Third Person Omniscient

Current "wisdom" is that it is to be avoided, that it entails too much "head hopping" and can throw people out of the story.

Which is most certainly true if it's done badly.

It's also occasionally said that it doesn't allow you to properly relate to a protagonist as it's "too distant" - which again can be true if it's done badly.

However, it does empower you to write scenes where you can take the "camera's eye view" over the area and describe locations and the actions of vast numbers of people before drilling down and into the head of any character you desire.

It empowers you to show both sides of a conversation and allow the readers to see, then and there if you desire, the heart of the conflict without forcing them to try to remember the whole argument forty pages later when the other character's viewpoint is finally made clear.

Of course, it has to be done properly to avoid the very valid pitfalls that prompt people to say "avoid it at all costs, stick with Third Person Limited throughout or, at the very least wait for a section/chapter break before changing POV character."

This is an area that I have especial problems with. Some of my stories that sit waiting for me to thrash them into something that won't cause cerebral aneurisms leap all over the place as I shuttle back and forth between Third Person Limited and Third Person Omniscient, trying to get the relevant information across.

Some of those stories could be tweaked into workable Third Person Limited albeit with a number of POV characters.

Others, however, are a tougher proposition as they could only work in Third Person Omniscient - which is harder to write properly.

Some simply only work if the narrator acts more like a dispassionate camera at times to reveal things that none of the main characters could possibly know about.

Have others here noted similar issues with not being able to force some projects into a Third Person Limited viewpoint? Presuming, of course, you're attempting to write in Third Person Limited at all.

I've found (and read) Third Person Omniscient is about the only way to properly write "epic" (as in grand scale and size) works on account that Third Person Limited is often too blinkered and First Person is sometimes downright insulting to good Worldbuilding.

As with everything, well-written exceptions do exist for any perspective. But a number of noteworthy works do use Third Person Omniscient. Tolkien frequently portrayed his prose as Omniscient as does Eric Nylund writer of much of the early Halo Expanded Universe.

I personally figure the rule of thumb would be the more open and larger your world, the less restrictions on perspective should be. Meaning if you're writing say a romance novel, you're probably looking at First Person. If you're writing a fantastical adventure following one party of characters, you're probably looking at Third Person Limited. If you go Beyond the Impossible and make up entire worlds, whole languages, complete technologies and vast numbers of (named) characters regardless of importance or frequency of recurrence then Third Person Omniscient is the way to go.

I thoroughly disagree with this.

^ I'm open to hear why. You have a right to disagree.

It's basically just an unsupported claim. I've read plenty of "epic" books told from third-person limited perspectives, and I think the only reason I can't say the same for first person is that it tends to not have multiple POV characters in the first place.

I've been having another look at my Post-Cyberpunk story - I figured that enough years had passed that I could look at it afresh and sort it out - and it's patchy as hell as it shifts from extremely close third person using the character's own words and attitudes in one chapter to omniscient third person using my own voice and more impartial in another.

In previous revisions, I'd tidied it up so that most shifts in character POV were separated by scene or chapter breaks - there are still a couple of glaring points where I jumped straight into another character or into omniscient without warning.

I'm having the devil of a job getting it consistent - if I could even get it to the point where I could decide which scenes need to be entirely omniscient and which need to be from a characters POV, I'd be rapt.

At the moment I've got minor characters that, like the major characters, get close third person sections and more important characters that don't.

I don't know much about the piece in question, so this may well not be applicable, but in case it helps:

Perhaps it might help to stick to strict third-person limited, but then in specific, delineated sections — perhaps between chapters or at the start or end of each — have a section in third-person omniscient. This might allow you to keep the viewpoints clear, while still allowing you to present events from both types of perspective.

That's pretty much what I was thinking - the bit that's giving me nightmares is the working out whether a particular section would work best as omniscient or close and who the POV character should be if it's the latter.

If you're trying to get published through a traditional publisher, I'd suggest avoiding third person omniscient at any costs. Obviously, if you're planning on getting self-published, posting it online, or just writing it for yourself, then if you want to do third person omniscient, go ahead and do it. I personally don't have a problem with it, myself; but then again I can't remember ever reading anything that was written that way, so I don't have personal experience with it.

I disagree with the previous poster that said that these huge sweeping epics have to be written in omniscient. They don't. George RR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series has massive world-building, the action covers events occurring throughout an entire continent, has several different cultures, has a history spanning thousands of years, and is not written in omniscient. He instead has over20 point-of-view characters (including prologue and epilogue characters) and switches between them to tell the story and never deviates from this in 5000 pages worth of story. I'm sure there are other examples but I haven't read a lot of fantasy book series.

Why? There are traditionally published works that are written in Third Person Omniscient.

I've seen a lot of advice on writing sites saying "avoid omniscient" as it's hard for anyone but an established "best seller" to get away with it.

Along with "don't use best-selling authors as an example of how to write omniscient" on the grounds that they "get away with more" due to being best-sellers.

On those same sites, I've seen a lot of contradictory advice as to what "head-hopping" is.

One will say you can get away with paragraph separation so long as you make it clear at the outset whose head you're in:

"Jane smiled and waved but was thinking 'what a jerk.'" rather than "'What a jerk,' thought Jane but she smiled an waved anyway." since in the latter you're left associating the "what a jerk" with the previous speaker until it's revealed mid-paragraph that it was actually Jane thinking it.

While other sites hold that sort of change as "rampant head-hopping" and possibly sired by Satan, to boot.

So one person's "omniscient voice" is someone else's "example of egregious head-hopping".

Others have suggested you can get away with it if you have the character touch his or her head to signal that's where you're going - I'm getting visions of stories in which there's a lot of sweaty-brow wiping, nose scratching/rubbing, earlobe pulling going on...

Jane rubbed the side of her nose. What an idiot, he'll never be able to help me. "Can you do it?"

Bill wiped the sweat from his brow. The fucking broad always acted like she was better than him. "Of course I can."

I can see that getting old really fast - two paragraphs of it, and already I can't bring myself to give a third example...

You can just tell that within five minutes the reader's going to be screaming "enough with the fucking brow-wiping already, I get that it's sweaty" (kind of like me and "preternatural" in an Anne Rice book) or the author, desperate for new POV-changing cues is going to come out with "Bill's pinky probed the recesses of his nostril..."

edited 29th May '13 9:03:26 PM by Wolf1066

I think that if you need to indicate who is thinking by using a gimmick, then yes, then that is egregious head-hopping. The context should make it clear who is thinking. The general rule is, I believe, one POV per scene, unless it's a scene that depicts high levels of action or suspense, and then a minimum of one POV per paragraph, separated by a line indicator, and that should be used as sparingly as possible (because overuse will confuse the reader and dilute the tension). GRRM himself, I believe, pretty consistently adheres to this.

That said, if your work is intended to be experimental, then experiment. You cant learn otherwise, what style of writing fits you best. So my advise would be to try it, then see for yourself how it reads to you.

That reminds me of The Wheel of Time. Not necessarily excessive narrator-hopping, but definitely the excessive braid-tugging and sniffing.