examples of omni-POV

I'll have to confess my ignorance here....I've never heard of 'omni-POV'. Are you referring simply to the narrator's voice? Because, as far as I'm aware, that's the only omniscient pov in a work.

orlien said:

I want to try something in an omni-POV.
Are there writers who pull this off successfully? Any books or authors that can be recommended?

I'm especially interested to read things written in a POV that's omniscient and intimate at the same time.
Has this been done lately?

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A Suitable Boy is extremely omnipov and very readable. In the very first page he (Vikram Seth) uses two different voices and later on he jumps from one person to the other , and occasionally he even changes POV mid-sentence - but it's still a great book.

You can read the first pages on amazon's Search Inside the book.

aruna said:

A Suitable Boy is extremely omnipov and very readable. In the very first page he (Vikram Seth) uses two different voices and later on he jumps from one person to the other , and occasionally he even changes POV mid-sentence - but it's still a great book.

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And not only that, but he anoints nearly every dialogue tag with an adverb. Shameful!

The whole POV question isn't as simple as omniscient vs. close on X vs. distant, because many writers will move the distance or shift into omniscience for brief moments, as Chabon does in Kavalier and Clay (which I loved) or J. Franzen in The Corrections (which I loathed, but that probably says more about me than the book).

Are you planning to shift POV or stay in omniscient? There are books like The Haunted Hillbilly that start out with a narrative voice you *think* is omniscient, only to discover that voice is actually a character.

What is your intention behind using omniscient? Is it a story that spans super-human hunks of time? Delves into spiritual realms as well as physical? Are you looking to mimic a 19th Century voice? My favorite omniscient voice is that in the beginning of Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen)....

Good luck on the slippery POV slope!

Julie Worth said:

And not only that, but he anoints nearly every dialogue tag with an adverb. Shameful!

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Perhaps this is some evidence relevant to the new "absence of editors" thread?

Vomaxx said:

Perhaps this is some evidence relevant to the new "absence of editors" thread?

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Er, no. It was one of the best books of the 1990s. Perhaps you'd care to read it before passing judgment...?

Rose Tremain's "Music and Silence," another of the best of that decade, is written in the present tense. Moreover, the first sentence ("A lamp is lit") is passive.

Writing "rules" are bollocks.

SJB said:

Writing "rules" are bollocks.

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No, not bollocks. But they're not cut in stone either. They're more like...guidelines. (Shamelessly nicking a line from Pirates of the Caribbean).

Actually, I can see only one real rule for writing: keep the reader reading. And all of the writing rules are really talking about different ways in which you can stop someone from continuing to read what you're written.

SJB said:

Writing "rules" are bollocks.

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Too true.

I hate the way that writers learn these subjective "rules", then thinks there's something wrong in a piece of writing which breaks these "rules".

I would say omni-POV is common in books. Stephen King uses it (in the Black Tower series for one).

Middlemarch. Not recent, but oh, my, how beautifully it's done.

I wrote the second draft of my WIP in rotating 3rd POV, and I'm not very satisfied with it. It reads too much like patchwork. I think I've been too rigid about staying in the right POV. A good omniscient POV could create more unity. Just want to try to do some sketches before starting my third draft.

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This is a weird analogy, but think of a rotating POV as being the ball in a football game. If you give every player their own ball, you no longer have a game.

But in a good football play, the ball gets passed from one player to another in a way that meets with the spectators expectations, and in a way that advances toward a common goal.

In other words, you move from one character's POV to another only when there's a good reason. While we're with Y, you build up questions in the readers mind about X. Finally you leave Y at some interesting point (maybe a cliffhanger) so that we'll wonder what's happened to him after a while, but in the mean time you shift to X and fill in the blanks about that character's perceptions.

The problem I have with fully omnicient narrators is that they tend to give away too much about everything too soon. The story can fall flat because there's no mystery to the characters.

Terry Pratchett does this all the time, but he's a master of it and it never seems awkward or disorienting. In fact, most of the time I don't even notice, but if I look out for it I realize that he's all over the place with his POV, even in books that feel like they're written in very close third person. I think omni-POV works well to get humor across, incidentally.

That's the narrator's challenge, I suppose. He/she has to decide what to reveal at what time.

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That really is the challenge, which is why it's important for a writer to master the technique of "limited POV" before they start delving into head-hops. Grisham could have written that passage from one POV or the other and still gotten across to us exactly what was going on. To me it sounds like he was having a little fun with that scene, and for a bestselling author, I guess he's earned a pass.

But a critical skill in writing narrative fiction is knowing how to boil things down to exactly what's relevant at the moment, and part of that is being able to indicate interior motives from an objective standpoint. If you "limit" yourself to one POV, it forces you to ask yourself, "Does the reader really need to know that Jane is lying? How can I get that across without flat-out telling them?"

Maybe it's not important for the reader to know the truth about Jane at that moment in the story, but if it is, there's a dozen ways to get that across without flat out saying it. And finding the way to get that across also forces you to cast by the wayside other extraneous info about Jane that really really has no place in the story at this moment.

I think the temptation for new writers is always to over inform the reader. In expository prose, that's the whole point, but not in narrative fiction. Most writers come to fiction from a background in expository prose. Every kind of writing a HS or college student is likely to do is expository... essay... report... that kind of thing. Same goes if you've ever written a newspaper column, or a magazine article.

Exposition is second nature to anybody who writes. And "Prose" can often be exposition. I think most writers who venture into prose, do so with a flair for exposition. But novel fiction isn't just long-winded prose. It's narrative. A story is shown to unfold. That's why limited POV is the standard. Because the temptation is too great with full omnicience for a writer to start boring the reader, and spoiling the plot.

orlien said:

I'm off to the library.


I tried Terry Pratchett, but I can't get through it. Too many characters, too confusing. I suppose I should have a look again, just for the sake of the POV.


I just finished reading The Brethren by John Grisham, and he does this in one and the same dialog, against all rules. The POV shifts from Wes (FBI) to Jan (secretary) and back again.

Wes (FBI) comes in to talk to Jan. She says her boss is busy. He thinks: hahaha, what a blatant lie.
He insists that he must talk to him, and tells her - "almost in tears" - that his wife was killed in a car accident. Jan wished she had coffee.
He says that friends recommended this lawyer.
Lousy friends, she thinks.
At this point the POV lies with her, until Wes says something "to help her".

I thought he pulled this off very well, it was not disturbing at all. It really shows the game Wes and Jan are playing (they're both lying). So maybe that's the reason that you could do it in this dialog, and not in another. But then again, not only the characters, but even the narrator is lying because Wes really didn't want "to help her".


That's the narrator's challenge, I suppose. He/she has to decide what to reveal at what time.

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What Grisham does isn't omniscient, it's head-hopping, and it's one of the things critics, and many readers, blast him for doing.

If the story and characters are good, you can get away with such things. The question is why would you want to? The answer is usually because you don't know there's a better way of doing it.

After seeing so many references to "Omni POV," I'm starting to imagine a story written from this car's point of view:



There's actually a lot of interesting stories behind it, but writing from the POV of a mechanical object might be a bit of a challenge!

stranger said:

Too true.

I hate the way that writers learn these subjective "rules", then thinks there's something wrong in a piece of writing which breaks these "rules".

I would say omni-POV is common in books. Stephen King uses it (in the Black Tower series for one).

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First, the omniscient viewpoint is not a violation of the rules. Second, the rules are not subjective, and they weren't created in a vacumm. They were not invented by English teachers, or by literati who want to look down on other writers. The rules have been developed by centuries of trial and error, and centuries of study on what works, what doesn't, what the public will buy and what it won't, and what kind of writing lasts and what doesn't.

There is such a thing as bad writing, and breaking the rules without serious reason is one of the prime reasons for bad writing. There usually is something seriously wrong with writing that breaks the rules.

There's nothing wrong with the omniscient viewpoint. It's been used a lot over the centuries. Some of the best 19th century novels are written in omniscient POV. Most readers don't like it as much as they do third person limited, and very few writers are good enough to use omniscient effectively, but when a writer is good enough, omniscient can be very, very good, and it's not a violation of the rules. Omniscient isn't terribly common today because most readers don't enjoy it, and because most writers don't know the difference between omniscient and head-hopping.

Head-hopping is simply bad writing, no matter who does it or why. If the stories and characters are good enough, head-hopping will not stop writing from being published, and won't stop writers from geting rich, as long as it isn't too blatant, but head-hopping will, rightfully, draw the ire of critics, reviewers, and many readers. And it will make the writer look like someone who either isn't terribly talented as a writer, or who just doesn't take his craft seriously.

There's never an excuse for head-hopping simply because there's always a better way of writing a scene. Always. Anyone with enough talent to write his name can rewrite a head-hopping scene and make it read far better in a minute or two.

Rules can be broken, but they can only be broken well by a writer who first knows how to write without breaking them, and then only when that writer has a reason. And "I want to break them" is never a good reason. "I don't know them" is an even worse reason.

The question should never be "What can I get away with and still get published." The question should be "How well can I write?"

The question should also be "Where did these rules come from, and why do good writers follow them?"

orlien said:

So how can one tell where omniscience ends and headhopping starts?

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Headhopping, AFAIK, refers to a series of limited third-person viewpoints, where the changes in POV take place within a single scene. OTOH, an Omniscient POV is when the narrator knows everything about the characters--including all their thoughts etc.

MadScientistMatt said:

After seeing so many references to "Omni POV," I'm starting to imagine a story written from this car's point of view:

There's actually a lot of interesting stories behind it, but writing from the POV of a mechanical object might be a bit of a challenge!

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HAR! I had a Dodge Omni that exact same color, but it was way more rusted out and beat up than the one in the picture.

aruna said:

A Suitable Boy is extremely omnipov and very readable. In the very first page he (Vikram Seth) uses two different voices and later on he jumps from one person to the other , and occasionally he even changes POV mid-sentence - but it's still a great book.

You can read the first pages on amazon's Search Inside the book.

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I tried listening to this as an audio book and got completely lost. Now I understand why. Maybe I'll try it in pring.