The Art of Writing: How to Write Bestselling Novels

Writing Third-Person POV: Rules & Tips

This chapter will be short because there isn't a lot to say about third-person POV that isn't common sense.

Originally, third-person POV was one of the most prominent perspectives in which to write. Most authors wrote in it up until about the last twenty years when we saw a shift to more first-person POV books for their engagement value.

Third-person has its advantages and disadvantages. It's good for diverse POVs, but it's bad for deep engagement. So be sure you learn the deep POV techniques in my chapter called Third-Person Deep POV to make yours stand out and to draw the readers in deeper.

PERSPECTIVE & DEPTH

When writing third-person, you're generally picturing the character from the outside because you're using he or she as the pronoun. That means you're an outside observer, documenting the events in the story.

If it were first-person POV, you'd view your character as if you were in his or her head. First-person is the deepest POV, so it engages the readers better than any other POV. But you don't have that luxury with third-person.

Keep that distinction in mind.

If you want to make your third-person POV deeper, place yourself in the head of the character, but don't write with my or I personal pronouns. Just viewing things from the character's eyes will cause you to write deeper in third-person.

ITALICS

Internal thoughts in third-person are written in italicized first-person POV.

Most publisher and readers don't like many italicized internal thoughts, so keep them to a minimum or don't use them at all. Often, all they show is lazy or untrained writing because that internal thought can easily be written into the narrative.

You see a lot of italicized internal thoughts in third-person POV books on Wattpad. If those writers just develop a few skills and learn a few rules and they can fix that crutch very quickly.

The rule of thumb for when to use internal thought is: only use it when absolutely necessary and when it makes a strong impact.

You'll also want to keep italicized words to a minimum, meaning words you want the reader to know are stressed. If your writing is good, you won't need many stressed words italicized.

BREACHING POV

Make sure you don't give details that your POV character does not know or cannot know unless you have an omniscient narrator. That's called omniscient third-person POV and it's the lost difficult style in which to write. It's very difficult because it's not easy to make smooth transitions between characters' POVs and make it feel natural.

Very few omniscient POV novels succeed. People like to feel centered on a character and they like things hidden from that character because it creates tense. Omniscient POV often spoils that and doesn't get deep enough for the reader. And that's what your book can sound like if you breach POV.

So make sure any information you give in the narrative is known and seen by the character. If it's not, either
don't write it, or write it in such a way that makes it clear that the character it guessing at that info.

So I can't say my Winter's Edge character Ian knows something another character is thinking. That'd be a breach of POV. He has to guess what the other character is thinking of feeling, or he must assume or speculate on it. He can't know for certain. Shape your characters guesses carefully so you stay within their POV.

There isn't much more to say about third-person POV. If you think of anything else, let me know and I'll revise this chapter to add that to it.

ASSIGNMENT

If there are any techniques in this chapter you don't use, go through and use some if them in your books. By the time you finish editing one book with these techniques, and you write a few chapters using them, they'll be one second nature.

Good luck, and as always, please vote for this chapter if you liked it!