This week, we had a workshop to discuss some of the use of omniscient narration by some of us in the writing group, and we looked at a variety of examples in authors' books and varying styles and techniques. Here's a review of this conversation and anaylsis of the technique as well as some conclusions. Some of our conclusions were that there are trends now of authors - or editors and agents and writing groups heavily influencing how authors tell stories - to immitate George Martin's use of multiple close third person POV. These same grousp of people will say "don't 'jump heads' or use omniscient' because" they have seen SO many authors do it badly. However, I am seeing people writing books with multiple close third person POV and do that badly. So perhaps the conclusion here is that ANYTHING can be done badly, and a particular POV is not good or bad simply because the people using them do not know how.
Who are some of the authors who have written in omniscient POV? Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Tolstoy, Margaret Atwood, Tolkein, Douglas Adams, Shirley Jackson. There is great variety to what this looks like in each of these examples, so first we should realize that not omniscient POV is done the same way!
Austen: The first example I used from an email sent to me about Mansfield Park. In some of her scenes and chapters she jumps from one sentence to the next telling us what different characters are thinking: "When the company were moving into the ballroom, she found herself for the first time near Miss Crawford, whose eyes and smiles were immediately and more unequivocally directed as her brother's had been, and who was beginning to speak on the subject, when Fanny, anxious to get the story over, hastened to give the explanation of the second necklace: the real chain. Miss Crawford listened; and all her intended compliments and insinuations to Fanny were forgotten: she felt only one thing; and her eyes, bright as they had been before, shewing they could yet be brighter, she exclaimed with eager pleasure, "Did he? Did Edmund? That was like himself. No other man would have thought of it. I honour him beyond expression." And she looked around as if longing to tell him so. He was not near, he was attending a party of ladies out of the room; and Mrs. Grant coming up to the two girls, and taking an arm of each, they followed with the rest.
When looking at the body of Austen's work, we realised she used a variety of techniques across a single book. Some chapters utilising close third POV, others flitting from one head to the next like a butterfly without ever sitting heavily or investing emotionally into one particular character. The question became what cues did she give to the reader that the narration voice was omniscient? We looked at the way she began Pride and Prejudice:
'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife'.
Which is not a statement from any of the characters in the story, but an observation of a narrator in their world that gave their interpretation of the world.
Virginia Woolf:
At the opening of To the Lighthouse, Woolf opens a scene involving a mother, father and son. She starts on the mother, but choses the pov of the first paragraph of the son, follows with a paragraph describing scene and action, then goes back to the perspective of how the mother is responding to the scene and the other characters. Much different from Austen, Woolf gives us full paragraph invested into understanding the emotional state of each character.
Woolf jumps directly into dialogue to open the story, and does not spend the rest of the book in omniscient POV, so cues to the reader are less obvious.
Tolstoy:
Russian literature like Tolstoy maintains a god-like pov continuously throughout the whole story.
Shirley Jackson:
In our discussion, we observed that Jackson sets rules for how her omniscient narrator behaved again, like Austen, was a voice within the same world as the characters.
Then the questions about how to write with an omniscient voice well revolves around anything else in writing - consistency and fluidity. The narrator has to understand the world and know what to share, and the narrator is giving their interpretation of the world. Cues can be telegraphed through small phrases without being heavy handed.
We hypothesised that agents or editors might jump into the trendy close third POV to assist the author to take a story and turn it into a modern novel. However, if the POV technique is done badly - in a way that is not fluid in the storytelling - then the novel may be transformed into a modern novel, but also be a novel that is written with a POV that has been badly done. George Martin had thirty years of writing before the Song of Ice and Fire Series emerged to develop his ability to combine his use of multiple close third POVs with a narrative structure which flowed smoothly, and in "modern novels" trying to imitate this, agents and editors are sacrificing fluidity of storytelling. Ironically, a criticism that "head hopping" of omniscient narration is abrasive or throws the reader out of the story?
Then the question is how am omniscient narrator which tells the story more fluidly becomes a modern voice?
This remark about Modernization. from Island Voices blog 2010 post
"Modern readers by and large seem happier to juggle multiple truths, and try and look for their own truth somewhere in those multiples. This could be because of the influence of other media like cinema where the viewer is right on the edge of the scene, almost with their toes touching the edges of the story’s ocean, and have to find their own way in the scene by the clues laid down by visual symbols, dialogue and the subtext they sense beneath and around the text."
Therefore, many of the ways older works cued or telegraphed to the reader that this was an omniscient narrator might feel antiquated rather than modern, but perhaps some of this was the more heavy handed "moral lesson" or "truth" the writer was trying to convey, or simply elements of a different time and place. In 2020, if we wanted, like Austen, to open with sarcastic commentary about our culture, perhaps wealthy men wanting wives might feel like less of a modern norm. Though, as I said during our workshop, I had a mother who literally "herded" (her words) a thirty year old man with money. However, in a modern voice, I might open sarcastic commentary about that behaviour with something like "Who does that?" rather than any undertone that it would be considered a cultural norm to behave or think that way.
However, this is the question isn't it? What cues or phrases telegraph to the reader that they are hearing from an in world omniscient narrator that also telegraph a modern sensibility of time and place. Since it is a technique common in Fantasy and Sci Fi, genres which are not always known for sounding modern, these might be ways to elevate books in these fields so they are more fully engaged in a more modern conversation.
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