How to Do Point of View: Third-Person Limited
Getting inside your characters’ heads.
Let’s take a look at how Lev Grossman begins The Magicians:
Quentin did a magic trick. Nobody noticed.
At this point, we don’t know what point of view the story is taking. It’s probably not first person, otherwise the second sentence would have to be “Nobody but me noticed.” (A first person narrator couldn’t say that “nobody noticed” something they themselves described.) It’s also probably not second person, otherwise that second sentence would read “Nobody but you noticed.”
It could be third-person omniscient, in which case an omniscient narrator would be observing the entire scene and telling us that nobody noticed Quentin’s magic trick.
Or it could be third-person limited, in which case Quentin himself is aware that nobody noticed his magic trick, and we know this because we’re seeing the world from his perspective.
Let’s keep going:
They picked their way along the cold, uneven sidewalk together: James, Julia, and Quentin. James and Julia held hands. That’s how things were now. The sidewalk wasn’t quite wide enough, so Quentin trailed after them, like a sulky child. He would rather have been alone with Julia, or just alone period, but you couldn’t have everything. Or at least the available evidence pointed overwhelmingly to that conclusion.
At what point do we know for sure we’re in a third-person limited perspective? At the sentence “He would rather have been alone with Julia, or just alone period, but you couldn’t have everything.” This sentence doesn’t describe the external scene; instead, it describes Quentin’s internal mental state.
That’s what makes third-person limited different from third-person omniscient. As you might remember from our previous discussion, third-person omniscient points of view show us what characters do (through verbs) and how they do it (through adverbs) but these points of view do not show us what a character is thinking. Occasionally third-person omniscient narratives will describe a character’s thoughts, but they will nearly always attach them to a verb and adverb, e.g.: “Quentin thought sulkily that he would rather have been alone with Julia.”
A third-person limited novel can be written entirely from a single character’s perspective, or it can do what’s called “head-hopping,” in which the narration is shared among multiple characters’ points of views. The first volume of Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy, The Magicians, is seen only from Quentin’s perspective. The second volume, The Magician King, splits itself between two characters’ perspectives. We stay in Quentin’s head for an entire chapter, then switch to Julia’s for a chapter. In the third volume, The Magician’s Land, we follow the story from multiple characters’ perspectives, and chapter breaks continue to mark the points at which we switch heads.
This type of third-person limited narration is very popular among both writers and readers because the chapter breaks make it easy to keep track of the head hopping. In George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, also written from a third-person limited point of view, each chapter begins with the name of the character whose head we are currently inhabiting.
But there are also third-person limited writers who head-hop mid-chapter. Sometimes they put visible cues, such as extra white space between paragraphs, to designate the perspective shifts. Sometimes they just switch perspectives and trust that we’ll be able to follow along. Take this example from Jane Smiley’s Some Luck:
Rosanna finished shelling peas and set the bowl on the blanket, then knelt in front of Frank and said, “What a boy! What a darling boy! Are you a darling boy?” And she kissed him on the forehead, because her mother had impressed on her that you never, never kissed a baby on the lips. She laid her hand gently on the top of his head.
Frank still had his grip on the spoon, but his mother’s face transfixed him. As it loomed closer and then retreated, his gaze followed it, and as she smiled, he smiled, and then laughed and then he waved his arms, which resulted in the spoon’s being thrown across the blanket—a first! He saw it fly and he saw it land, and his head turned slightly so he could watch it.
In this example, we switch from Rosanna’s perspective to Frank’s between paragraphs. The reader is cued into the switch because Smiley begins each paragraph with the character’s name and gives each character a distinct voice and—you guessed it—perspective. Frank’s paragraph is literally from the perspective of a five-month-old baby; he is focused on what he can see and how he can move his body. Rosanna’s paragraph is from the perspective of a mother who has chores to do and parenting advice to remember.
If you want to write from a third-person limited point of view, you have two big challenges: first, clearly delineating the head-hopping (if you choose to head-hop); and second, making sure to write only what can be observed from a single character’s perspective. You could not write “Frank watched his mother’s face loom closer until she gently kissed his forehead—her mother had impressed on her that you never, ever kiss babies on the lips.” Frank would not likely have been born when Rosanna and her mother had the “never kiss babies on the lips” conversation—and even if he were present when they had the conversation, he wouldn’t have understood it—so he cannot share that information with the reader. The anecdote will have to wait until we’re inside Rosanna’s head again.
Third-person limited novels help us see the world through an individual character’s eyes—or through a series of individual characters’ eyes—without the “I am telling you this story” aspect of first-person narration. The third-person limited character often doesn’t even know they’re in a story; all they’re doing is kissing a baby, throwing a spoon, or doing a magic trick and then checking to see if anyone noticed.
Nicole Dieker is a freelance writer, a senior editor at The Billfold, and a columnist at The Write Life. Her debut novel, The Biographies of Ordinary People, published in May 2017.
