Please help me understand omniscient point of view

Mary-Ellen, I was just looking for this thread to link it for you, glad you found it and were able to get more clarity than I could give.

Great thread. Calmed my fear that my omni narrator wasn't distant enough. I'm six chapters in with my critique group and only just got my first note on head hopping when I tried to make the omni clearer. I guess it was clear all along. Now I know why. I didn't smooth out a few transitions where I always had before. Thanks for the help.

ap123 said:

Mary-ellen, I was just looking for this thread to link it for you, glad you found it and were able to get more clarity than I could give.

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Thanks, I almost told you about this thread. LOL

I'm glad you now know more about omniscient but you're not the first to give wrong information in a blog and I very much doubt you'll be the last.

That's how some strange ideas get passed around but at least you're aware of your mistake and have corrected it.

AngelaGreenfield said:

Thank you, everyone, for clearing this up. I used this example on my blog to inform writers about omni, and it turned out I was incorrect.

For now, I will stick to first-person or third-person limited POV when writing.

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I consider the reference to the camera lens as the best approach to narrative perspective.

Omniscience is the hardest POV to write successfully and convincingly yet is the one most beginners often slip into without any thought other than- I want to tell you this story.

It's rarely a deliberately chosen POV for beginners - most fall into it because they either don't know enough to choose any POV at all or don't think POV is that important.

I doubt reading novels by itself will give any beginner a grasp of POV, which in essence is the chosen camera position through which the story will be experienced.

In Omniscient POV The omniscient narrator is both the narrator and the only POV, and the omnscient narrator should not be confused with the narrator of a story in Third person limited POV where the narrator is NOT a POV at all.

Omniscience really is you narrating a story.

The camera position (and lens) is yours and always yours even though you may be hovering fifty miles above the scene or zooming down to perch on the shelf by a character and then zooming away somewhere else.

Even though there may be many characters what appears on the page is always your version of events and your interpretation of what everyone is thinking or doing.

You know everything and don't have to go into anybody else's head to show what they are thinking or feeling -you are omniscient and already know what they are thinking and feeling.

Your job is to convey the story by focussing in and on characters as necessary. You are the POV - the one and only POV - and you are also the narrator.

The skill is to convey what YOU know in an interesting and entertaining manner with flow and clarity and in such a manner as keeps the story flowing and the reader absorbed in characters and events and therin lies the difficult part -the execution. Your 'story-telling' ability is paramount. Harry Potter is Omniscient.

In real life there are folk who are boring and dull to listen to no matter what story they are relating.

In Third person Limited POV the omniscient attitude of I know everything about everybody and can tell everything idea has to be discarded.

In Third person Limited the camera position is on the shoulder of whatever character is (for the scene/chapter/story, whatever) chosen to be the POV character.

But - and here's where Omniscient and Third differ -

That chosen Third person Limited POV character is NOT the narrator - the narrator is still you.

Somebody has to create scenes and link actions and dialogue etc..

In Third person Limited the narrator's function is to climb inside that POV camera fixed on the POV character's shoulder and to link what can be seen/heard/sensed through the lens in such a way that the reader feels the reader is experiencing what the POV character is experiencing as events unfold.

If it can't be seen (or sensed) by the POV character via that camera it cannot be mentioned and the less obvious the narrator's presence the better the chances of creating and maintaining the illusion.

Explaining or over-explaining should be avoided and the events perceived through the camera allowed to speak for themselves so the reader can make their own conclusions.

In brief, the Omniscient narrator is always also the sole POV camera position, but in Third person Limited the narrator is never the POV position.

If that helps anybody - Here endeth.

Bufty said:

Explaining or over-explaining should be avoided

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This is true of any POV, and is one of the most common problems in the work of inexperienced writers. Narrate. Let the story breathe on its own, not on life-support. Concentrate on the what, not the why. Don't succumb to the temptation to explain everything.

caw

Bufty said:

I doubt reading novels by itself will give any beginner a grasp of POV, which in essence is the chosen camera position through which the story will be experienced.

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However, this is the only way to learn omni. When I first start writing in, I searched every resource I could find. Most were websites where the author had never written it and was giving a bad example of what they thought it was. I found books that discussed it and got it completely wrong, and one book that had a short two sentence paragraph: "No one uses it any more. Don't use it." I'm sitting here going, "If nobody uses it, then why does it keep turning up in all the how-to books?"

That may be why there are so many questions, because there just isn't any information and what there is available isn't from people who've written in it. I ended up having to study books I knew were in omni because that was the only resource that was available.