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.
That's a great example of omniscient written in the voice of some hypothetical inside character. You get the benefit of speedy exposition, but it's intimate too. You don't need to know who the narrator is to get the feeling the voice is a voice of 'someone', not no one, and this 'someone' is competent to lead you into a strange new world. And you're right, it would be awkward in third person limited, or at least it would take a long time for the reader to get situated in the story world...maybe too long.
Third person limited is my default too. First person seems to be the usual go-to since it feels natural, but I think it's deceptively tricky. And if you're new at writing and you find yourself going for omniscient, I think it's fair to say you should be on high-alert for all the pitfalls you're likely to fall into. The guy in the workshop wasn't entirely wrong; it's a perilous place to start unless you have a lot of experience. Third person limited keeps you connected to the world, but also grounded in character. It's a good solid middle ground.
I like your idea of using a news report (or something along those lines). A space might not be enough to signal to the reader that this is not a particularly knowledgable character within the story. (I can see something like that pulling me out of the story. I'd probably start flipping around the book to see if I missed something.) A news report or something like that can be made to look like what it is and would provide a solid ground. And the voice would simply be the same as a straightforward news reporter. Very efficient and simple. I use various forms of media myself to get into a different perspective or to go around the limits of my characters. Formatting contributes a lot. Plus it's just fun.
I think of the phrase 'head hopping' as referring to poor technique, not the act of switching from one deep POV character to another. (Same goes for 'info dumps'). But taking head hopping in a more neutral sense, yeah, the skilled author can definitely make it work. It's the sort of rule-flouting literary fiction authors love: "Watch me switch POVs mid-sentence! Woo hoo!" Of course it's usually done to some purpose.
I'm not sure knowing the various characters first would help much. As I see it, head hopping (in the negative sense) is usually a symptom of a bigger problem—it comes off as a lack of control that usually stems from lack of experience (often the writer has no idea they're switching POVs.) It happens in third person limited too, but usually in that case the writer isn't even aware they've set up the narrative in third person limited. When a writer has a well-honed instinct and makes deliberate choices concerning which technique to use and when, they don't really need to follow rules. Take cooking as an analogy. The experienced cook doesn't need recipes. They know what they're doing on a more fundamental level and can adapt to whatever they have in the kitchen, whereas the novice cook has to run out to the store to buy whatever's missing to follow the recipe exactly—they don't yet have the know-how. The novice writer who recognizes this lack of know-how can get quite far with rule-following (so long as they have the right 'recipe'), but the novice who doesn't have this self-knowledge really stands out in a not-so-good way. But when a real master—someone with instinct and experience—violates the rules, the technique might not even call attention to itself since it's not something that pulls you out of the story. (Or if it pulls you out of the story, it does so in a deliberate way that's delightful and makes you GAIN trust in the writer.) For those who are watching out for technique and hoping to learn some tricks, that kind of thing is an especially rewarding reading experience. Few are capable of pulling off these stunts for the sake of the story as a whole—those are the ones I like to really dig into for study.
I know I'm opening the door for virtual tomatoes to get thrown at me for saying this, but I didn't appreciate Dune for the writing. The world building and imagery were fabulous—who can forget the sandworms—but I did find the writing a bit amateurish. I don't think I would have finished the book had I not wondered what the fuss was about. I suppose what people find captivating about Dune are its complex and unique themes, the merging of religion and tradition with capitalism and power, the ancient and natural with the futuristic and manmade.
I wonder if the biggest obstacle omni has today is both authors and readers have less experience with it. Although anyone who’s read classic stuff from more than a few decades ago will have been exposed. But techniques like gradually zooming into a perspective, then zooming out when needed, don’t seem internalized by many of us anymore. Though contemporary British authors seem more at home with it.
I can’t claim credit for the news report idea. Some variation of it is pretty common in sci-fi / fantasy. James S.A. Corey does it in their recent book, using later testimony from one of the aliens to fill in details none of the human characters could know. Of course, the very existence of that testimony gives us insight into what happens later, but they do it in a way that heightens anticipation, so it ends up doing double duty.
Now that I think about it, I know what you mean about Dune. I actually think Herbert pays a price for the head hopping, among other things, and it’s the classic one, of creating distance between the reader and characters. None of the characters are ever really that sympathetic for me. Paul is to some degree, but becomes less so as the novel continues. (And let’s not even talk about the later books.)
Dune’s reputation is really relative to the standards of old school sci-fi, little of which I suspect you’d find appealing. Aside from the exclusively male perspective, characterization mostly was not their thing. Dune was groundbreaking for tackling social issues, like religion. Other sci-fi had dipped into it before, but not with the attention Herbert brought. It also played well into the developing counter-culture at the time.
On control and pitfalls, I think you’re right. Seems like I see a lot of self published authors make the same mistakes I did before reading anything about viewpoint. For limited, the big one is conveying things in a way the viewpoint character wouldn’t, such as describing them sitting at a control panel with blinking lights while they hit buttons. That's a cinematic view, one easy for those of us raised on TV to fall into. But that character would be thinking about what the lights mean, and what the buttons actually do.
Of course, most casual readers are fully aware this is all a gimmick, and usually give authors more leeway than fellow writers or editors. I know turning off my inner writer, or at least keeping him under control, is often important for just enjoying the story, particularly for that old sci-fi stuff.
"But techniques like gradually zooming into a perspective, then zooming out when needed, don’t seem internalized by many of us anymore."
Haha...that's the point! You know, a woman in my writing group—she's super sharp at spotting, well, everything—gave me the greatest compliment when she said she had to go back a page to figure out how she got from omni to my protagonist's POV because she almost didn't notice it. It wasn't intended as a compliment, but I was practically squealing with delight when she said this because I'd spent a great deal of time working on making that transition as close to invisible as possible. I didn't expect to get it past her, but the fact that I almost did was cause for a mini celebration.
Of course, not all transitions have to be smooth. It just depends. A lot of contemporary fiction plays around with abrupt transitions and it can work. But yeah. It depends.
"None of the characters are ever really that sympathetic for me. Paul is to some degree, but becomes less so as the novel continues."
That's how I felt too. I needed more insight into the character's thoughts, motives, feelings. If not from the characters, then at least the narrator. But everything seemed flattened out, almost as if he were waiting for the movie version to come out so the actors could do the filling in. I think you also hit the nail on the head in pointing out the timing of his book with the developing counter-culture. Its themes resonated with that zeitgeist.
That pitfall you point out is so common. If someone decided to make explicit levels of writing like belts in karate, "would my character notice that?" could constitute its own level. First comes the realization that limited means limited, then comes all the klutzy attempts to get around the problem, like having your character look in a mirror to describe themselves, or having someone come into the room to ask what all the buttons do and having this long dialogue about something that should have been more clearly voiced by the character or shortened or dispensed with. I'm learning to embrace the lazy solution—cut!
Casual readers...I suspect they do give more leeway, but it probably depends on the genre too. How many people reading Sci Fi will pull a face at an info dump? Will the romance audience feel the same way? I don't know. Literary fiction seems like it could be a bit incestuous—writers reading writers.
I'm not aware of turning on the inner editor when I first sit down with a book, but if something strikes me as off, then the inner editor stays on. I can't really help it. When the writing is truly masterful, though, then I feel like I can get swept up by the story. I do tend to pause at particularly impactful moments to ask, "How did the writer do this?" Then it's hard to resist the temptation to go back to analyze. But it can be a mix. Some serious knock it out of the park moments followed by tedious overwriting. Then it's a matter of patiently waiting for those breathtaking moments, all along hoping the ending lands. (I realize my reading experience sounds hyper critical and sad. But I really do live for those "Oh my god" moments where all I can do is put the book down for a minute to let the moment go on a while longer.)
I’m not nearly as detail oriented as the woman in your writing group, but I think the fact that the omni nature didn’t jump out at me when I was listening to it, and is only evident now because we’ve been discussing it, is a testimony to how well you pulled it off.
On character thoughts, motives, and feelings, it seems like a lot of old school male dominated genre fiction tended to go light on that. The reader had to do a lot of filling in, but most readers of that stuff were okay with it. More contemporary fiction has a lot more of it, sometimes too much for my tastes. But I have to admit to feeling its absence lately when I go back to the old stuff. Maybe the issue in Dune in particular is that too many characters don’t act like normal people, and that in particular needs more fleshing out.
For casual readers, genre expectations definitely play a big role. Although even in sci-fi / fantasy, lengthy info dumps are considered gauche these days. The author is expected to work us into it gradually, a process often called “incluing”. The biggest problem is it’s easy to get it wrong, making stuff too obscure for the average reader to pick up on. Greg Egan once had a fit when a reviewer of one of his novels just didn’t pick up on the clues he left. (I didn’t either until I read Egan’s exasperated explanation.)
On the inner editor, I know someone who struggles to enjoy most fiction because it intrudes on his experience too much. For me, it’s only an issue sometimes. Most of the time it amounts to me noticing something like why a story feels slow paced, or thinking how I would have handled things differently. But occasionally, like when I read the Lensman series last year, it really has to just be restrained.
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.
"The omniscient narrator describes what the focalizer sees and experiences but they are not speaking in their voice"
That's a really good point. A difference that's most apparent when the character's voice (in dialogue, say) is decidedly different from the narrator's. There might be limits to how far 'into the head' of a character you can go when you're dealing with very different voices, although it might be interesting to play around with that.
For my novel I found myself hitting a limit in trying to merge my omni narrator (not god-like) with a very different POV character's voice. I could capture that character's distracted mode of thinking from the inside, but only for limited doses. I didn't think it wise to go for a full-on Mrs. Dalloway-level stream of consciousness.
As for your experiment, it can work very well when the narrator "reports" on the focalizer's inner states instead of the stream-of-consciousness technique which I personally find tiresome. The narrator may, or may not, use the focalizer's own idiom or way of speaking - it's totally up to you. If you are interested in the more technical aspects, you may want to look up the Living Handbook of Narratology (online). It has an article on focalization
A very interesting analysis and some insight to what writers do. Obviously of great import from that end. FWIW, as not-a-writer, I don't pay any attention to writing technique when I read -- for me, it's all about story and characters and ideas. The details of limited omni whatever completely escape me.
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.
That's a great example of omniscient written in the voice of some hypothetical inside character. You get the benefit of speedy exposition, but it's intimate too. You don't need to know who the narrator is to get the feeling the voice is a voice of 'someone', not no one, and this 'someone' is competent to lead you into a strange new world. And you're right, it would be awkward in third person limited, or at least it would take a long time for the reader to get situated in the story world...maybe too long.
Third person limited is my default too. First person seems to be the usual go-to since it feels natural, but I think it's deceptively tricky. And if you're new at writing and you find yourself going for omniscient, I think it's fair to say you should be on high-alert for all the pitfalls you're likely to fall into. The guy in the workshop wasn't entirely wrong; it's a perilous place to start unless you have a lot of experience. Third person limited keeps you connected to the world, but also grounded in character. It's a good solid middle ground.
I like your idea of using a news report (or something along those lines). A space might not be enough to signal to the reader that this is not a particularly knowledgable character within the story. (I can see something like that pulling me out of the story. I'd probably start flipping around the book to see if I missed something.) A news report or something like that can be made to look like what it is and would provide a solid ground. And the voice would simply be the same as a straightforward news reporter. Very efficient and simple. I use various forms of media myself to get into a different perspective or to go around the limits of my characters. Formatting contributes a lot. Plus it's just fun.
I think of the phrase 'head hopping' as referring to poor technique, not the act of switching from one deep POV character to another. (Same goes for 'info dumps'). But taking head hopping in a more neutral sense, yeah, the skilled author can definitely make it work. It's the sort of rule-flouting literary fiction authors love: "Watch me switch POVs mid-sentence! Woo hoo!" Of course it's usually done to some purpose.
I'm not sure knowing the various characters first would help much. As I see it, head hopping (in the negative sense) is usually a symptom of a bigger problem—it comes off as a lack of control that usually stems from lack of experience (often the writer has no idea they're switching POVs.) It happens in third person limited too, but usually in that case the writer isn't even aware they've set up the narrative in third person limited. When a writer has a well-honed instinct and makes deliberate choices concerning which technique to use and when, they don't really need to follow rules. Take cooking as an analogy. The experienced cook doesn't need recipes. They know what they're doing on a more fundamental level and can adapt to whatever they have in the kitchen, whereas the novice cook has to run out to the store to buy whatever's missing to follow the recipe exactly—they don't yet have the know-how. The novice writer who recognizes this lack of know-how can get quite far with rule-following (so long as they have the right 'recipe'), but the novice who doesn't have this self-knowledge really stands out in a not-so-good way. But when a real master—someone with instinct and experience—violates the rules, the technique might not even call attention to itself since it's not something that pulls you out of the story. (Or if it pulls you out of the story, it does so in a deliberate way that's delightful and makes you GAIN trust in the writer.) For those who are watching out for technique and hoping to learn some tricks, that kind of thing is an especially rewarding reading experience. Few are capable of pulling off these stunts for the sake of the story as a whole—those are the ones I like to really dig into for study.
I know I'm opening the door for virtual tomatoes to get thrown at me for saying this, but I didn't appreciate Dune for the writing. The world building and imagery were fabulous—who can forget the sandworms—but I did find the writing a bit amateurish. I don't think I would have finished the book had I not wondered what the fuss was about. I suppose what people find captivating about Dune are its complex and unique themes, the merging of religion and tradition with capitalism and power, the ancient and natural with the futuristic and manmade.
I wonder if the biggest obstacle omni has today is both authors and readers have less experience with it. Although anyone who’s read classic stuff from more than a few decades ago will have been exposed. But techniques like gradually zooming into a perspective, then zooming out when needed, don’t seem internalized by many of us anymore. Though contemporary British authors seem more at home with it.
I can’t claim credit for the news report idea. Some variation of it is pretty common in sci-fi / fantasy. James S.A. Corey does it in their recent book, using later testimony from one of the aliens to fill in details none of the human characters could know. Of course, the very existence of that testimony gives us insight into what happens later, but they do it in a way that heightens anticipation, so it ends up doing double duty.
Now that I think about it, I know what you mean about Dune. I actually think Herbert pays a price for the head hopping, among other things, and it’s the classic one, of creating distance between the reader and characters. None of the characters are ever really that sympathetic for me. Paul is to some degree, but becomes less so as the novel continues. (And let’s not even talk about the later books.)
Dune’s reputation is really relative to the standards of old school sci-fi, little of which I suspect you’d find appealing. Aside from the exclusively male perspective, characterization mostly was not their thing. Dune was groundbreaking for tackling social issues, like religion. Other sci-fi had dipped into it before, but not with the attention Herbert brought. It also played well into the developing counter-culture at the time.
On control and pitfalls, I think you’re right. Seems like I see a lot of self published authors make the same mistakes I did before reading anything about viewpoint. For limited, the big one is conveying things in a way the viewpoint character wouldn’t, such as describing them sitting at a control panel with blinking lights while they hit buttons. That's a cinematic view, one easy for those of us raised on TV to fall into. But that character would be thinking about what the lights mean, and what the buttons actually do.
Of course, most casual readers are fully aware this is all a gimmick, and usually give authors more leeway than fellow writers or editors. I know turning off my inner writer, or at least keeping him under control, is often important for just enjoying the story, particularly for that old sci-fi stuff.
"But techniques like gradually zooming into a perspective, then zooming out when needed, don’t seem internalized by many of us anymore."
Haha...that's the point! You know, a woman in my writing group—she's super sharp at spotting, well, everything—gave me the greatest compliment when she said she had to go back a page to figure out how she got from omni to my protagonist's POV because she almost didn't notice it. It wasn't intended as a compliment, but I was practically squealing with delight when she said this because I'd spent a great deal of time working on making that transition as close to invisible as possible. I didn't expect to get it past her, but the fact that I almost did was cause for a mini celebration.
Of course, not all transitions have to be smooth. It just depends. A lot of contemporary fiction plays around with abrupt transitions and it can work. But yeah. It depends.
"None of the characters are ever really that sympathetic for me. Paul is to some degree, but becomes less so as the novel continues."
That's how I felt too. I needed more insight into the character's thoughts, motives, feelings. If not from the characters, then at least the narrator. But everything seemed flattened out, almost as if he were waiting for the movie version to come out so the actors could do the filling in. I think you also hit the nail on the head in pointing out the timing of his book with the developing counter-culture. Its themes resonated with that zeitgeist.
That pitfall you point out is so common. If someone decided to make explicit levels of writing like belts in karate, "would my character notice that?" could constitute its own level. First comes the realization that limited means limited, then comes all the klutzy attempts to get around the problem, like having your character look in a mirror to describe themselves, or having someone come into the room to ask what all the buttons do and having this long dialogue about something that should have been more clearly voiced by the character or shortened or dispensed with. I'm learning to embrace the lazy solution—cut!
Casual readers...I suspect they do give more leeway, but it probably depends on the genre too. How many people reading Sci Fi will pull a face at an info dump? Will the romance audience feel the same way? I don't know. Literary fiction seems like it could be a bit incestuous—writers reading writers.
I'm not aware of turning on the inner editor when I first sit down with a book, but if something strikes me as off, then the inner editor stays on. I can't really help it. When the writing is truly masterful, though, then I feel like I can get swept up by the story. I do tend to pause at particularly impactful moments to ask, "How did the writer do this?" Then it's hard to resist the temptation to go back to analyze. But it can be a mix. Some serious knock it out of the park moments followed by tedious overwriting. Then it's a matter of patiently waiting for those breathtaking moments, all along hoping the ending lands. (I realize my reading experience sounds hyper critical and sad. But I really do live for those "Oh my god" moments where all I can do is put the book down for a minute to let the moment go on a while longer.)
I’m not nearly as detail oriented as the woman in your writing group, but I think the fact that the omni nature didn’t jump out at me when I was listening to it, and is only evident now because we’ve been discussing it, is a testimony to how well you pulled it off.
On character thoughts, motives, and feelings, it seems like a lot of old school male dominated genre fiction tended to go light on that. The reader had to do a lot of filling in, but most readers of that stuff were okay with it. More contemporary fiction has a lot more of it, sometimes too much for my tastes. But I have to admit to feeling its absence lately when I go back to the old stuff. Maybe the issue in Dune in particular is that too many characters don’t act like normal people, and that in particular needs more fleshing out.
For casual readers, genre expectations definitely play a big role. Although even in sci-fi / fantasy, lengthy info dumps are considered gauche these days. The author is expected to work us into it gradually, a process often called “incluing”. The biggest problem is it’s easy to get it wrong, making stuff too obscure for the average reader to pick up on. Greg Egan once had a fit when a reviewer of one of his novels just didn’t pick up on the clues he left. (I didn’t either until I read Egan’s exasperated explanation.)
On the inner editor, I know someone who struggles to enjoy most fiction because it intrudes on his experience too much. For me, it’s only an issue sometimes. Most of the time it amounts to me noticing something like why a story feels slow paced, or thinking how I would have handled things differently. But occasionally, like when I read the Lensman series last year, it really has to just be restrained.
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.
"The omniscient narrator describes what the focalizer sees and experiences but they are not speaking in their voice"
That's a really good point. A difference that's most apparent when the character's voice (in dialogue, say) is decidedly different from the narrator's. There might be limits to how far 'into the head' of a character you can go when you're dealing with very different voices, although it might be interesting to play around with that.
For my novel I found myself hitting a limit in trying to merge my omni narrator (not god-like) with a very different POV character's voice. I could capture that character's distracted mode of thinking from the inside, but only for limited doses. I didn't think it wise to go for a full-on Mrs. Dalloway-level stream of consciousness.
Has your novel been published yet?
Thanks for asking! Yes indeed, it has been published and is on Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Nine-Levels-Elana-Gomel-ebook/dp/B0D3S59YB4
As for your experiment, it can work very well when the narrator "reports" on the focalizer's inner states instead of the stream-of-consciousness technique which I personally find tiresome. The narrator may, or may not, use the focalizer's own idiom or way of speaking - it's totally up to you. If you are interested in the more technical aspects, you may want to look up the Living Handbook of Narratology (online). It has an article on focalization
http://lhn.sub.uni-hamburg.de/index.php/Contents.html
Thanks! I’ll check it out!
A very interesting analysis and some insight to what writers do. Obviously of great import from that end. FWIW, as not-a-writer, I don't pay any attention to writing technique when I read -- for me, it's all about story and characters and ideas. The details of limited omni whatever completely escape me.
That's as it should be! Feel free to sit back and enjoy the show.