Harmony Ink Press

In the aftermath of a mass shooting in a gay club, high school junior Collin faces the loss of his best friend, painful injuries, and being outed in a conservative suburb of Houston.

Ask Andrea is a monthly feature about proofreading and editing. Andrea is a proofreader and editor at Dreamspinner Publications, International Publishers of Quality Gay Romantic Fiction. If you have proofreading or editing questions let us know. Andrea will answer your questions in upcoming posts.

Read your story out loud.

Do a thorough spot-check by running a spell check and then by using the search function. When running spell check, select both "grammar" and "style" in addition to spelling, with the intent that there will likely be a lot of false positives. When using the search function, type in a fairly common word (e.g., "then"). Each time the functions stop, review the surrounding paragraphs too.

Limit/reduce the amount of text visible on the screen (e.g., enlarge the font, increase the margins and spacing), then work backward through the story.

This post is part of a series on fiction point of view. Earlier posts can be found here. See books I edit at Dreamspinner Publications.

Third-person limited point of view is one step removed from first-person. If in first person readers see through the protagonist’s eyes, in third-person limited they watch over their shoulder like an invisible parrot. (Okay, maybe not exactly like that, but you get the idea.) To recap, third-person limited point of view:

Uses he, she, they, and associated pronouns for all characters

Uses narration limited to one character’s thoughts, knowledge, and experience

Provides a natural way for authors to limit information in a similar way to first person, but allows a wider scope better suited to action scenes, for example

Here’s an example of a paragraph written in third-person limited.

On his way to the store that morning, Jim tried to decide if anything was different. The sky was the same blue. The birds sang the same dumb song. But there was something in the air, an uncomfortable awareness creeping up his spine. Something isn’t right.

From comparing this paragraph to the same paragraph written in first person, we can observe a few of the ways in which third person and first person are similar:

The narrator has a distinctive voice.

The author can only relate what the protagonist can see, hear, feel, smell, taste, or experience, or what they already know.

Like first person, third limited requires an author to think about their protagonist’s word choices, syntax, and so on as integral to building their character. If the protagonist wouldn’t know the word apiarist, stick to beekeeper.

Third limited also shares some other challenges with first person as well—it can be difficult to get to know other characters and their motivations, and it’s easy to fall into the apparently/obviously/evidently trap to tell things outside the protagonist’s experience. As it is with first person, The Emotion Thesaurus is a good resource here and can help you get in the groove of indicating characters’ emotions via body language. (Not every person is good at reading body language; it’s okay if your protagonist misses cues that your reader does not, or vice versa.)

Because third limited allows a bit more distance between the reader and the protagonist than first person does, authors can get away with more in the way of characterization. The unlikeable character who made readers put the book down in first person can be a star here. If you have a protagonist who’s calculating, callous, catty, chickenhearted, conceited, crass, or even just clueless, third limited might be the right choice. Those few inches between being inside the character’s head and riding on his shoulder may let your reader disassociate from those negative traits enough to enjoy the entertainment they create. Just exercise moderation to keep character redeemable. After all, there’s a fine line between “he’s so stupid; I love him” and “this person’s idiocy is a danger to the human race.”