Three words perfectly describe the essence of this perspective: You. Are. God. As such, you know everything about everyone. To be specific, third-person omniscient is a narrative mode in which the reader is presented the story by a narrator with an overarching, seeing and knowing everything that happens within the world of the story, regardless of the presence of certain characters, including everything all of the characters are thinking and feeling. The only question is, how much will you reveal to us lowly readers?

Third person omniscient (TPOmni) is a complex style and not easy to pull off well as you always run the risk of confusing the reader. It is most often used in large-scale sagas like JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or, more recently, Stephen King’s Under the Dome, but most often doesn’t mean always. Many novels of the nineteenth century employ this perspective, perhaps most memorably the works of Jane Austen, including Pride and Prejudice. Below you’ll find my not at all memorable example of the perspective:

Shelby leaned against the door frame, trying not to let him see that she was as tense as a coiled spring.

“What do you want, Luke? I told you I didn’t have anything else to say. If you don’t believe me then it never would have worked anyway.”

Luke sighed. He’d known this wasn’t going to be an easy conversation, but it looked like Shel was going to make him battle for every inch she gave. He saw the twitch in her hand that she never even realized gave her away every time she felt overstressed.

“You don’t have to say anything, Shelby. I came to say I’m sorry.”

Her eyes widened, but otherwise she didn’t move. She had already given up hope that he would ever believe her. Surviving another crushing disappointment didn’t seem possible. Now that he knew the truth, however, Luke held onto hope that he still had at least a snowball’s chance in hell of Shel accepting his apology. Neither of them could really bring themselves to embrace a future that didn’t involve the other. The trouble would be getting her to admit it.

Serves me right if she tells me to take a hike, he thought. I should have trusted her.

This is not the best example, but it illustrates the ability to tell what multiple characters are thinking.

One option you have to help corral the extensive amount of information available within TPOmni is to create a narrator that almost becomes another character (for examples of a narrator as character, see the double narrator of Princess Bride by William Goldman or the musical Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim which you can watch in pieces on youtube starting here or watch the entire opening performed by students at NYU here).

Personally, I have yet to generate a story idea that demands the scale of TPOmni storytelling, but when it’s done well, this perspective is a powerful tool. Definitely not one to be used lightly. How do you figure out if this point of view is right for your novel? Here are a few possible questions to ask:

• Are there multiple characters who play a pivotal role in this story?
• If so, am I going to lose tension or heighten it by revealing their thoughts? (Think about what would have happened to the Harry Potter series if you’d been able to read Snape’s mind the entire time. The build up of tension as readers flip-flopped between believing him evil and thinking that maybe he wasn’t so bad would have been ruined.)
• Can the goal I have in mind be reached by revealing short scenes in the objective third person?
• If it seems like the main character is missing out on too much, am I sure I have the best person in charge to tell the story?

These questions are by no means comprehensive or final, but they’re a good starting place if you’re unsure whether or not TPOmni is for you. Hopefully, though, with the information I’ve presented in this series on perspective you’ll have a better road map to help get you from conception to completion.

See Also:
POV Overview
First Person
Second Person
Third Person Objective
Third Person Limited Omniscient

Third Person Limited Omniscient (TPLO): a narrative mode in which the reader experiences the story through the senses and thoughts of just one character.

Even without doing the research to back this up, I still feel comfortable saying that a good portion of literature written after the beginning of the 1900s uses this point of view. Probably not a true majority, but a statistically significant percentage. The popularity of TPLO is completely justifiable, though–you get the close-up feel of first person with the flexibility and god-like window of third. So, what are the basics of this perspective?

• You can read the mind of only one character, usually the protagonist.
• You refer to all characters, including the “storyteller” byt their name or as he/she/they. Never I or we unless it is used in dialogue
• You can offer explanations and insights via the narrator’s voice as long as it’s done consistently (for examples, see Harry Potter or Princess Bride, just for the narrator’s voice, though, not the point of view )
• While you can only read the mind of one character, that doesn’t mean you can’t watch things she/he can’t see. When used well, you can jump to other areas and give readers knowledge that the protagonist doesn’t have. The opening chapters of books 1, 6 and 7 of Harry Potter. They are essentially written in TPO.

From my own library of unpublished work, here is a short story I wrote in college using TPO:

The Drive

The boy stuck his head out the car window, but a hand yanked him back in.

“Don’t do that.”

Those three words were pretty much all his father ever said to him: “Don’t do that.” Didn’t ever tell him what he could do, but made damn sure he knew what not to do.

The boy leaned back against the seat and moved his fingers closer to the window. Inch by inch he moved them, his eyes never leaving his father’s profile. Finally, his whole hand was sticking out the window, but no reprimand came.

Apparently, he could do this.

They’d been driving for six hours, but the boy had no notion of where they were headed. They were in Nevada. Somewhere. Desert stretched before and behind them, as if that was all there was in the world: a never-ending horizon of sagebrush and waves of heat.

It had been a long, quiet ride; the boy had never tried talking to his father, not without his father saying something first. His mom had been the one who brought joy and meaning into their home, but even with her to soften his father’s edges, he had been an imposing figure in the little boy’s eyes.

When she’d died two years ago, father and son had lapsed into an enduring silence.

His father would only break that silence for one story, one memory—

“I ever tell you about when your mom and I first met?” His voice was deep and had a scratchiness that usually came after decades of chain-smoking, but he’d never as much as held a cigarette.

The man glanced at his son, waiting for some kind of response. They both knew the answer—of course he had—but that didn’t matter. The boy shook his head no and waited.

“She was studyin’ art up at the University, but she’d made a friend who worked at the government unemployment office. They got her a job so she could work her way through school.”

All the other times, he’d told this story to the boy at night before they went to bed, after his father had turned the lights out. Now, though, the sun was beating through the window, illuminating the world so much it made it hard to look at anything head on. Now, the boy could actually see his father tell the story. The unforgiving light outlined each hair in the stubble covering the man’s chin and the lines around his eyes that made him seem so sad and so much older than thirty-eight. The boy stared, wide-eyed, afraid that, if he blinked, he might miss some twitch of the mouth or shift of the eye that would reassure the boy that the answers to the silent questions he asked his father were right: Do you really miss her? Did you love her as much as she loved you? Do you love me?

“That was a hard year. People’d be lined up outside that office for hours ‘cause there wasn’t enough jobs to go round, see? You’d think, a time like that, anybody workin’ in the unemployment office’d be as pursed as a pickle. But not your mom.”

The man’s eyes focused solely on the road ahead. He never glanced over at his son to be sure he was listening, that the boy was getting all this and remembering it like he was supposed to. But the boy saw how his father clenched his jaw when he wasn’t speaking, and how he wrinkled his nose more often than usual, like he had to sneeze or like he was about to—

“She smiled at me, and damn if my whole day didn’t get better right there. She told me that she was gonna do the best she could to find me a job that fit my particular qualifications. Promised to call me herself when she found somethin’, and she blushed like anything when I shook her hand goodbye. She was as sweet as a cereus flower and prettier than a bluebird, she was. And she kept her promise, too.”

His was steady and calm. He never sounded as if he was doing anything other than reciting something he’d memorized for the benefit of the kid, but he sniffed a couple of times, his nose twitching like a dog that’d caught a scent.

“She got me my job with Davis Construction. Damn if I didn’t fit there so well they made me a site manager after only a few months. And I’d never have found that place if not for your mom.”

The corner of his lip quivered, and the boy tensed in his seat, watching for any other movement, any sign of the thoughts behind his father’s unreadable blue eyes—nothing came. But the dry wind rushing through the open windows made the boy blink, and his eyes refocused past his father to the road rushing by on the opposite side of the car. He was surprised to recognize the town they were driving through; the corner store where they sold candy for cheap and the diner that made the world’s best flapjacks. Bunkerville; his mother’s sister lived here. She’d offered to adopt the boy when his mother died, but his father had just shaken his head, no. No. The boy blinked again and quickly refocused on his father.

“I was so grateful; I went back to that office and stood in line for another three hours just to see your mom. I brought her daisies and told her that, if she didn’t object none, I’d be more than happy to take her out to dinner.”

The man sniffed again, but, this time, the tears he had been fighting to hold back welled up and, one by one, slid down his cheek.

“She said yes.”

The tears came faster, then, one following the next so quickly that the boy couldn’t tell them apart. But his father never gave any indication that he knew he was crying. Never moved to wipe his eyes. His voice never shook, never faltered.

The man turned off the main road and into a residential section of the town. Everything was getting more familiar: the park his aunt would take him to play with the swing set the boy loved climbing on, the house with the old lady who smelled like mold, the street where the boy who loved to race lived. He glanced at the bags and boxes in the backseat and wondered how long he and his father would be staying—his father sure had packed a lot. He looked back out the window and remembered his mother teaching him to ride a big kid’s bike here. He wished, now that he’d finally learned to ride it without help, that she was here to see how hard he’d practiced. The boy daydreamed what it would be like to have his mother back, for his father to be happy again; he wasn’t expecting his father to say anything else; the story usually ended there.

But, after a minute, his father kept talking.

“You used to remind me of her, but you been alone with me too long already. You’re too much like me now.” His father sighed and shook his head; the boy wasn’t sure if he was talking to himself or not. “I’m not right to be a father on my own. Ain’t got it in me. I tried, but, sometimes, you just gotta know when it ain’t about you no more. Sometimes you gotta do what’s best for someone else.”

The man finally glanced at his son, the tears still running down his face. This time, the boy didn’t look away. He thought about how his father used to smile when his mother danced with him in their living room. He remembered all the times his father’s eyes got wide and scared when the boy had hurt himself bad. He realized that, not once in ten years had his father ever yelled at him in anger.

The boy smiled and said, “I think you done all right, Pa. I’m still here, ain’t I?”

His father pushed the brake, slowly bringing the car to a stop. He stared at his son as if seeing him for the first time, and the boy stared right back. He glanced up the road, in the direction of his late wife’s sister’s house, and back at his boy, then, he nodded.

He pulled into the next driveway, reversed, and they headed home together.

There’s a lot of possibility inherent in this perspective. You can get almost as close as first person or almost as distant as TPO. The integration of thoughts in my example is subtle, but it’s there in the little things that someone watching through a window would not have known. Could not have known. How you use that knowledge, though, is the important part.

Added note: Depending on the source, this perspective is sometimes simply called third person limited. I feel as though this is a misnomer. Dropping the mention of the narrator’s omniscience makes the point of view seem far less appealing than it is. But that’s just my opinion.

See Also:
POV Overview
First Person
Second Person
Third Person Objective
Third Person Omniscient

It’s hard to know how often this perspective is really used because it’s somewhat overlooked. I have had the five perspective classifications in my head for so long that I can’t remember who first taught them to me. What I do remember is some teacher at some point telling me that this point of view (which I remember being referred to as both Third Person Objective and Third Person Limited) was even less popular than second person. If the sparse Wikipedia mention is any indication (it doesn’t even have its own page!), third person objective (TPO from here on because I am lazy) has gone from unpopular to nearly discarded.

This style, like second person, has a lot of intrinsic restrictions. The story you get in TPO is the same kind of story you would get from a private investigator who has been following your characters. He can describe what they did and said, but can give no true insight into their thoughts and motivations.

The basics of TPO are as follows:
– I and we are used only in dialogue
– All characters are referred to by name or by the distant pronouns he/she/they
– You cannot delve into any character’s thoughts, not even your protagonist’s

For example:

He sat in her seat at the kitchen table, placing his hands where hers had rested so many times.

“I still take care of your roses,” he said to the air.

The silence that reigned then was broken only by the ticking of the old clock hanging on the wall. He sat there for another minute and sighed.

“I should accept the fact that if you haven’t come back by now, you’re not going to.” He stood and gently pushed the chair back into place. “But I still feel guilty that no one will be here to take care of the roses once I leave.”

All the information you get from the segment above comes from her observable actions and the words he speaks aloud. Sticking to that, keeping yourself from accidentally filling in the blanks, if the hardest part of writing in TPO. An upside, however, is that you can peer through anyone’s window, peek into their lives (a peek that all three third person perspectives include).

Excepting this, TPO is the most distant point of view, watching but in no way involved. Think back to my investigator example–in a way, reading a book in TPO is more than a little like reading a PI’s report. Not that it’s never used successfully. In fact, one of my favorite short stories is in this narrative style: Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway, which you can read by clicking the title. However, unless you have a genius narrative idea like Hemingway’s, you’re probably better served by one of the other points of view.

See Also:
POV Overview
First Person
Second Person
Third Person Limited Omniscient
Third Person Omniscient

EDITED TO ADD (12/17/2016):

In my two Assassins novels, I make use of this point of view often. For those books, Discord and Nemesis, the TPO perspective allows me to give readers a look at what’s happening away from the narrator. I can give away secrets the narrator doesn’t know, or at least leave clues, and it adds suspense to the pacing of the books. Below is an example from Nemesis, and it is the very first section of the book:

The vicious squall battered the Sea of Japan, roiling the waves and sending high winds screaming across the water. Those waves crashed against the shores of the small, isolated island sitting between Japan and the Korean Peninsula. Wind battered trees and displaced rocks on the island’s tall mountains.

Inside the Lyohwa Labs research facility on the northwestern edge of Etobih-lin, none of that could be heard. Especially not on sublevel two.

Lab six was a large, windowless room with a door that couldn’t be opened from the inside. Cameras in the corners were positioned to monitor everything, with no blind spots, but at this early hour of the morning, there didn’t seem to be much to watch. Only one woman—wearing a white, full-body, level A hazmat suit—was at work.

Hands braced on a backlit glass table, she stared through her faceplate at the rack of glass vials in front of her, furrows across her forehead. The vials seemed to glow with the light from the table, and the intensely green liquid was vibrant in the otherwise stark white and stainless steel room. Though her gaze jumped between the vial and the tools laid out in front of her, she ignored the alerts popping up on the wall-mounted screen to her left and the beeps of the various machines, all of them labeled LyoLabs.

“They’ll kill you if this works.” The words were quiet, but the distortion of her breathing apparatus gave them an ominous rasp. “Whatever. At least you won’t be here anymore, right?”

However cavalier the words seemed, her hands shook when she straightened and tried to lift a vial out of the rack with a pair of tongs. She took a deep breath, the sound made mechanical by her respirator. Her hands steadied. After lifting it clear of the rack, she turned and placed it in another on the epoxy resin workspace behind her.

Slowly, carefully, she extracted a small amount of the green liquid with a pipette and placed three drops into the brown mixture simmering in a beaker over a lit Bunsen burner. The color shifted as the bright drops swirled and dissolved into the bubbling liquid. From a vacuum-sealed jar on the table, she measured out 0.03 milligrams of an extremely fine powder. When she added it to the beaker, lines of dark blue spread through the mixture like ink, but when she stirred it with a thin glass rod, the solution cleared.

“Almost there.”

Another alert buzzed through the computer’s speakers. The tone was lower—a grating sound meant to draw attention—but she didn’t spare the screen more than a cursory glance.

The door behind her opened; the hiss of the airtight seal releasing would have made that obvious even if the door’s handle hadn’t clicked as it lowered and announced company.

A leanly muscled, olive-skinned guy wearing a LyoLabs security uniform walked into the room, a Colt handgun in his hand. He kept it pointed at the floor.

“I don’t care how impatient you are,” she said without turning around. “There is no possible way for me to make these machines work any faster. Either shoot me, or let me get back to my work.”

“Adila?”

“Who else?” she muttered. “It’s not like you assholes let me have assistants anymore.”

He stopped at the wall display that had been flashing a red alert box. When he saw what was written there in bold black-and-white Korean letters, he cursed. When he crossed the room, his footsteps were heavy and quick. “Adila, we have to go. Now.”

“Go. Stay. Come. Work. I’m not a goddamn dog!” She slammed her hand down. The stirring rod clenched in her fist shattered when it hit the countertop. Releasing the broken pieces, she turned. “If you want me to figure this out, leave me alone and let me— Who are you?”

Though the gun-wielding newcomer was dressed as a guard, he looked like he might be twenty at the oldest. He seemed too young to be working there, but his dark eyes searched the room with purpose, and he held his Colt like someone with decades of experience shooting it.

“I’m your ticket out of here if you follow me,” he said. “But the offer won’t be worth anything in about four and a half minutes.”

Adila hesitated only a moment. In a burst of motion, she grabbed a flash drive and jammed it into one of the computers, activating a command to back up the data.

“Time is running out,” the guy warned. “Is that info worth our lives?”

“It’s worth a hell of a lot more than that.” Adila dumped the clear liquid from the bubbling beaker into the sink, then filled the beaker with a solution from a large bottle next to the sink, and poured the rest of the bottle’s contents and all of the green-filled vials down the drain. When the computer flashed Backup Complete, she ejected the flash drive and pressed it into her rescuer’s hand.

After executing a command to format the computer and wipe the drive clean, Adila followed the stranger out of the lab, slowly stripping the hazmat suit as she walked, dropping the pieces behind her.

As the suit fell away, the body underneath it became visible—and the scars that body wore. Old, healed burns from pinky finger to elbow up the side of her left arm. A misshapen bump that might have been a badly treated break. Thin lines were almost hidden in the natural creases of her neck, but they were too pale against her naturally tan skin to disappear completely.

“Annyeong, fuckers,” she said as the door shut behind them.

Wikipedia says:
The second-person narrative is a narrative mode in which the protagonist or another main character is referred to by employment of second-person personal pronouns and other kinds of addressing forms, for example the English second-person pronoun “you”.

An intriguing, difficult, sparsely used point of view, second person is also one of the least mentioned. I should probably also mention before I start that I don’t like this perspective much. It is at best hard and at worst impossible to sound natural writing in this viewpoint, and while it can be an effective tool in certain narrative situations (none of which come to mind right now…), I find the constant use of “you” pulls me out of the story. A lot of people (both readers and writers) would probably agree with me, but there are definitely those who don’t. Some of the most notable examples include Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club) in Diary, Jay McInerney in Bright Lights, Big City, and numerous short stories by  authors both famous and obscure. So, now that we’ve covered that, on to the actual subject.

The light that came through your window that morning was gray, sunlight filtered through the fog that had covered the town for over a month. But that morning, something felt different. You woke up instantly alert, as though someone had shouted your name, every cell tingling with a readiness for danger as adrenaline coursed through your blood. Mornings like that terrified you: something horrible and inescapable always seemed to follow.

Second person attempts to literally draw the reader into the story by placing them in the action. This allows a possible level of sympathy and empathy that the other points of view simply can’t match. The reader becomes the main character; the character’s problems become the reader’s, the losses and victories, the readers losses and victories. On the reverse side of this coin however, is the danger of alienating the reader. Because you’re making the reader the protagonist, they have to accept on some level that the character’s actions could reasonably be their own.

This is one of the other aspects that, personally, turns me away from second person in both books I read and ones I write. I find myself thrown out of the story entirely if “I” start saying and/or doing things completely contrary to my actual personality.

I’m sorry to say that because I have so little reading or writing experience in this style, I have nothing else to say about it. However, below are some links that may or may not prove useful to those who wish to learn more.

Novel Writing Help
Wikipedia
The Writer’s Craft

See also: 
POV Overview
First Person
Third Person Objective
Third Person Limited Omniscient
Third Person Omniscient