Viewpoint problems #3 – It’s still a writing problem

One of the conclusions that folks could have, and perhaps should have, drawn from my last post on omniscient viewpoint is that it is easy for editors and critiquers to mistake it for something else. When this happens, you are likely to get “you have viewpoint problems” comments based on the fact that they think you are writing tight-third-person, but you aren’t “following the rules.”

This looks like a critiquing problem, and in some instances it is. Readers, editors, and critiquers have all seen the same how-to-write books, and absorbed all the same “writing rules” about “head-hopping,” as writers have, and sometimes one simply cannot convince them that there is nothing wrong with what one is doing because it’s omniscient. Much of the time, though, this isn’t a critiquing problem – or at least, it isn’t the kind of critiquing problem you get with the rule-obsessed.

It’s a writing problem, and it often arises when the author is suffering what I described as a failure of nerve in the last post. It can be because the author is unconsciously writing omniscient and feeling uncomfortable about it because he/she doesn’t get omniscient (or, sometimes, even recognize that’s what it is), and keeps trying to shove the viewpoint back to a typical tight-third. The shoving doesn’t work, and it makes it really obvious that the viewpoint isn’t proper tight-third, so it ends up looking as if the author is trying to write tight-third and failing.

This is true, in a way, but the problem isn’t that the author set out to write tight-third and blew it. It’s more as if the author got halfway through the book writing in first-person and suddenly thought, “Wait, I’m not supposed to be writing in first person; I better switch everything to third-person.” Only the switchover doesn’t work; the author gets the pronouns changed, but there are still turns of phrase and personal opinions and a bunch of other things that are fine in first-person, but that just don’t work in third-person because there’s a lot more to switching viewpoint types than just changing the pronouns.

The other reason for failure of nerve is the one I described last time: the author does indeed intend to write omniscient, but they think of it as nerve-wracking and scary and strange, so they keep retreating back into the nice, clear rules and conventions that they are used to having in tight-third. This, too, results in a weird hybrid that just doesn’t work.

This is where it becomes a writing problem, rather than a critiquing problem – since the viewpoint isn’t written as clearly one thing or the other, the reader has to guess whether the writer was trying for tight-third and sliding into sloppy omniscient, or trying for omniscient and not quite pulling it off. Since the most common third-person viewpoint these days is tight-third, the readers, editors, and critiquers are almost certain to look at the story and assume that the hybrid is faulty tight-third, and they will base their comments on that assumption.

One can, of course, tell one’s beta readers and/or editor right up front, “I am trying to write omniscient and I’m a bit worried about how it is coming out.” (About half of the people you say this to will look at you as if you have two heads and ask why on earth you want to write omniscient, nobody does that these days, it’s old-fashioned, and anyway it is hard. It is worth warning them anyway, if only so you know their attitude.) Unfortunately, one generally can’t go around to every single one of the readers who picks up one’s book and tell them that.

The only other solution is to clarify the viewpoint. This is not at all easy with omniscient (as witness the list of books in the last post that are, all of them, written in omniscient, but that many, many readers interpret as some odd variant of tight-third, simply because they aren’t used to seeing omniscient). If your editor/critiquers are identifying as “problems” things like seeing the thoughts/feelings of more than one character per scene, or a narrative voice that is significantly different from that of the supposed POV character, or including information in narrative that the supposed viewpoint character couldn’t know, you have to be clearer, cleaner, and smoother about all of them so that they read “more omniscient” and less like tight-third.

If your intention is to write tight-third (or you decide that the viewpoint is close enough to tight third that turning it into tight third will be vastly easier than trying to clarify it as omniscient), fixing things is considerably easier, as it’s usually a matter of getting rid of everything the POV character couldn’t see, hear, feel, know, or think. Note that I said “easier” – it isn’t easy, in any absolute sense. Usually, all the places where the viewpoint slides out of tight-third and into someone else’s head are spots where the author has some piece of information that they absolutely want the reader to know, but that the POV can’t see, hear, etc. Which means that one has to find some other way to get that information across right then, move it to some later point in the story when the POV does find/figure it out, or do without it.

There are also a few problems that almost never happen except in omniscient, because they involve things you can only do in omniscient, like providing the thoughts of multiple characters at once, or giving information that nobody in the story could know. Clumsy transitions between characters, blatantly trying to force the reader to see or interpret things the way the writer wants, and the had-they-only-known type of “foreshadowing” (which is usually both clumsy and dated) are problems wherever they show up, but they usually only show up in omniscient.