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http://www.arghink.com/2009/11/09/the-art-of-pov/ http://www.arghink.com/?p=1970 I started to write this as a reply to Laura’s comment and then realized it would be better as a post. Laura compared POV to different artists’ styles, but I think a visual comparison isn’t with artists, it’s with distance.
First Person is a close-up of something.
Third Limited is still focused on one thing or group of things but it pulls back.
Omniscient is a landscape.
So first person can be heavy and layered, third limited can be light, depending on the author, the difference is more a matter of distance and focus.
In first person, you’re inside one person’s head, getting only her view of the story, and it’s always her story, it’s a personal one because it’s seen only through her eyes. So even if she’s reporting on something that’s not personal, she makes it personal because she’s relating her experience.
Third limited has distance because there’s a narrator buried in that POV; that is, “Jane hit him” will never be as personal as “I hit him” even though everything is told through Jane’s POV. You can do a very tight third person POV–most of my stuff is tight third–and you still can’t get the immediacy and intimacy of first person. This, by the way, is why I can do sex scenes in third limited but not in first. I need at least some distance. Plus in third limited you often get different scenes in different POVs so you’re getting a more global view of the story, which means the story is becoming more important than the character or at least of equal importance.
And then there’s third omniscient where there’s a narrator who sees all and knows all and reports all. That’s an observer-narrator-as-God so it’s really remote, not human. It’s great for epics and satire, anything where distance is a plus and the story is more important than the character’s emotional lives. Omniscient is much harder to make emotional and involving and personal, but if your story doesn’t need that, it’s great.
You gain something with each POV and you lose something. In my case, with first, I’m going to lose the ability to do different POVs which is going to limit my ability to layer different realities onto the structure of the story. The reader is going to get one reality: Liz’s. But the thing that’s really going to limit the depth and the layering is the speed of the story; they’re going to move really fast and be fairly short, so there won’t be that much time, especially since Liz isn’t terribly reflective in the moment. But I’ll have four books to layer the community and the relationships and the love story, and they’re set roughly three months apart so Liz will have time to process things and change.
I originally wanted to try this because I loved the way Joss Whedon structured Buffy: Each episode was a story in itself, but you didn’t get the entire novel until you watched that entire season, which always ended with a satisfying climax, not a stupid cliffhanger. Every season of Buffy was a novel. I loved that. I wanted to try that without writing for TV. So a limited series of four mystery novels that taken together make one women’s fiction novel done in first person to give immediacy. If you want the art analogy back, a series of carefully done pencil drawings instead of a freaking oil painting.
Still not sure the art analogy works, but it sparked a whole post, so thank you, Laura.
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You can guess which one I get to be. 
This might actually be an improvement. He's kind of cute.
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