate someone else’s consistently, especially if the differences are subtle. It’s much easier if the narrator-character has a strong voice, including but not limited to vocabulary, syntax, and idioms.

A subset of this is that what the character notices also has to be in-character. This means, for instance, if your character is a farmer, she will likely notice and comment on every garden and the health of every plant (or at least, the useful plants, i.e., food), but may or may not have any interest in describing hairstyles or the interiors of other people’s homes. And what she does say about them will be from her own perspective and in her own words, not yours.

Logically, then, if you are good at “getting into” the mind of your narrator, but bad at sticking to what he/she sees and/or terrible at conveying information that the narrator isn’t around for, using a first-person viewpoint would force you to work on those areas you have trouble with, while giving your ability to get into the character’s head a chance to shine. On the other hand, if you are rock-solid on the what-the-narrator-sees stuff, but shaky on voice, doing a good strong-voiced first-person who does not sound like you will give you a novel’s worth of practice at using a character’s voice when your natural inclination is to use your own. It may be a bit of a trial by fire, but it’s likely to be effective.

If you have trouble doing a viewpoint character’s internal dialog, first person will likewise give you lots of chance to practice, though whether you make use of the chance or not is up to you. If, however, you are predisposed to writing internal monologue even in third-person, you may find that first-person encourages this tendency to an unfortunate extreme, and you may not want to try it until you’ve brought your description and narration skills up to the same level. As always, if you’re going to work on your skills, the first thing you have to do is figure out where you’re weak.

The advantages of writing a fat, complicated, multiple-viewpoint, ensemble-cast book are many: they’re popular; they provide both writer and reader with more than enough variety to keep from getting bored; they are in many ways a truer reflection of the complexity of real life events than something more straightforward would be; the variety that an ensemble cast allows for means that more people will find someone they’re interested in and want to follow through all the adventures in the book; the multitude of viewpoints lets the writer show all sorts of cool stuff that would otherwise be behind the scenes; etc.

The trouble is that most of those advantages can very easily become disadvantages if they’re handled even a little bit clumsily – and the more viewpoint characters and subplots the writer has to juggle, the easier it is for them to let things get ever-so-slightly out of balance. Which is all it takes to annoy a sizeable subset of readers.

A few years back, a friend who was working on her first big multiple-viewpoint book got six chapters and eight viewpoints into the thing, and then stopped and took two of the viewpoints out. All of her first-readers screamed bloody murder; we liked those two people, and we thought the scenes they had were great. My friend was adamant, however – and perfectly correct in her decision. Those two people weren’t close enough to the central story she wanted to tell, and leaving them in would have thrown everything off-balance.

Or, to put it another way, whenever a character is the viewpoint character, the story is about them. It doesn’t matter if the character is the cab driver whose only importance is that he drove Our Hero from Kennedy Airport to a hotel downtown; while he’s the viewpoint, he’s the center. And he’s the center of his story, which, to him, is much more important than anything else that’s going on in the book.

This means that in a multiple-viewpoint book, each and every viewpoint character has to be chosen with great care. This is particularly true when the writer intends to have a cast of five or ten people who are all meant to be “the main character” in some way – that is, a classic ensemble cast. It can be very hard to identify exactly which characters are at the heart of the writer’s story (each of them is, of course, at the heart of his or her own…which is the fundamental problem).

A story told from a single viewpoint, whether it’s first-person, tight third-person, or the sort of limited omniscient that still only follows one character around, has built-in protection against subplot proliferation. The reader can only see and find out what the single viewpoint character sees and finds out, and there are only so many things that one person can reasonably be involved in. The kind of multiple-viewpoint book that has a strong core plot or theme also doesn’t usually tend to have problems with subplot-and-character proliferation; the strength of the main plot through-line keeps everything else from going too far astray.

The real trouble comes when the author lets him or herself be distracted by shiny minor characters and/or interesting bits of business that “might develop into something.” Because the minute that cab driver gets his own viewpoint scene, his story is the one the writer is telling. And it’s always, always fascinating and fun and interesting, because people’s stories always feel that way to themselves, and when you’re writing from the viewpoint of a character, you see their story they way they see it. And next thing you know, the caper novel about the ensemble cast trying to rob the Metropolitan Museum of Art has this whole involved subplot about the cab driver’s romance with a police detective (see, the writer says to herself, it’s relevant! There’s police involved!).

And then the cab driver’s family come into it, and there are more interesting complications there, and pretty soon the original caper novel is practically buried under the cab driver’s cousin’s drug smuggling subplot and his sister’s angsting over whether she’ll get into art school (see, the writer says desperately, Art! And they’re planning an art heist! So it’s, um, thematically relevant!) and the police detective’s difficulties with precinct politics.

I’ve learned the hard way that any time I start justifying the presence of a scene, character, viewpoint, or general Cool Bit Of Business, it almost certainly doesn’t belong in the story. If it belonged, I wouldn’t have to do any justifying. (Saying confidently “That’s setup for the problem with X that they’re going to have three chapters from now” is not justifying it; saying “But…but…but it’s relevant! Because there’s, um, important stuff in this bit!” is a dead sure sign that I’m going to need to cut, and the sooner, the better.)

When I notice myself slipping into this pattern, I find it helps to snip the scenes to a file, and promise myself that I can write that other story later. Because that’s the thing that’s so seductive – all those fun, fascinating stories that aren’t the one I’m telling right now, but that could be shoehorned in with just a little work… Promising myself that I can write a whole book about them and do a proper job of telling their stories, instead of giving them just a corner of this one, is what keeps me from falling victim to Endless Subplot Proliferation Syndrome. Most of the time.

Chiefly, what I remember is his emphasis on the necessity for vivid visuals and over-the-top actions on the part of the characters, because in camera-eye, the visuals and actions are all the writer has to work with. In this kind of viewpoint, the writer can’t dip into anyone’s thoughts. He can only show whatever is on the surface…so he has to pick characters and situations where a lot shows on the surface.

Most of what I’ve learned about camera-eye since those early articles, I learned when I was asked to novelize the most recent three “Star Wars” movies as middle-school paperbacks. The job was a lot harder than I anticipated (partly because turning a 120-page screenplay into a 120-page novel means that every time you want to add something, like a description, you have to cut some of what’s already there). But the real difficulty came because of the difference in viewpoint.

Screenplays are, obviously, written for the camera. They don’t waste words or space on things the camera can’t see. Because I chose to write the novelizations as multiple-tight-third-person, I had to put in all those things…which meant I had to think a lot about the differences between camera-eye and tight-third-person prose.

True camera-eye has some fairly extreme limitations: no direct thoughts or emotions, no physical sensations (whether internal ones, like a sinking sensation in the character’s stomach, or external ones, like the feel of cool water running across a hand), no smells or tastes, not even the POV’s guesses about what characters are thinking (a camera can’t guess). The camera reports what it can see and hear, and that’s it. This viewpoint is generally thought of as both difficult to write (because the writer has fewer tools to work with) and distancing (because the writer can’t get inside the viewpoint character’s head – indeed, one could argue that there isn’t a viewpoint character at all, just someone the camera spends most of its time focused on).

Camera-eye has some advantages, though, which I might not have noticed if I hadn’t been converting a screenplay into a novel. The biggest one is the ability to change focus easily in mid-scene. In tight-third, once the writer has picked the viewpoint character for a scene, that person has to be at least present for the whole scene, and usually not just present, but involved in whatever action or conversation is happening. In camera-eye, the camera can follow the conversation or the action, rather than one particular character.

For instance, take a dinner scene in which the characters get into an argument. Eventually, Character A stands up and storms out. In a tight-third scene, with A as the viewpoint character, that would have to be the end of the scene; if the writer wanted to show the reader whatever happens next, he’d have to start a new scene with a new viewpoint character (which isn’t possible if the writer has chosen to write single rather than multiple viewpoint). In camera-eye, the writer doesn’t have to end the scene or follow A out of the room; the camera can focus on A until he storms out of the room and then pull back and continue to watch whatever reactions the rest of the people at the dinner table have to A’s abrupt exit.

Camera-eye is even more useful when there’s a less obvious division within a scene – say, a dinner party for twelve, where there are bits of important/interesting conversation going on all up and down the table. It would be tough for one single tight-third viewpoint character to see all of the important bits, but a camera-eye (or an omniscient) viewpoint can follow the key conversations wherever they lead.

Quite often, a multiple-viewpoint novel will have most of its scenes written in tight-third with different POV characters, but one or two scenes done in camera eye. These are usually glimpses of the villain(s), and the writer uses camera eye because it keeps the reader out of the villain’s head, and therefore limits the reader’s knowledge of just what the villain is really up to.

Camera-eye seems to be becoming more popular lately, possibly because the visual media (TV, movies, videos) have become so pervasive. I personally still prefer tight-third in most cases, because I think that the ability to show the viewpoint character’s thoughts is one of the advantages prose has over film, and why not use all the advantages one can get? Nevertheless, there are times and stories when camera-eye is just the thing (and flexibility is also an advantage). And it’s always good to have another tool in one’s writing toolbox.

By the time I finished the book, I knew something was wrong wrong wrong. I still wasn’t sure what, but I’d at least begun to look at other books with a writer’s eye, and I’d noticed that a lot of my favorites stuck with one character throughout, giving everything that person saw and thought and nothing that anyone else saw or thought. (I still didn’t have any terminology for that). So I decided, quite arbitrarily, that I’d do that for my next book, just to see if I could. And even though that was thirty years ago, I remember it quite clearly.

The first few chapters were tough. I hadn’t realized just how often I bounced around, or how convenient it had been to just say that so-and-so was angry or depressed instead of having to stop and figure out what “angry” or “depressed” would look like to my viewpoint character. Then I started to get the hang of it. It was kind of like method acting, I thought (not that I actually know anything about method acting). I just put myself into the viewpoint character’s head very firmly, and described what “I” saw and felt.

Then I hit chapter seven.

In chapter seven, two things happened: first, my viewpoint character was separated from the rest of the group, and second, she was drugged up to the eyebrows. She wasn’t going to be around to watch the exceedingly important things the other characters would be doing; she wasn’t even going to be in any condition to make reasonable observations of what she was seeing.

I stalled dead on that chapter for weeks. I desperately wanted to pick a different character and tell the next bit from his/her viewpoint (two characters, actually; one to watch what the rest of the group was doing and one to watch what my original, now-drugged, viewpoint character was doing). I knew how to do that.

But I couldn’t make myself do it. I’d set myself a challenge, and I really didn’t want to blow it. More important, every time I started seriously considering which of my remaining characters to use for my new viewpoint, I realized it felt wrong. I’d gone six chapters seeing things through the eyes of one and only one character; to switch to somebody else in chapter seven would be a huge jolt. It would throw the story off track. It felt wrong.

So, after much agonizing, I went ahead and wrote the next scene through the drugged eyes of my original viewpoint character. I had to stop and consider practically every sentence to make sure I was staying with the right feel and not showing any thoughts or reactions or giving any descriptions that my too-tranquilized heroine wouldn’t be thinking or feeling or describing. It was a big relief when she finally escaped and crawled into hiding to sleep it off.

Shortly thereafter, my POV reunited with the rest of the group. Everyone brought everyone else up to speed, and I found out something else. That scene I’d wanted to do so badly, the one my viewpoint character wasn’t around to watch? It worked just fine to have my other characters tell her all about it after the fact, in detail, because, you know, she hadn’t been around to watch. Oh, telling the story wasn’t as immediate or vivid as the actual scene would have been, but it worked…and given that I’d chosen a tight-third viewpoint, it worked much better than breaking the viewpoint to switch to someone else (so I could show the scene).

After that, sticking with tight-third for the rest of the book was…less difficult. Not easy, but at least I’d finally gotten it into my head that whenever I found myself desperately wanting to jump into some other character’s thoughts, I needed to think instead about how things looked to my viewpoint character and what conclusions she could draw from them. I didn’t always get to provide the thoughts and reactions I wanted to, because my POV character didn’t know most of her traveling companions very well, but I discovered that quite often, this was a Good Thing, because it let my POV character wonder and speculate and have her own interesting reactions, all of which ended up being even more revealing.

If I’d been a better writer, I might even have been able to manage showing enough of the other characters’ reactions for the reader to draw the right conclusions while still having my POV draw the wrong ones because of her background…but hey, it was only my second book and I was still struggling with sticking to one and only one POV character. I wasn’t up to anything more sophisticated.

Anyway, by the time I finished Daughter of Witches, I felt fairly comfortable writing single-viewpoint tight-third person. I even knew what to call it, because by then I was in a writing group and had other writers to talk to, several of whom knew a lot more about terminology than I did and were happy to share. I wrote my third book in first-person, which helped even more with the sticking-to-the-inside-of-one-head thing (because in first person, it is really really obvious if the writer slips and says something the POV wouldn’t know).

And that’s how I learned to write tight-third person.

Third person viewpoint, taken as a whole, is probably the most commonly used viewpoint in fiction. There are seemingly an infinite number of ways to do it, because third-person viewpoint has a very broad range, from what I call “tight third person,” where the writer not only sticks with a single character’s point of view, but also provides his/her thoughts and emotions (and only that one viewpoint character’s thoughts and emotions), to the broad sweep of omniscient viewpoint that can dip into anyone’s thoughts at any time or tell the reader things that are going on elsewhere, that happened in the past, or that will happen in the future.

The worst part of it is, neither the terminology nor the ways of dividing up the third person viewpoint are standardized. Some references will tell you that there is only ever the omniscient narrator (but sometimes the narrator chooses to focus on only one character); others will split things up into dozens of fine distinctions, depending on whether the narrative voice matches the character’s voice, how much of the character’s thoughts are or aren’t shown, whether the narrator is explicit, and a bunch of other things.

I personally find most of those fine distinctions to be pretty useless from a writer’s perspective. Maybe they’re helpful if you’re analyzing stuff after it’s written, but I’ve never found them to be much help while I’m writing. So I break the third person viewpoint up into three general sub-categories, and lump the rest of the distinctions under “voice,” where I don’t have to worry about them so much.

My three categories are: 1) Tight third person (also known as intimate third-person, third-person-personal, limited third person, third person subjective, and probably a bunch of other stuff). This is the viewpoint where the writer sticks with a single viewpoint character, providing his/her thoughts and emotions directly. The only way for the reader to find out the other characters’ emotions is for the viewpoint character to guess or infer them from what those characters say and do.

2) Camera-eye third person (also known as third-person objective, observer-in-the-corner, third-person-impersonal, fly-on-the-wall, third person indirect, camera-on-the-shoulder, and, probably, also a bunch of other things). In camera-eye third person, the narrator does not give the reader anyone’s thoughts or emotions. The writer just describes expressions and actions, provides dialog and tone of voice – the stuff that a camera or observer could see, and nothing more. Sometimes the writer’s “camera” sits on one particular viewpoint character’s shoulder; sometimes it’s further away, or changes focus; but it always shows only what is happening from the outside.

3) Omniscient viewpoint, in which the narrator is an invisible character who knows everything that has ever happened or will ever happen and everything that anyone is thinking or feeling, and who can report as much or as little of this as seems appropriate. I’ve heard the term “limited omniscient” bandied around a couple of times, but it seems to mean contradictory things depending on who’s using it, so I’m waiting until a consensus definition appears before I worry about using it.

Unfortunately for precise terminology, these categories do not have neat gaps in between – there’s a fuzzy area between each pair, where stories seem to be too objective to be called “tight third,” but are still providing the viewpoint character’s thoughts, so they can’t quite be “camera eye,” or where the narrator sticks with the same two characters’ thoughts, so it doesn’t really look like a truly omniscient viewpoint but it’s still not a single, tight-third viewpoint character. This is of great interest to a lot of folks who like to analyze and categorize writing, but I don’t think it matters nearly as much to writers.

What really matters to writers is that whatever the writer comes up with works. Usually, this means that there’s a certain amount of internal consistency – one doesn’t start off in tight-third and then switch to camera eye or omniscient halfway through (unless there’s a major section break to clue the reader in that the writer is doing this on purpose).

As I said, third-person viewpoint, taken as a whole, is probably the most popular viewpoint among writers of fiction. I think this is because of its flexibility – in tight-third, the writer can get almost as up-close-and-personal with the viewpoint character as one can get in a first-person manuscript, or the writer can provide an illusion of objectivity by backing away into camera-eye, or even omniscient. The writer can manipulate the focus and scope of a story by choosing which end of the scale she tells it from, making a sweeping epic feel more intimate and personal by sticking with a tight-third-person viewpoint and a single-narrator structure, or opening up what would otherwise be a restricted, personal tale by using omniscient viewpoint to bring in broader social and political consequences that the obvious tight-third viewpoint character wouldn’t know about.

And one can even have it both ways (both intimate/personal and with broader scope) by using a multiple-viewpoint-character structure while telling each characters’ scenes in tight-third. (One can, of course, do the same thing with multiple first-person viewpoint characters, but it’s a lot more difficult to pull it off because it’s a lot easier for the reader to confuse three different “I” characters than three tight-third viewpoint characters, each of whom has a different name.)

Of my three categories of third-person viewpoint, omniscient was historically the most popular, up into the early 20th century. Somewhere since then, tight-third has become the predominant type of third-person viewpoint. I found tight-third hellishly difficult to learn to do, but once I learned how, it became my favorite. I’ll talk more about that next time.

I know some people who feel quite strongly about keeping to the main character's POV except when it's absolutely necessary to go to someone else, but I've also seen that rule (like so many others!)broken successfully. It can be so useful to show someone else reacting to the MC.

Any guidelines on choosing? I keep having to write these scenes in more than one version to see which is the right way.

OK, first off, single-character-viewpoint tight-third-person is one kind of viewpoint. There are lots of others. It’s a stylistic choice: does the writer want the focus and intimacy that comes with sticking to a single character’s view for an entire novel, or does the writer want the flexibility that comes with using multiple viewpoints or omniscient third-person?

From the way the question is phrased, this particular writer is probably using a third-person multiple viewpoint structure. I call it a structure rather than a type of viewpoint because one can obviously do multiple first-person as well as multiple-third-person, or even do a mixed multiple viewpoint, with some of the viewpoint characters told in first person and others in third person. Or, I supposed, second person, though that would be very unusual…and is getting a little off-topic.

Back to multiple viewpoint. I group this into several loose categories: a) the ensemble cast, where the viewpoint characters all have their own storylines and importance; b) a plot-centered book with a wide-ranging plot that really needs to be seen from multiple angles; c) a character-centered story with a main character who needs to be seen from multiple angles; and d) the braided novel, where three or four plotlines interweave and overlap a bit, but may not come together until the end.

How the writer picks the viewpoint character for the next scene depends on what kind of story she/he is telling.

A straightforward braided novel that has, say, one viewpoint character for each of three plotlines, might go in strict rotation: a scene from A’s viewpoint, then B’s, then C’s, then back to A, repeat until they all come together at the end. If one plotline is more central than the others, it will likely have more scenes (perhaps A-B-A-C-A-B-A-C), or the A scenes may just be longer than the B or C scenes. Not all writers like to be tied down to a mechanical rotation like this, but if it’s right for the story, one can learn a lot from doing it…and it makes the question of whose viewpoint to use in the next scene really simple.

A plot-centered or character-centered book where there is a central thread that the writer wants to view from several directions is more complicated. A multiple-viewpoint, plot-centered story is a lot like a football game – the person who has the ball is the one who’s important, the one who’s moving the plot forward. So for each scene, the question is “who has the ball here?” Which character is moving the story forward? Who did the quarterback (your main character) hand the ball off to this time…or did he/she throw a pass to someone else, or run with it him/herself? Or has the other team intercepted?

A character-centered book is similar, except that instead of moving a plot-football forward, the idea is to get ever more interesting and deeper understanding of the central character, but from different angles. The first question here is therefore “whose opinion of the main character changes the most during this scene?” Which character does the scene make the biggest difference to, in terms of their relationship with or opinion of the main character?

An ensemble cast is, for me, the hardest kind of book to keep balanced, because you have all these people who are in the same place, who are supposed to be of equal (or nearly equal) importance. The one time I tried this, I found the balancing act very difficult – I had to look at it in all three ways – who’s doing the next plot-important thing? who do these events matter to the most? who’s had too many/not enough viewpoint scenes so far? – and then make a conscious decision each time as to which factor I was going to let have the most weight this time. (There is a reason why that story is lying mostly-abandoned on my hard drive…)

When all else fails – trust your backbrain. Go with what feels right. If nothing does, do the best you can; maybe later it will become clear what the right choice should have been. And yeah, rewriting a scene several times from different viewpoints is a pain … but I know more than one pro who does exactly that. So if it’s any comfort, you’re in good company.

The caravan wound slowly through the woods along the riverbank and broke at last into the fields surrounding the city. Except for a few wooden shelters near the gates, the city itself was invisible behind massive walls. Not even the roof of a tower showed above the smooth grey stone.

Though they were now within sight of their goal, the dust-covered guards continued to ride restlessly up and down the long chain of wagons, watching field and forest narrowly for any sign of unusual activity. Travel here, at the western border of Alkyra, was relatively safe, but the Traders generally preferred not to take chances.

When the last of the wagons had entered the city, the guards relaxed at last. Their far-flung riding pattern contracted into small eddies of motion between the lumbering wagons. The iron-rimmed wagon-wheels were noisy, and conversation was minimal. The horses seemed to find the stone pavement, rough as it was, an improvement over the deeply rutted dirt road outside the city, and it was not long before the caravan had reached the wide courtyard of the inn.

As the last wagon in the caravan rumbled into the courtyard of the Blue Heron Inn, Maurin Atuval allowed himself to relax. Theoretically, the safety of the trade goods had been the responsibility of the cargo masters since the wagons passed through the city gates of Brenn, and the other caravan guards had long since abandoned any pretense of patrol. Unlike his fellow guards, however, Maurin was himself a Trader, and could expect to share in the caravan’s profits-and losses. So he had continued to watch the wagons even after his duties were officially over.

As it stands, there’s nothing terribly wrong with the original opening – it’s a “zoom-in,” starting with a long view, slowly focusing down until we get to characters. But for an action-adventure that moves fast enough to have a kidnapping by the third chapter, it’s too slow. Also, in the original, we don’t get to an actual character until the end of the fifth paragraph, and the whole thing is in a sloppy omniscient viewpoint. So the original five paragraphs went, replaced by two that are a lot more specific and that have a specific viewpoint, that of Journeyman Trader Maurin Atuval.

The hypnotic rumble of the wagons gave way to a cheerful bustle of securing goods and stabling horses. Everyone took part, from the most exalted of the Master Traders to the lowliest apprentices. As each finished his appointed task, he went in search of friends or pleasure, depending on his inclination, and soon the courtyard began to empty.

Among those remaining was a tall, black-haired man in the utilitarian leather of a caravan guard, his skin tanned by the sun and wind of the trails to a deep bronze under its coating of grime. The uniform suited him well, and he carried himself with an easy confidence that proclaimed him a veteran despite his relative youth. He was checking the ropes securing one of the wagons when another man hailed him. “Maurin!”

The hired guards lined up near Master Goldar to receive their pay, while the Traders began the cheerful ritual of unloading and securing their goods. Maurin was hauling a bundle of white fox pelts to the storage room when someone tapped him on the shoulder from behind.

The dark-haired man at the wagon rope looked up. “Greetings, Har. Har made a rude noise and looked at his friend with disfavor. Maurin turned his head to see who had accosted him. The two were of a height, but Har’s slight build, accentuated by It was a slender young man in the leather uniform of the caravan guards, made him appear smaller and younger than he was. An whose unruly shock of sandy brown hair made him look younger than Maurin knew him to be.  added to the effect, and made the straight black brows and slightly tilted grey-green eyes more startling. “Har, what are you still doing here?” Maurin said. “I thought you would be away home by now.”

“I’ve been hunting all over for you,” Har said when Maurin made no response. “I invited you to visit when we got to Brenn; did you think I would forget? Haven’t you finished with that yet?”

The original description of Har is, again, not awful…but it stops the story dead in its tracks (and it hadn’t even really gotten going yet). I deleted most of it here, and stuck in references to the straight black eyebrows and green eyes later.

“I would have been, if I hadn’t had to stop and look for you,” Har said. “Here, give that to someone else. You’re done for the day.” He plucked the bundle of fox pelts from Maurin’s arms and set it on a nearby barrel.

“I’m just checking the knots,” Maurin replied. “Last stop we nearly lost three white fox pelts when the wind blew the canvas off, remember?”

“You forget, I’m a Trader. I’m not done until Master Goldar says I am.”

Har grinned unrepentantly. “This is Brenn, remember?” he mimicked. “That can’t happen in town, and anyway the light stuff has all been unpacked. So won’t you come on?”

“I didn’t forget.” Har looked smug. “I’ve already checked with him, and you’re officially released. Unless, of course, you’ve changed your mind about accepting my family’s hospitality while you’re in Brenn.”

“A journeyman can’t leave the caravan without the permission of one of the Master Traders. You know that,” Maurin answered.

Maurin looked at his friend in consternation. “I never said ... I mean, uh - “

“So let’s get it! They won’t deny it; there’s nothing more to do here.” As Maurin still hesitated, Har frowned. “I’m beginning to think you don’t want to come. I tell you, Maurin, you work too hard. Take the whole week and stay with us and relax for a change. Har raised his straight black eyebrows. “What’s the matter? Isn’t the Noble House of Brenn up to your standards?”

“I don’t want Master Goldar to think I’m trying to curry favor,” Maurin admitted. “And what will your family think? “You’re not thinking,” Maurin said, letting his breath out in exasperation. “Look, it’s all right for nobles and journeymen to brush cloaks on a caravan trip, but your family isn’t going to appreciate you bringing home a mere journeyman. Even the Master Traders don’t visit stay with lords in town unless they’re invited.”

“Well, I invited you, didn’t I? That’s because they don’t get invited,” Har said. ““They’d come fast enough if they were. And you don’t have to worry about my family; Mother won’t mind, and if she doesn’t, no one else will, either.”

“I’ll mind,” Maurin muttered, too low for Har to hear.

The original conversation was awkward and full of maid-and-butler dialog (A.K.A. “As you know, Bob” – people telling each other stuff they already know, for no good reason except to let the reader in on it). The revised version contains the critical bits (the invitation, needing to get Goldar’s permission, Maurin’s reluctance) in other ways. The only remnant of maid-and-butler is the “You forget, I’m a Trader…” line, which is both in character and salvaged by the following line, “I didn’t forget…” And in general it reads a lot more smoothly.

More next time.

When your first-person narrator looks at the street outside his house, does he see Fords and Chryslers and Saturns? Or does he see red vans and silver cars and a blue pickup? In other words, is he the sort of person who knows all the makes and models and maybe even the year, or are they just all cars to him? When she sits on a rock under a tree, does she notice that it’s metamorphic limestone and a fine specimen of  Acer saccharum, some kind of unpolished marble boulder and a sugar maple, or just a rock and a tree?

In a third-person viewpoint, the writer can fudge the narrative a bit even if she’s doing a tight third-person point of view, and let the reader know that it’s a sugar maple even if the viewpoint character has no clue. In first-person, you can’t fudge. If the viewpoint character says “I sat under a sugar maple,” then obviously she knows it’s a sugar maple.

This seems like a small thing, but it can come around and bite you when you least expect it. You have your viewpoint character describe a tree or a car or a horse in specific terms, because you know what it is and you want the reader to get a clear picture of the scene…and then four or five chapters later, the character says he doesn’t know the difference between an oak and an elm, or a Saturn and a Lexus, and any reader who’s at all noticing goes “hey, wait a minute, he used to know that…” Or worse yet, you turn out to need him to know (or not-know) something as part of a major plot-point. If it’s first-person, the only thing to do is go back through everything and hope you catch every place where you might possibly have said something in the narrative that indicated differently.

Of course, this can work to your advantage, too. If the first-person narrator describes elms and sugar maples by name, but just “red cars” and “blue cars,” then when the plot requires him to not be able to identify the robbers’ getaway car, he doesn’t have to say that he can’t tell one car from another. It’s already there, in the word choices he’s made every time a car came up in the narrative.

Furthermore, this cuts both ways with the worldbuilding as well as the characterization, especially if you’re a fantasy or science fiction author writing in a completely imaginary world. The reader builds up a picture of the world from what the narrator says, and how she/he says it. In first person, you have to be a little more careful, because the reader can’t tell whether the first-person narrator is omitting details about the trees because they’re unimportant and/or the same as in our world, or whether she just doesn’t know what sort of tree it is. Yet you can also use things like the way the narrator takes purple carrots for granted, or thinks of lemon-flavored streams as rather commonplace, to tell the reader things about the world that are a lot trickier to get across in third person.

In fact, one of the things that is, for me, the most fun about writing first person is that the narrator can have attitude. Her opinions about people and things don’t have to be implied or shown; she can just say them straight out. “I hate pickled beets.” “Donald is stupid.” Because of this, though, first-person is almost inherently unreliable. That is, the reader is predisposed to believe what the first-person narrator says, so if the narrator lies or doesn’t know what she’s talking about, it’s a lot harder to let the reader know that she really does like pickled beets and is just grousing, or that Donald actually could have been a rocket scientist if he’d wanted to.

Every type of viewpoint has advantages and disadvantages like this, and eventually, I’ll probably get through most of them.