I see your Point of View

I mean, what's left to write about this?  I suppose in many ways, it's like teaching the historical event of Washington crossing the Delaware.  It's covered in 5th grade, 8th grade, and 11th grade and yet, still, some people aren't familiar with it.  Maybe there is something left to dig into or reinforce.

When a book is written in 1st person point-of-view (POV), the narrator is a character in the novel, and is using first-person pronouns like "I" or "me" or "my" or "we" or "us"... you get the idea.  This is a fun way to write, because the author can do so much like have an unreliable narrator.  The storyteller is involved, and is thus biased, and may even be trying to deceive the reader. The narrator can even be dead, and telling their story.  The challenge is the author must always be asking, "Would my narrator know this?"  The narrator certainly would not know the thoughts and feelings of others, so the words "seemed to" and "seemingly" come in often.  As in:

"She seemed to be angry with me, but I couldn't be sure."

The narrator can't see someone slipping poison into tea in the next room.  The narrator can't know anything that happened while the narrator was sleeping, unless someone explains it later.  Even with these limits, it can be a fun POV because the reader inhabits the character, although this can be off-putting as well.  First-person character needs to be a bit more sympathetic than others, and by sympathetic, I don't mean the reader has to feel sorry for them, only that the reader would be interested in learning what happens to them.

In 2nd person, the pronouns are "you" and "your" and "yours" and this is incredibly hard to do.  There is no story that the reader is accessing, peeping into, it's in the reader's face.  It is author-to-reader jujitsu, and it is incredibly hard to do well.  Most often, you find this POV in self-help books, e.g. "You need to get in touch with your inner child" and it is rugged to use it in fiction.  A young author from Australia used it particularly well, her name is Bruna Gomes, in her novel How to Disappear, but it is challenging, and honestly, I warn you against it.

In 3rd person limited, some of the constraints from 1st person still apply. The narrator is anonymous.   The pronouns switch to 3rd person, like "he, she" but the reader is only inside the mind of one person, and that's why it's limited.  We the reader can only see inside the mind of a single character throughout the entire book.  None of this:

"Caroline thought that Benjamin was handsome, and Benjamin thought Caroline was a genius."

Nope.  You can't write that in 3rd person limited.

Neither can you do that with 3rd person multiple.  In 3rd person multiple, you have all the same rules as 3rd person limited, but you switch which mind the reader can see into, usually at chapter breaks, otherwise the reader will become confused.  

A chapter where we can see only Caroline's thoughts and actions, and then a chapter where we can see only Benjamin's thoughts and actions.  This can be a lot of fun to write and to read, because as the reader we know the thoughts of the characters, but they do not know each other's thoughts, and we can see the Three's Company-esque misunderstandings coming a mile away, or we can be tense because we are aware of the trap the other character is walking into.  With three characters, each getting a turn each chapter, a nice braided story can occur, and the three characters needn't be living in the same century, or even on the same planet.  The trick is tying it all together, the braiding, but it can be great fun to write, and three 90-page stories combine for a nice 270-page novel.

That brings me to 3rd person omniscient.  My initial advice- don't do it.  Leave that POV to God.  It's a POV where the reader can hear the thoughts and see the actions of every character in the same scene.  It's takes much of the narrative tension out of the story, like a police detective's court testimony, it's virtually impossible to do well, and no one likes a know-it-all anyway.

Remember that, except in 3rd-person omniscient (again, don't use it), if the POV is through a character who becomes unconscious, asleep, or dead-dead (not Lovely Bones dead), the character and thus the reader cannot know what is happening.  Once you learn this, you'll spot it happening as a glaring error.

The movie Groundhog Day is TERRIFIC.  I love it, but it makes this gaff once.  Bill Murray's character, though whose POV we have been experiencing everything, is dead in the morgue, and his colleagues from the TV station go and identify his remains.  He is dead and insensate. We have been in his POV the entire time, and suddenly we're in someone else's.  Maybe the coroner's, maybe the woman's?  Who knows?  It's jarring.  If you watch the movie with me, when we get to that very short scene, you'll hear me say, "POV issue" every time.  I know it annoys people, but I can't help it.

Once you learn these things, it's not as if spotting these errors is like being a middle-school hall monitor, saying, "You broke the rules!"  It's more like watching a puppet show, and the marionette's strings suddenly shift from invisible wires into 1-inch black rope.  

I don't want to sit and watch a great movie, or read a wonderful book, or even go to a decent puppet show, and suddenly get slapped in the face with POV issues that yank me out of the story.

Pick one of the POVs above (not 3rd-person omni, and I caution you against 2nd-person) and carefully stick to it.  Breaking the rules is always a choice, but you won't look clever.  You'll only look like you didn't know the rules.