Following a character

Probably the oldest form of narrative is the 'tale': folktales, fairytales, myths, legends, and so on.

In tales, point of view works like this:

The audience...
Listen to a narrator...
Who tells a story about one or more characters.

Stories like this are expressed as, "He/she/they did this and that."

We call this third person point of view.

(But there are varieties of third person point of view in which characters, storyteller, and audience can all know different things.)

For example, read this snippet and think about the what information is being conveyed by the narrator.

Once again, he deactivated the elevator. Then he reached up and pushed. The top of the elevator was a trapdoor that opened outward. He pushed the briefcase and the silver box ahead of him, then pulled himself up and climbed onto the roof of the elevator. He was now standing inside the main shaft of Roscoe Tower. He was surrounded on four sides by girders and pipes blackened with oil and dirt. Thick steel cables hung down, some of them humming as they carried their loads. Looking down, he could see a seemingly endless square tunnel illuminated only by the chinks of light from the doors that slid open and shut again as the other elevators arrived at various floors.

Point Blanc(2001)

There's a narrator who is telling us about the actions of this character, in the same way that you might tell a story about a friend.

The narrator describes:

Actions that the character performs.
The environment they are in (which could include other characters performing their own actions).
The character's perceptions (including what they see and hear).
- Note that these perceptions are what the narrator would have if they were there with the character (i.e. the narrator would see, hear, and smell the same thing).

What doesn't the narrator describe?

Notice how, in this snippet, the narrator doesn't describe anything inside the character.
What is the character thinking or feeling? All we know is based on how we see them behave.

We don't want to go too far down a rabbit-hole here, but each of the highlighters in this snippet could be translated into shot sizes from visual storytelling forms such as film, TV, and comics:

Environment: Wide shot
Action: Mid shot
Perception: Point of view (POV) shot

(You can see here that 'point of view' is a slippery term that can change meaning based on context. For example, in film 'point of view' means a shot angled to capture what a character is looking at.)

(Storyboard by Ulrich Zeidler in The Art of the Storyboard by John Hart)

The examples below try to observe the same limitations as the snippet above (the narrator can observe the character's actions, environment, and sensory perceptions—nothing else).

Do they stick within those limitations, or do they cheat?

He stepped out of the elevator on the sixth floor. The Infinit-e Energy Accounts Department was a wide, long, open-plan office. Adjouembe walked along rows of grey cubicles and said hi to his coworkers as he passed by their desks. Before going to his workstation, Adjouembe turned left into the kitchen. He took his lunchbox from his backpack and opened the fridge. He saw the fridge was full of other peoples' lunchboxes: all different colors and sizes, but bricked together without a gap between them.

She sat on the surfboard in the hot afternoon sun, one hand shielding her eyes as she looked out to sea, paddling gently with her feet, bobbing over the swells as they eased to shore. The beach was still crowded. It was school holidays so there were families with kids on the sand and in the water. But the good waves had gone and most of the surfers had taken off, leaving only Casey. She shuffled on her board. There was no sign of surf now. On the horizon she could see a container ship waiting its turn. Overhead, someone was paragliding.

The examples stick within the limits.

We call this third person limited objective point of view.

Third person means 'she/he/they'.
Limited means 'limited to this character' (more on that coming up).
Objective means 'can't access their thoughts and feelings'.

graphic showing narrator looking at elf character. The elf appears to be looking at a shampoo ad on a poster that reads: “Hair Silk. 100 gold per vial”.

Write your own third person limited objective snippet. Include actions and environment, and try to include a POV shot or other character perception.

Why would you use third person limited objective?

This lesson is all about different types of point of view, but the million dollar question throughout is, "Why would you tell a story in this point of view as opposed to another?"

So let's answer that for third person limited objective.

The key feature of this point of view is that it puts the characters slightly further away from the narrator and audience.

This extra psychological and emotional distance can have a few effects, depending on how the story is told:

It can make characters seem more mysterious, which can be good for mysteries and thrillers where you might want the audience to be surprised by a character's choices and actions (e.g. the detective who suddenly reveals they know who the killer is, to the surprise of the audience who haven't figured it out).
It can make characters seem more epic. It's hard to explain, but, because the audience can't access the characters' inner lives, the characters feel slightly out of reach—almost like they are on a stage or pedestal. This slightly elevated position can make the characters seem larger than life.
However, the risk with third person objective is that without any expression of character thoughts and feelings, the story can feel mechanical and dull.

It is possible to express rich character emotions by only describing their outward behaviour and speech, but it's hard work and not easy to sustain through a long story, so most storytellers jump inside their characters using a subjective point of view.

Let's look at how that works.

Point of view

Following a character