: Re: Is First person perspective more intimate than Third person perspective? I know there's a lot of questions regarding this topic, but none of them delved too deep into if there's a different

@Debbie451

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The standard problem with third-person perspective is when it's written from the point of view of a god-like omniscient being. Not only can this spoil the narrative and plotting, because the reader knows things which the characters do not, but it tends to disconnect the reader from the characters.

The more usual way to approach this is with third-person limited perspective. The narrative is still written in third-person, but you are only given the viewpoint and experiences of a limited number of individuals (or perhaps only one). We tend to call them "point-of-view (PoV) characters".

Most people have read the books of A Song of Fire and Ice. You'll notice that each chapter tends to be centred around a particular character. During that chapter, the thoughts of other characters are never shown, even if those other characters may later be PoV characters themselves. What emotions you see from the other characters are strictly those which the PoV character at the time can see.

There are other ways to do this, of course. The Number of the Beast (which in all other ways is a tedious exercise in right-wing stupidity) is written in first-person perspective, but each chapter changes which of the four main characters is "I". Charles Stross's Laundry Files series are mostly presented as the protagonist's work journal, so are mostly in first-person perspective, but every now and again there are third-person perspective inserts of relevant events which have been inferred or discovered subsequently but which the protagonist was not aware of at the time.

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