Omniscient POV: Why are so many interested in it?

Mayhaps that's what Stephenie Meyers' new book is being written in? But really, I have no idea.

I think it's pretty simple - if you like seeing what's going on inside people's heads, especially characters you have created specifically to have interesting thoughts and feelings, omniscient is the only POV which allows you to look at the thoughts of any character whenever you want. I think that if you wanted to do, say, a buddy story comedy where half the humor was in being able to see the discrepancy between the two characters' thoughts, omniscient would be the best choice.

Me personally, I write romance and for that I am fine with using close third or first and only being able to see one character's thoughts per scene. But that does occasionally force me to have shorter scenes than I otherwise would, breaking them where there is no time lapse or setting change, because I need to switch pov character in the middle of a conversation or something like that.

If Stephen King, JK Rowling, Terry Pratchett & company can make a comfortable career out of omni, I definitely think it's a POV that should be availible in the great old toolbox.

It suits big, panoramic stories well, I guess. Epics and big adventures, and such. F.eg. to compare it to the movies, The Lord of the Rings wouldn't work without the grand scope, while a character study wouldn't work without the close-ups.

I think that's true for fiction too.

For my novel WIP, I wanted to keep a certain amount of distance from the two MCs while following the two almost exclusively. I wanted one voice to give the narration for both while being heavily invested in each character.

The voice of the novel is different from any of the characters, too. It's literally from a different POV than either of the two MCs. You're supposed to see them but not be them, if that makes sense.

I guess it could possibly be compared to first person? People assume it's going to be an easy POV. I find 1st person quite challenging because it's so easy to slip into a mode of starting every sentence with 'I'. You get intimacy at the cost of detail, if you're not careful. I guess Omni is the same, in reverse. You get detail at the cost of intimacy.

If you're not careful with both. Which quite possibly makes 1st and Omni harder to do than 3rd limited.

People assume it's going to be an easy POV.

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I think you nailed it.

People read a tale they love, and it's in omni (there's plenty about, especially if you don't read anything too recent.) and they think that's the way to go. Or maybe they try for limited and don't realise they've got carried away or....

I think maybe it's the default POV in the brain, before you start really thinking about POV

I think limited POV is easier, but when I first started writing I did use omni. And I still do, but only for comedies (which I haven't written in so long) because the narrator adds some wit to the situations s/he is observing and plus head-hopping in comedies is fun.

Yet, having a narrator know everything kinda takes the fun out of it. No real mysteries or unanswered questions.

IMHO - I think third omnicent is seductive for right and wrong reasons.

The ways in which 3rd omnicent can be useful to the reader is if you're trying to write about something thematic and epic, and you want to include a multifaceted veiw of the themes, with possibly a detatched analysis of what's happening thematically and character wise. Most of the places I have seen 3rd Omni have been the literature genre (I don't read a heap of this, so this is a very narrow vision - just keep that in mind.) One example I can think of is "In the Lake of the Woods." It's themes and plot and character analysis are huge - and I think it would be a lesser book if we saw things only through the eyes of one or multiple characters - you have to be able to see in everyone's heads, including that of the media and the narrator - to understand the central themes. Also, to have the battle of My Lai, which is central to the book, told in any other voice then that of a disembodied narrator would have spoilt the point the novel was trying to make. It's structure and the use of third omni made it fascinating in the way a psychological study can be fascinating.

I feel I'm not explaining things well, but the point is that it is needed and useful to the reader to have that book in third omni, because it helps in the understanding of the themes, characters and events.

The other place I see 3rd Omni is epic fantasy. The reason for that (In my mind at least) is that the book isn't focusing on a character's plot line - it is focusing on a civilisation's plot line. Thus, it must jump and provide a narrator in order for you to see that civilisation illustrated in all it's shapes and forms. Again, this is useful to the reader because if they didn't see all that, they would be getting a tiny piece of the story of a civilisation, which may be interesting, but not involve the politics/mechanisations of something like a war/politics or rebellion. On this note War and Peace springs to mind. You can't follow what's happening to the multiple civilisations in that book without 3rd omni.

The wrong reasons, IMHO are the ones that benifit mainly the author - that the 3rd omni POV makes things easier. (And it does - I've done this before and had to re-write). When third Omni goes wrong, you can't instantly assume that the writer was lazy though - maybe they tried for reasons that benifit the reader, and fell short of their goals, or maybe they're not sure of any other way to do it.

Anyway, that was my two cents. I hope it made some sort of sense.

It did! The first situation is what I was trying to describe for my WIP. It's not epic, but it would be a different sort of story told by one or two of the characters. You can't 'be' them and see them the way I'm going for. The context of setting and society matters very much, too. It is much more thematic than a lot of stories are.

backslashbaby said:

It did! The first situation is what I was trying to describe for my WIP. It's not epic, but it would be a different sort of story told by one or two of the characters. You can't 'be' them and see them the way I'm going for. The context of setting and society matters very much, too. It is much more thematic than a lot of stories are.

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I personally think theme has a lot to do with 3rd Omni. The best books that I've read that used it have had pretty huge themes. (Again, based on a limited perspective - having not read a heap of 3rd omni books. But it just pops to mind)

blacbird said:

We've had a fever of threads involving discussion of omniscient POV recently, and I have to wonder why so many here are are interested in writing in that narrative mode. Frankly, I'm not. I like the discipline afforded by 3rd person limited or 1st person POV narratives, which I find challenging. Most manuscripts I've critiqued which either purport to be or by default become 3rd person omniscient POV narratives suffer from all kinds of sloppiness and lack of narrative discipline. So why so so many here wish to write that way? What does it do that other POV narrative forms do not?

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Why are so many interested in it?

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It might be increasing inpopularity in the US. I have heard rumors about this before. It's apparently quite popular in Britain.

I'm glad we're getting questions now. That hasn't always been the case. Yes, it's hard viewpoint to write, but a lot of times the writer is simply told not to try instead of how to learn how to do it right.

blacbird said:

Most manuscripts I've critiqued which either purport to be or by default become 3rd person omniscient POV narratives suffer from all kinds of sloppiness and lack of narrative discipline. So why so so many here wish to write that way? What does it do that other POV narrative forms do not?

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Omni, for me, seems to be my natural POV--but I'd never used it because nearly all the writing books say not to use it. I even repeated the mantra of "no one uses it any more" because that's what everyone else kept saying.

But I was challenged on the omni issue with my 2nd book--which actually slipped into omni from third because it was fighting to be the viewpoint. Then cowriter wanted to switch to omni, but I wouldn't do it because of what I kept hearing from everyone. Then, when I started working on Book 3, I started having problems. Instinctively, I knew it was the viewpoint, but I didn't understand what the problem was. About that time, I attended a free workshop on viewpoint where tried all the viewpoints by rewriting the same scene. Based on the workshop, I switched the story to first. If third was wrong, first was really, really, really wrong. It was too personal, too intimate for the story. About then, we did omni in the class, so I tried the techniques on a scene I was on--and it the story sang. I knew instantly this was where I always needed to do be.

For me, omni has magic that I can't get from the other viewpoints. The omni narrator allows me to experiment and do things that would be limited by what the viewpoint character knows. In hindsight, that always frustrated me. The other viewpoints were always more about what I couldn't do then what I could do. Some people find that a great tool to help them stay in focus, but I found them too restrictive. I couldn't be as creative, I couldn't experiment. I couldn't play. That's likely one of the reasons my books aren't quite there yet--I wanted to play, and it came out in other ways that muddled the story.

Now I'm playing with it and having a ball!

You're supposed to see them but not be them, if that makes sense.

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For me, this this this.

I feel that way as a reader too; I like to see characters as other people, but I don't really like being inserted into them as if I was them. Although I do like getting deep into their thoughts once I know them.

Also, I like the intimacy of an omniscient narrator; I feel like someone is telling me the story, and if someone is telling me this story, than it is a story that really happened once upon a time and it mattered.

And once intimacy is created between narrator and reader, then that narrator brings me intimately into a relationship with the characters he knows. It makes characters feel believable and real. As a reader and a writer, intimacy for me is about relationship with another, not self-insertion into the character.

I like 1st person for the same reason. Someone is telling the story, and that makes it feel intimate and important.

The majority of the novels I've read have been some form of Omni or 1st (my favorite books are usually fantasy, classics, and literary). I haven't read a lot of 3rd limited so it doesn't feel like a natural way for me to write. I like 3rd limited in short stories better than full length novels, although I've read a few 3rd limited novels where I really liked the use of POV and the way it fit the story.

I don't remember John Gardner saying that omniscient was the ONLY POV, just that it was the one capable of conveying the greatest themes and the most depth. Since he wrote a novel in 1st I don't think he was totally anti-POV's other than omniscient.

I have no idea but I can guess. It's actually quite natural for writers to want to write omniscient (even if they don't know what it is).

Writers know everything. We live in these characters' heads all day long. We know where the story is going. We know how it's going to end. We know what these characters don't know (at that point of the story).

So it's natural for the writer to want to tell everything, and what everyone is thinking. I call it the "telleverythingitis" and it's very common among writers, new or seasoned. Also, being the author, we tend to have a god-complex -- we can make the characters suffer, etc. So why can't we know what all the characters are thinking, or that a bridge is going to land on them?

On top of it, any kind of limited view point (1st person, 3rd limited, even 2nd) seems tough and contradictory to the way authors think. We know everything, and yet you're telling us that we can't tell people we know everything? That we're only limited to what ONE character knows? An undisciplined writer would have twitchy fingers -- feeling like, Gosh, I'm in Mary's head now, but I just WANT TO TELL you all what Jack and his dog are thinking too. How else are going to know if I don't tell you?

It's a combination of not knowing how to reveal information/create suspense with a limited view point, and the desire to tell everything in our writer's head.

Of course, people could be drawn to it for the right reasons. Omni has that sense of epicness, that "once upon a time" timelessness, and also the all-knowing nature of storytelling can be magical, because it's not like real life. That's why omniscient, often, is suitable for fantasy or science-fiction, or any type of epic adventures. It's not very suitable, however, for intimate personal dramas.

Someone said omniscient creates intimacy. I'm not sure why. Omniscient is the most distant narrative. Someone is sitting on a cloud telling us stories about other people. To me, there's nothing more intimate and personal than 1st person. And just because 3rd person doesn't have a VISIBLE narrator, it doesn't mean no one is telling a story, but 3rd person limited is somewhere between 1st and omni, and you can create almost the same intimacy as 1st person, with a thin layer of detachment, with 3rd limited close.

Maxinquaye said:

It suits big, panoramic stories well, I guess. Epics and big adventures, and such. F.eg. to compare it to the movies, The Lord of the Rings wouldn't work without the grand scope, while a character study wouldn't work without the close-ups.

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Actually movies are what we'd call 3rd objective. It's kind of like omniscient -- you can have a shot of the peak of a mountain and then swoop in until you have a close-up of Frodo. The difference is, you can't get inside Frodo's head. Everything has to be inferred by his action, facial expression, dialogue, etc. So in a way, it's like omniscient except there's no thought dipping.

Which is very different than actual omniscient, where the writers try to get inside every character's mind. I think that's the biggest reason why writers like omniscient, and not because they can describe the peak of a mountain where the characters can't see.

p.s. Omniscient sounds "easier" because that's how the writer thinks -- the writer knows everything. The problem is, it may not be the way the readers think. Like Blacbird said, real life isn't like that. We seldom get a chance to get inside everybody else's head. We, as humans, are trained to infer and interpret, so it's natural for us (readers) to be limited and use our cognitive abilities to deduce and understand. So, sometimes there's a disconnect. Omniscient creates this illusion that we're in some kind of la-la fantasy, and that's why it serves epics or fantasy well. For real life dramas, it suddenly lacks certain authenticity because real life doesn't work in omniscient mode.

Also, it may seem easy, but in reality, it is hard to do omniscient well. The problem is the lack of discipline and control. When the writer thinks it's omniscient so he can say anything, describe anything, and dip into character's heads at will, often the result is a whiplashing experience for the readers. They'd feel disoriented and have no idea who to root for. Or too much information from all over the place. One minute they're hearing Mary's thoughts, and the next sentence we're in Jack's head. It diminishes the relationship between reader and character.

blacbird said:

We've had a fever of threads involving discussion of omniscient POV recently, and I have to wonder why so many here are are interested in writing in that narrative mode. Frankly, I'm not. I like the discipline afforded by 3rd person limited or 1st person POV narratives, which I find challenging. Most manuscripts I've critiqued which either purport to be or by default become 3rd person omniscient POV narratives suffer from all kinds of sloppiness and lack of narrative discipline. So why so so many here wish to write that way? What does it do that other POV narrative forms do not?

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When omniscient is done right, it's a wonderful POV. The real problem with omniscient is that very, very few wirters know what it really is. They write a book where the narrator simply head-hops in and out of heads at will, and think it's omniscient. It isn't. hed-hopping is head-hopping, and bad in any POV.

Omniscient is a complicated, tough way to write, and most new writers would do better to avoid it. But as I said, when done well, it's a wonderful POV, and I think this is why so many want to try it.

And, I suspect many think it's easier than third person limited because it allows them to jump in and out of heads at will. It doesn't, of course, but this is how most new writers perceive it, and why so many sloppy, unreadable omniscient manuscript show up.

blacbird said:

So why so so many here wish to write that way? What does it do that other POV narrative forms do not?

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I think it depends on what kind of a story you're writing. I love omni. I want to get into a few heads and let the reader see inside too. For me, it serves a couple of purposes. One is to heighten the reader's anxiety because they know something about one character that the other characters are oblivious to and it will be a problem for those characters because they don't know it. Another is to deflect attention from a character who plays an important role and a pivotal role by only allowing the reader in on part of what they're thinking. The reader comes to a wrong conclusion based on what they think they know about that character. This allows me to surprise the reader and only clue them in close to the end of the story, again ramping up tension. I didn't use it quite that way in my previous novel but my current WIP relies heavily on using omni that way.

ishtar'sgate said:

Another is to deflect attention from a character who plays an important role and a pivotal role by only allowing the reader in on part of what they're thinking. The reader comes to a wrong conclusion based on what they think they know about that character. This allows me to surprise the reader and only clue them in close to the end of the story, again ramping up tension. I didn't use it quite that way in my previous novel but my current WIP relies heavily on using omni that way.

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Personally I hate that kind of omniscient and misdirection. It's manipulative and deceptive to me. Like "I'm the omniscient narrator, and I know everything, but I am not going to tell you. So I can fool you later!" As a reader, I resent that. I'd rather being misled and misdirected ALONG with the character because I'm limited by what that character knows.

That's why most mystery is written in 1st person or 3rd limited. I can't imagine it being written in omniscient and gets away with it. Deliberately withholding information from the readers is a sin.

It has to be done carefully so the reader can look back and think, ah, that's why they did this or that. It can't come from somewhere out in left field. That's annoying, I agree. Pulling it off is a big part of the attraction for me as a writer. I've seen it done well and I've seen it done poorly. I love a challenge.

Just don't do anything like this:

"Mary thought of something, something that would be damaging to Jack's reputation. He, on the other, had no idea what was going to come his way."

And then 49 pages later we still don't know that nefarious plan is. That's when you hear the sound of the book hitting the wall.

I agree with just about everything Maestrowork said, but I'll see if I can add something new.

I think it depends on genre (fantasy is often written in omni, so if you read a lot you might think it's the norm, versus a romance reader, etc), but I do think he hit the nail on the head with writers wanting to tell you everything. It seems more common (to me, I could be wrong) a technique among new writers who aren't sure what they're doing or how to get a handle on POV.

I think often people don't know much about it. Unless you've been taught about POV and learned to distinguish it and analyzed the advantages and disadvantages, it's difficult to even really put together what you're doing when you write. If you have a new writer who doesn't have much experience, I think there tends to be that lean toward wanting to tell everything because there's a feeling that the reader wants/needs to know everything. The more you study, the more you realize that not telling the reader everything you know as a writer is more beneficial.

I'm not speaking out against omni, which is a great POV when done well. The problem is just that most people (particularly new people) don't understand it well enough to do it well. One of the faults of my last book was actually a POV issue related to this, so I'm partly speaking from experience, too.

I'm just thinking of how often we're telling people to avoid head-hopping, and how common of a problem it is among newer writers, and I think it all links back to this main issue of believing the reader needs to know everything the writer does.

Granted, some of us are just going to like it. Someone above mentioned that they felt the other POVs were more limiting, and that's cool. Just a personal preference thing. I've always felt like first was the easiest for me and the one that allows you to just throw yourself into a character, but I've actually heard other people say they feel that way about third, so there's definitely that element of personal taste as well.

I'm just rambling now so I'm gonna stop.

maestrowork said:

Just don't do anything like this:

"Mary thought of something, something that would be damaging to Jack's reputation. He, on the other, had no idea what was going to come his way."

And then 49 pages later we still don't know that nefarious plan is. That's when you hear the sound of the book hitting the wall.

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No, that kind of stuff bugs the daylights out of me and it's not at all what I'm talking about.

On the other hand, if you have Character X and he has a body under his house, but the omniscient narrator doesn't say anything about any of that, doesn't let the readers in on this guy's secrets, etc. until the last few pages, the readers can feel cheated, too. That's the problem with omniscient.

With a limited view point, that that fact could easily be hidden because, well, the POV character doesn't know. But if the omniscient narrator knows, and the narrator does get inside X's head, but never reveals any hint at all, then there's an evasion issue. In fact, it would be more suspenseful, with more tension, if the narrator tells the readers, but the other characters don't know. That's called dramatic irony. For example, in The Lovely Bones, we know who did it. But everyone else except the protag doesn't know -- that creates a whole lot of suspense and tension.

Again, you can create a lot of suspense and tension with omniscient, just be careful about this kind of stuff that may turn off a reader.