Third-person limited is a point of view that uses he, she or they but stays inside one character's perspective at a time, so readers know only what that character senses, thinks and learns.
Where the term comes from
The Wikipedia article on narrative mode explains that in the third-person mode, the narration refers to all characters with third-person pronouns like he or she and never uses first- or second-person pronouns. Within that mode it separates an omniscient view from a limited, or close, view that is confined to one character's perspective. It names J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace as an example of the limited kind. It also notes that a book can shift viewpoint, for instance by alternating between several characters, which is a common way to widen a story while keeping each scene close.
An example
Bastien Orr steps off the night train and sees the town his brother left him. "The station clock was wrong by an hour, and he found he was glad of it. Nobody here would expect him yet." Everything in that passage belongs to Bastien: what he notices, what he feels, what he assumes. The narrator does not say what the ticket clerk thinks of him. If the next scene belongs to the clerk, a clean break shows that the camera has moved, and from there we get her suspicion, her memories and her view of Bastien.
Common mistakes
- Head-hopping, which means sliding into another character's thoughts in the middle of a scene without a break. It leaves readers unsure whose eyes they are using.
- Letting the narrator know more than the character does, such as describing the character's face from the outside as though they could see it.
- Staying so distant that the limited view gives no intimacy, and the writing reads like a summary.
- Picking a viewpoint character for convenience rather than for the character who has the most to lose in the scene.
How to check your manuscript
Give every scene a name, the person whose perspective it belongs to. Then read it asking one question of each sentence: could this person perceive or infer it? Highlight any thought attributed to someone else, any detail they could not see and any fact they do not yet know. Fix each by moving it into dialogue, a gesture the viewpoint character can read, or a different scene. If you want a wider perspective on purpose, see the entry on the omniscient narrator. The fantasy novel guide talks about how to handle several viewpoints in a big cast.
In Musael, the plan board keeps point of view as a field on each scene, so you can filter the book by viewpoint and see whether one character has gone quiet for too long.