Viewpoint problems #2 – Omniscient

First a housekeeping announcement: I am going to be off on vacation for the next couple of weeks. I’ve left some posts for my webmaster, but I won’t be viewing comments and moderating new people will likely be even slower than normal. It also means that the next post will be more on the when-it-isn’t-a-critiquer-problem/omniscient combination, and critiquing Wolf’s snippet will come after that.

So, more about viewpoint problems. Today is on omniscient, because omniscient viewpoint causes more confusion and viewpoint problems, in my experience, than everything else put together. This is because so few people have a good understanding of what omniscient is and how it works, and because omniscient viewpoint can be handled in so many, many different ways.

I can’t tell you how many times someone has told me that the Patrick O’Brian books, or Lord of the Rings, use a viewpoint that “floats” or “jumps around”, or how often someone’s said that Larry McMurty’s Lonesome Dove is multiple viewpoint, or that Georgette Heyer does a lot of head-hopping, when all of them are simply very good examples of omniscient viewpoint. The trouble is that they look so different from each other that people don’t recognize them as having the same type of viewpoint. Folks can identify them as third-person, but they misidentify what sub-type of third person, and every bit of evidence that should tell them it’s omniscient is taken instead as evidence that the writer isn’t doing a good job of tight-third or multiple viewpoint or whichever subtype the particular reader has decided the author is using. They aren’t bad tight-third or bad multiple viewpoint. They’re perfectly good omniscient.

The mistake is understandable, though, because there are many, many beginning writers who are trying to write good tight-third or good camera-eye, but who make a lot of mistakes that turn their work into bad omniscient. I did that myself in my first novel; even after all the editorial revisions, the first edition was very, very sloppy omniscient. I knew there was something wrong with it, but I didn’t know what. This is not an uncommon position for writers to find themselves in with omniscient.

For the vast majority of writers, omniscient is the easiest of all viewpoints to do badly and the hardest to do well. I’ve known maybe two writers for whom omniscient was their natural choice; everyone else I know who has tried it has had to work at it. Hard. Many writers don’t ever even try it. Omniscient viewpoint has not been a popular choice, especially in the non-literary genres, for decades (though as the selection of titles above should indicate, it is still very much around).

The first thing about omniscient viewpoint is that you can quite literally do anything you want. You can stop in mid-scene to tell the reader the entire life story, past, present, and future, of the cab driver whose one appearance in your novel is the five-minute drive that takes your main characters from the airport to their hotel. You can include a few sentences from the point of view of the cat watching said characters from the window ledge overlooking the hotel. You can dip into six different characters’ heads in a single sentence or stick with just one character per paragraph, scene, or for the entire novel.

This is hard to wrap your head around when you are used to the constraints of first-person or tight-third. A writer in one of my crit groups once came in three or four times complaining that she didn’t know how to get a particular bit of information in because the main character couldn’t see it or wouldn’t know it, even though she was writing in omniscient and the narrator knew it and could just say “While they were arguing, a small spider crept across the blanket and climbed George’s back, unseen by anyone.”

What does not ever seem to work in omniscient is trying to do absolutely anything all the time. It’s like the old saying “You can fool some of the people all of the time; you can fool all of the people some of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” In omniscient, you are allowed to make up whatever rules you want, but once you decide on them, you have to stick to them. You can’t do anything you happen to feel like whenever you happen to feel like doing it, not and expect it to work consistently.

In order to decide what you are doing in omniscient, you pretty much have to think about it consciously and deliberately. The narrative voice is usually not that of a single viewpoint character; it’s the voice of the omniscient narrator. But who is the narrator – the author, or a character who does/doesn’t appear in the actual novel? Is the narrator going to be obvious and in-your-face-dear-reader, or barely noticeable? Is the narrative going to maintain a particular distance, or zoom in and out like a movie camera that focuses on one character’s face and then on a different one? Will it be matter-of-fact, or ramble all over? Follow only particular characters (which often gets mistaken for a multiple-viewpoint structure), or go ahead and drop three pages about the walk-on cab driver’s life into the middle of the main story?

“Viewpoint problems” in omniscient are not quite the same as for other POV types. For starters, quite often omniscient itself is the problem – that is, the writer intended to write tight-third-person, or to use a multiple-viewpoint structure, and slid accidentally into omniscient as part of the problem he/she was having with the story’s chosen viewpoint type. Inevitably, this ends up with a sloppy, not-quite-one-thing-or-the-other viewpoint.

When the author is trying to write omniscient, the problems aren’t usually with violating standard, expected viewpoint constraints, because there aren’t any standard constraints on this type of viewpoint. Instead, the problems end up being inconsistency, confusion, and lack of clarity because the writer hasn’t thought about what he/she is doing and is just grabbing whatever technique is handy and hoping it will all fit together and work at the end of the story. If this is what’s going on, I’d suggest studying a bunch of books written in whatever you think of as “really good omniscient,” until you think you have a better handle on how you want your to work. Or look very hard at what you have done in your story so far, and continue using whatever techniques you’ve been using (and only those) for the rest of the story.

The other frequent problem with omniscient is a failure of nerve – the writer is so used to the specific constraints of first-person, tight-third-person, and the multiple viewpoint structure, that (like the writer in my crit group) they try to stay within them even when it is not only unnecessary but detrimental to the story. If you are writing omniscient, and you stick too closely to the conventions of tight-third-person (no head-hopping, one viewpoint per scene, etc.), your readers and critiquers are likely to settle comfortably into the conviction that you are writing tight-third, and to perceive any deviations from that as jarring or wrong. Also, if you are going to stick closely to tight-third conventions, you might as well just write tight-third.