Quick Links: Everything You Need to Know About Writing a 3rd-Person POV

Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

It’s all about your Point of View.  Over at Helping Writers Become Authors, K.M. Weiland goes in depth about writing in third person pov, with links to articles on omniscient point of view, and first person point of view. I know this is my weak area, and my focus for this years NANO in November.

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Chances are good you’re using a third-person POV (or Point of View) in your story right now. If not, then you likely used it in the past or will give it a try in the future. It’s a nearly universal writing technique and the most popular of all the POV choices. But are you using it correctly?

Not everything in writing comes easily. I often talk about how most of storytelling—particularly structure—is surprisingly instinctive for most writers. We understand it on a subconscious level, to the point we’re often on the right track with our books long before our conscious brains catch up.

But not everything’s like that. For most writers, POV isn’t like that. The gist of one of the questions I most frequently receive is: “POV????!!!!”

I’ve written primer posts about omniscient POV and first-person POV, but I realized I still needed to do one on the most prevalent of all POVs—the third-person POV.

This is the POV of choice in more books than not—everything from Emma to Ender’s Game. It’s arguably the least complicated of the POVs, so it’s a good choice for beginning writers. But it’s also arguably the most flexible of the POVs, which means it’s also a good choice for the most advanced and complicated of stories.