The Ultimate Guide to Third-Person Writing

As an author, one of the most important decisions you have to make is what writing perspective to use. The most common are first-person writing, where you write from the perspective of one of the characters, and third-person writing, where you write as someone outside the story, observing the actions of the characters. 

There are advantages to both the first person and the third-person perspective. Read on to find out more about third-person writing.

The third person is what you call it when someone writes a story from outside the action. On paper, that translates into using third-person pronouns (he, she, it, they) when talking about the characters in the story. There is more than one type of third person. Here are the three most common ones:

1. Third-person omniscient: third-person writing as a superpower

Omniscient is an adjective that means all-knowing. So if you choose to write in the third-person omniscient, you are writing as if you were entirely outside the story, and you have the ability to be inside all of your characters’ heads and know their thoughts and feelings. As an omniscient narrator, you can also travel through time and space. Obviously, this has many advantages for someone who wants to write a story because it makes it easy to show each character’s motivation.

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