You write in omniscient?
Who do you think you are? God?
Years ago during a Q&A at a writing workshop, someone in the audience asked the speaker for tips on writing in omniscient.
The speaker’s response: Unless you're Tolstoy, don't do it.
Call me Tolstoy, then!
He seemed to think readers had lost their taste for god-narrators, preferring instead to be immersed in a character’s limited lived experience.
First of all, omniscient narrators don’t have to be god-like. In numerous classic novels we find narrative voices so distinctive they effectively are a character. Consider the voice in this oft-quoted opening line:
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."—Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
The unnamed narrator sounds like some witty inhabitant of Austen's fictional world, maybe Austen herself—not god.
But god-like omniscient can be immersive, too, since the close third person limited doesn’t have to be sacrificed. Someone might say: Why not just write in third person limited then? Because narrative distance reveals more; there are, well, limits to 3rd person limited. Maybe you need a wider scope—establishing shots, to borrow a term from filmmaking—to set a certain mood or tone.
After learning my writing group’s takeaway from the first draft of my novel (’truth is relative’ is not what I meant!) I realized I needed to just tell the truth, relate the information I knew but that no single character could know, otherwise I was stuck with an unintended Rashomon effect. (A secondary lesson here: Don’t expect readers to triangulate the facts after discounting each character’s opinions and biases to arrive the story’s truth on their own. You need a detective within the story and a convenient roundup of suspects at the end…and a criminal stupid enough to stick around for the big reveal. No one wants to watch Rashomon three times in a row to track the knife’s location in each suspect’s version of the murder scene. Only you, Tina. Only you.)
Filmmaking seems to be a good, albeit loose, analogy here. Suppose you have the following options to film a scene:
1. With multiple video cameras at your disposal, along with a director who can choose shots from any camera at will, compiling the footage on the spot (omni).1
2. With multiple cameras, but no director (third person limited).
3. With a single camera, no director (first person).
As we move from option 1 to 3, there’s an increasing level of simplicity. But what at first seems easy—as easy as pulling out your phone these days—can also be inefficient, klutzy, or too limiting for your project. (And please don’t hold your phone vertically for the love of god!) Do you really want to write an epic fantasy from one character’s point of view? Never say never, but yeah. Good luck with that.
A few things I learned, too often the hard way:
Give yourself rules to follow. How will your omni narrator affect the structure of your story? In other words, what will you do with it? As you make these decisions, also ask yourself: How does this serve the story?
For example, since I had already written my first draft in a rotating third person limited with roughly one POV per chapter, I decided I would stick with that structure as much as possible. (I call it Omni Lite.) In most cases I opened each chapter with my omni narrator—there's your establishing shot—and gradually ‘zoomed in’ until I was essentially in third person limited again. (I’ll explain this technique more in a later post.) But I didn’t do this for every chapter. I didn’t even do it for most chapters. More often I began in third person limited and stayed there. If I needed to switch to another character’s POV within the same chapter, I made sure the switch happened at the same time and/or place in the story for continuity. In short, I only used the omniscient when I needed it and I transitioned as smoothly as possible to avoid calling attention to the switch. Those were my rules. Come up with your own…or steal mine! Not like I own them.
Keep the ‘camera’ still. Especially at the beginning. Pros and amateurs alike make the mistake of rushing from one snappy scene to the next, bouncing from place to place, time to time, character to character, under the misguided notion that doing so creates interest and excitement. It doesn’t. It creates confusion and boredom. I need to know who the characters are and what’s driving them, but I can’t do that if you keep introducing new ones and changing the context.
For an example of what I’m talking about, check out the opening to the 2007 version of the film, 3:10 to Yuma. Once you get past the most boring shoot ‘em up bang bang opening ever, the rest of the movie is worth watching. It’s on Netflix. (Also, paid subscribers, if you’re curious to see an example of the story arc template I gave you, check out this movie—it fits the structure far better than my novel, and it’s truly character-driven. Literary fiction and westerns have a lot in common!)
Remember the movie, The Blair Witch Project? Hand-held camera work can be interesting for very limited amount of time—a few seconds at most—but using that technique for an entire movie is a surefire way to get your audience projectile puking as they rush out of the theater. Which I guess might be considered exciting. But what’s exciting in a good way is being immersed. This calls for slowing things down in story time. Draw out details in the surroundings. Uncover what I like to call a phenomenological moment: what is it really like to eat a cherry?—literary gold! Show us your character’s normal comportment to the world. What are your character’s thoughts, fears, cares, delusions, intentions?
Who is your omni narrator? Maybe it’s god. Or maybe it’s an actual person, such as the protagonist looking back on events as an adult, like the voice over in the Wonder Years. Or maybe it’s a ghost related to someone in the story. Or maybe it’s some nobody off to the side of events. Maybe it's really you, the author, splitting into another you and winking back at yourself. Whatever you do, choose something sustainable. Usually you’ll want to pick a narrator whose voice isn’t too far from your protagonist’s. Consider the overall tone and mood you want for your novel.
Which characters will you dive into? Choose wisely. Less is more. And don’t forget, it’s not easy to 'zoom in' on a drastically different-sounding POV character, so you might find it helpful to consider which of your characters you want to keep at a distance and which you want to get up close and personal with when deciding on your omni narrator’s voice. (This might be one of those rare occasions when your characters really do tell you what to do.)
Watch those transitions. This is big, so I'll talk more about this in the next post, but here’s a minor tip: don’t forget visual clues. A blank space within a chapter gives a clue to the reader that a some sort of switch is about to take place, but you still need to take a look at the words themselves and consider whether the visual clue is sufficient for the effect you’re trying to achieve.
Signal upfront and in no uncertain terms that you are writing in omniscient. Maybe there was a time when you didn’t have to be so explicit, but trust me, even if you think you’re bashing your readers over the head, you’ll still get that one reader who thinks you’re head hopping or violating third person limited. Here are a few techniques for signaling omni:
Make a grand declaration in the antique fashion (a la Tolstoy or Austen). Yeah, it's hard.
Relate something your protagonist doesn't or couldn't know. This technique tends to feels a little contrived, but it has the benefit of being clear. For example:
"Kya was the youngest of five, the others much older, though later she couldn't recall their ages.”—Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing
Begin with objective facts. Full name. Place. Time. Formality feels very omni, but it might not be enough by itself. Notice how the author in the following example follows up with an external description of the protagonist (a version of "something your protagonist doesn't know"):
“At half-past six on the twenty-first of June 1922, when Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov was escorted through the gates of the Kremlin onto Red Square, it was glorious and cool. Drawing his shoulders back without breaking his stride, the Count inhaled the air like one fresh from a swim.”—Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
A Gentleman in Moscow actually begins with a transcript, and throughout the first chapter the author drops little clues which cumulatively signal omni POV. I keep returning to this novel's subtle opening. It’s a great resource.
Study novels written in omniscient. Don’t just passively read them, study them.
Speaking of studying…in a later post I'd like to take a look at what I’ll call invisible omniscient which John Williams uses in his 1965 academic novel, Stoner (an unfortunate title for a book that has nothing to do with getting stoned). The narrative voice Williams employs rarely makes the grand pronouncements we associate with omniscient, “Happy families are all alike…”. Instead it feels largely invisible, but at just the right moment it plunges us into Stoner’s experiences in a way that seems at once deeply intimate and still somehow sweeping in scope. Yeah, it’s paradoxical. The paradox isn’t noticeable to most readers, but to the active reader, the studious reader—okay, let’s face it, the writer lookin’ for tricks—it feels like some sort of magic before which we can only bow in reverence. A novel this masterful could not have been written by a mortal. Surely it was touched by the divine, or at least something more powerful than your run-of-the-mill muse.
You really would have to be Tolstoy to pull it off.
Even so, I’ll attempt the impossible—an analysis of that which cannot be analyzed—in a future post.
What do YOU think?
What’s your favorite story in omniscient?
Do you gravitate towards a particular point of view in reading or writing fiction?
Do you have any advice or thoughts on POV you would like to share?
I actually got to be a part of such an ensemble once. I had volunteered to be part of a film crew for Brattleboro Community Television. The crew I worked with that day got to do a live broadcast of the cow parade. It was so flipping fabulous! I couldn’t believe how much fun it was. I loved being on a high platform where I was able to actually see everything (I’m short). I loved listening to the director and visualizing what he might be broadcasting based on which camera operator was live. But most of all, I loved the pooper scoopers dressed as flies. This is the kind of thing that makes me miss Vermont.
Here’s Bernie milking a cow at the cow parade:
I think about the opening of Lord of the Rings, which has a feel similar to the viewpoint in Pride and Prejudice. It's like we're listening to gossip from a typical hobbit. It conveys an enormous amount of information very quickly, in a manner that would be awkward in strict third person limited.
That said, I've read so much contemporary fiction in third person limited, it's pretty much the default when I sit down to write. But I don't think I would hesitate to do a blank line, and switch to omni for a quick summation of something. And then switch right back to someone's POV. That, to me, feels more natural than coming up with a quick throwaway character just to have a POV to convey it. Although I might be tempted to portray it as a news report, after the fact historical commentary, or something along those lines.
The typical advice for omni is not to do head hopping, although it seems like a skilled author can make it work. The advice I once read in an old book on writing, was not to do head hopping until the reader knew the various characters. I've seen even that violated (Dune), but it seems like pretty good advice.
The traditional omniscient POV (as in Jane Austen, Thackeray or indeed Tolstoy) is hard to pull off nowadays, precisely because it implies a godlike narrator who occasionally and rather arbitrarily shines the spotlight on a particular character. But it is important to distinguish between the narrator and the focalizer. The narrator is the voice that speaks. The focalizer is the eye that sees. The omniscient narrator describes what the focalizer sees and experiences but they are not speaking in their voice, as would be the case with a first-person narrator. The default setting for me is third-person limited, in which the focalizer is one of the characters. My last novel Nine Levels has a single focalizer, so it is as close to the first-person as possible, while still keeping an omniscient narrator.