What are the different points of view in fiction?
Who is telling the story and how much they can know — a decision that constrains everything else, and one that is difficult to change once a draft exists.
First person. I walked in. The narrator is a character.
Strengths: immediacy, a strong distinctive voice, and automatic limitation — the reader knows only what the narrator knows, which creates suspense for free.
Constraints: you cannot show scenes the narrator is absent from, or reveal what anyone else thinks. Describing the narrator physically is awkward. And the narrator must survive to tell it, unless you are doing something deliberate.
Second person. You walk in. Rare, striking, and hard to sustain at length. Used for disorientation, complicity, or a strong stylistic effect.
Third person limited. She walked in. External narration, but confined to one character's knowledge and perceptions at a time. The dominant mode in modern fiction, because it combines first person's intimacy with the flexibility of an outside narrator.
Many novels use limited third across multiple viewpoint characters, switching at chapter or section breaks.
Third person omniscient. The narrator knows everything and everyone, and may comment directly. Common in nineteenth-century fiction and less so now. Gives scope and authorial voice; costs intimacy, and makes suspense harder since the narrator is withholding rather than unaware.
Third person objective. Reports only observable action and speech, entering no one's head. Cinematic and cold.
The two technical points that matter most:
Psychic distance. Even within limited third, you can stand very close to a character's consciousness or far back, and skilled writers move along that scale deliberately within a scene.
Head-hopping. Switching viewpoint within a scene without a clear break disorients readers, and is the most common technical fault in amateur fiction. Omniscient narration is not an excuse — genuine omniscience is consistent and controlled, not accidental.
Tense is a separate choice. Present tense increases immediacy and limits the narrator's hindsight; past tense is the default and carries less attention to itself.