Omniscient Point of View: A Re-Understanding

Writing Excuses recently did a podcast on omniscient point of view, and while I agree with much of what they said, I noticed that the show repeated a central understanding of omniscience that I've come to see as flawed. Because it's so prevalent, I thought I'd write on it.

When I first learned about point of view (POV) back in middle school and high school, I learned that there were three kinds: first person, third person limited, and third person omniscient. (Much later, I would learn about that other skipped person, that poetically favored person, the second, but I won't touch on that for this post.) First and third person limited were fairly clear and familiar, but third omniscient was more difficult to grasp. The way I learned it then and over and over in courses since then was much in line with this definition, found at About: "Third person omniscient is a method of storytelling in which the narrator knows the thoughts and feelings of all of the characters in the story." This definition is usually followed with the disclaimer that writers used to use third person omniscient more commonly, but that it has gone out of fashion. The problem was, I couldn't remember ever seeing it used in the works I read.

I've since continued to read widely in Victorian literature, and I can't think of a case of third person omniscient that adheres to this definition. In fact, the only novel I can think of that does attempt this is Peter Carey's 1999 novel Jack Maggs, and though it's been a while since I read it, my memory is that fairly soon after the opening, it adheres to one limited point of view and then another for sustained periods (becoming more like the floating third mentioned below). It strikes me that novels that truly allow simultaneous insight into all characters' minds are exceedingly rare.

And with good reason. After all, if a reader has insight into all minds at once, we lose some of our ability to engage with the text--that is, we don't get to participate by trying to understand characters' motivations from their actions. We're no longer in the position of the characters, trying to figure out each other from outside information (gestures, dialogue) alone. We're no longer in a human position at all. As the word omniscient suggests, we're put in the position of an all-knowing god, and that's not a position that's familiar or comfortable from which to read. It's also almost impossible for even the finest writer to manage. I've come to understand that third person omniscient, as it's typically defined (simultaneous insight into all characters' thoughts and feelings), is even more rare than second person.

If the traditional definition is not valid, I'd like to propose alternatives that are more common, though still more rare than first person or third person limited. I add a disclaimer that I don't think I'm coining any new terminology here.

Floating third person limited: when the writer deliberately and seamlessly moves us from the thoughts of one character into the thoughts of another.

Virginia Woolf was a master at the floating third person. In Mrs. Dalloway, for example, we'll move from the thoughts of our title character to war veteran Septimus Smith as she gazes at him across a flower shop. Woolf's point of view shifts are not haphazard or jarring, but methodical and intentional. We get a sense of how each character is isolated from the others by the way they fail to intersect at the very moments their points of view collide.  In this way, it's distinct from the point of view errors one might find in a new writer's work, in which we accidentally see or know something the point of view character cannot. With Woolf, it's never a slip-up. We move to the new mind and stay there for some time before moving on.

Writing Excuses refers to this as "head hopping," which is usually a pejorative term for poorly executed writing when the writer doesn't seem able or willing to commit to a point of view. I'd like to draw the distinction that floating third person is an extremely difficult POV to pull off, and only true craftsman tend to manage it well. (I suspect that Writing Excuses writers would back me up on this.)


Omniscient pronouncement: when the writer makes a grand pronouncement that seems beyond the scope of most human knowledge.

This omniscience that is correctly attributed to nineteenth century writers, who were not shy about making a sweeping statement in their work. Charles Dickens's "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times" in Tale of Two Cities or Leo Tolstoy's "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" in Anna Karenina both fit into this category. More recently, and one of the more common examples given on Internet websites, Douglas Adams's narrator in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has knowledge of world history going back to the primordial ooze. Usually, this kind of omniscience enters the book only for short moments before we attach ourselves to a POV character through which our understanding will be filtered.

And yes, this point of view does put the author in a god-like roll, but not so much that it allows multiple characters' thoughts at once.


The Establishing Shot: when a book starts, like a film, with an establishing "shot," that is, a description that of a large setting that then zooms in on a particular set of characters which we will follow.

John Steinbeck's story "The Chrysanthemums" is a great example of this, starting "The high gray-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world. On every side it sat like a lid on the mountains and made of the great valley a closed pot." 

(Writing Excuses mentioned Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. Those better read in fantasy than I will have to confirm or disavow this one.)


Shifting third person limited: when the point of view character shifts in clearly defined sections, such as chapters

Charles Dickens's Bleak House shifts between an unknown third person narrator to Esther Summerson in different segments of the novel. George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones and George Eliot's Middlemarch similarly limit each chapter to one third person POV character, but which character that is shifts from chapter to chapter. Murder mystery novelist P. D. James uses this to great effect in most of her novels, as she shifts us into a new mind from chapter to chapter so that readers discover at her novels' ends that they've been in the mind of a murderer and never suspected them. Like the floating point of view, the shifting third person does not allow sloppiness. For the entirety of the chapter, the POV stays strictly limited to the person its writer has established.


While nineteenth century writers were still inventing the novel and, so, didn't have the wealth of craft texts that their work and subsequent writing has generated, by falsely attributing to them a point of view that allows simultaneous insight into all minds, we do them a disservice. I've come to believe they understood narrative tension better than this. While we can find occasional examples in which their point of view does not attach as rigidly to a single character as is now common, I cannot find so many of those examples as to suggest they are any kind of norm. Nineteenth century novelists allowed their readers more involvement in their books than this credits them for. They allowed readers to draw conclusions from the action and dialogue of non-POV characters without insight into their thinking. This restraint offers the pleasure of dramatic irony, in which we readers better read the dialogue of a character than the POV character him/herself.

Novel writing has changed a great deal in the past two hundred years, but perhaps not so much as our current teaching of point of view suggests.

Painting the Kitchen and Why It's Like Writing: A Defense of Journaling

I came pretty close to a nervous breakdown over spring break. Maybe that's an overstatement, but it sure didn't feel like one at the time. I should add that, generally, I like to think of myself as a fairly stable kind of person who is able to handle life's ups and downs, but last Tuesday, I realized I was nearly half way through the only break in this incredibly busy semester, a semester that will bleed into my summer school courses without any time off, and I was still getting up at five to write and working all day and feeling just as stressed about the papers I needed to grade and the power point presentations I needed to write as I do on any other work day. My mood was foul and I was prone to lash out and say damaging things. Seeing this, my husband, being a sensible man, took me to Lowes and we bought two gallons of bright blue paint.

I spent the next day and a half working steadily on making our kitchen blue. It was good. Yes, I was working, but it was physical work, and it was something I have wanted to do for a while and haven't found time for. It was a chance to get out of my head for a little while--or, perhaps, in the millions of little whiles in between the thoughts that will bubble up when you aren't doggedly pursuing thought.

I'm a big believer in removing switch plate covers. It takes under a minute to take them off and painting easily goes that much faster because they're off. But I've painted a lot of rooms in a lot of houses and apartments, and I know that many people try to paint around the switch plates. No matter how painstaking their efforts, it never turns out well.

So I got to thinking, is there a writing equivalent to removing switch plate covers? That is, is there something writers can do that takes almost no effort to do but substantially improves the work?

The answer, for me at least, is the writing journal.

I recently gave myself a stern talking to about journal use. Like so many painters, I sometimes try to take what seems like a shortcut, jumping straight into the novel manuscript I'm finishing. Sometimes it works, but often I stall out. I do a lot of my writing at 5AM, even though my brain has not started to really function yet. It's a good time to be productive because the kids aren't up yet, but not so good if I can't get my mind going. If I start fresh, it might take me a half hour or more of staring at the screen to come up with an idea. Even then, ideas come in fits and starts, which means I'm barely started on it before the kids are staggering out of bed looking for breakfast and I begin asking myself why I woke up so early at all.

To prevent this, I've been trying to finish those morning writing sessions by stopping work on the novel earlier--even, and maybe especially, when I have a sense of where I'm going and it's hard to stop, and switch to writing notes for the next day in my journal. That way, I can start the next day at five with a plan. I start with direction and purpose. Almost always, my writing is better and more productive as a result.

Another benefit? Like the thoughts that bubbled up while I was painting and not trying to think about anything, thoughts can bubble up during the day when I'm not focused on the manuscript and trying to come up with them. Because the journal is so low stakes and because I rarely strive for a complete sentence, let alone a well crafted one, I keep jotting things in it all day. It's not an intimidating or impatient as the blinking cursor. And after all, if you start writing something at five in the morning, chances are your mind will circle back to it, and while I may not have the time to write those circling thoughts into the manuscript, I do have time to catch some of them and make notes in my trusty, beat-up comp book. Just like removing a switch plate, the relatively small time investment has a big pay off.

----

Other random painting thought:
"lying on the beach perpetrating a tan" is almost as amazing a verb use as "vexed to nightmare" or "slouches towards Bethlehem." Almost. There's still no one who can deploy a verb like Yeats.

Hayden's Ferry Review just posted this call for submissions, and it makes me want to write:

IN THE DARK

 We do a lot of things in the dark: feel fear, make love, tell stories. We spend at least a third of our lives with the lights off, dreaming. In the dark, we imagine shadows and movement where there may be none, we picture stormy nights and power outages. We see amorphous shapes that we cannot identify, and the whole world goes colorless. Sometimes, we feel left out or lost, and though it may be the middle of the day, high noon, we say we are in the dark. Sometimes we don't even know the things we don't know, don't know that someone, somewhere, is thinking about how in the dark we are--unaware of unfaithful love, of eyes trained on us from a distance, of surprise parties being plotted. Darkness is also used to make things seem brighter. In painting, for instance, a brushstroke here brings out the color there, illuminating the illumination.



Our theme for issue #51 of Hayden's Ferry Review is In the Dark. We want your stories and poems about darkness, about being and doing and feeling in the dark. Turn the lights off. Make shadow puppets on the wall. Leave something out. Tell us what happens when the screen goes black. Blindfold us and take us by the hand. Lock us in the trunks of cars. Take us to attics, basements, graveyards. Find a darkness that hasn't been found.



Submit online at 

http://hfr.submishmash.com 

and mention “In the Dark” in the comments section. Deadline is June 1, 2012

Who Cares? (The Most Important Question We Never Ask)

For the past few years, I have started every creative writing class by telling my students that there is one question that I can't ask but that is more important than any other. "Who cares?"

I tell them this on the first day of class, before I've seen any of their writing, because I can't read their stories, the ones they've worked so hard on, the ones they've poured so much of themselves into, I can't hold those narratives up in front of all their peers, and say "honestly, y'all, who cares?"

To do so would be soul crushing, and it is neither my job nor my desire to crush souls. Still, before we've read any stories or can attach the question to any one writer's work, I have to put the question out there because, if we're serious about writing for publication, then our writing must above all other things make someone care.

Fiction, when it works, works like a gut punch. Whether we're out to make someone happy or sad, the purpose of fiction is not to move someone's rational mind, but rather, to move them emotionally. That's not easy to do. Most people are tired at the end of the day.

Flannery O'Connor knew this and wrote brilliantly about it (see her essay on "The Tired Reader" in Mystery and Manners).. The only problem is, she blames the reader, writing “I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.”

Now, I love Flannery O'Connor, and, though I know she is in part being facetious, I also want to believe that she is right because so many people are moved by her writing. Still, I wonder if the less-talented rest of us can get away with this attitude? Don't we have to go after those tired hearts and, if not uplift them, make them at least care a little about the characters we write? If we're moving hearts, and then minds along with them but hearts first, isn't making someone care the single most important function of a piece of writing?

I'm not advocating we start asking "who cares?" on any student's story. As I said earlier, I believe it would be destructive and harmful in the long run... Still, I'd like to throw the question out there as one we writers should be asking ourselves. We may not live in the sentimental age of the Victorians, with their love of melodrama, but nonetheless, readers turn to fiction because they do want catharsis; they do want to care. Our job is to provide matter worth caring about.

Trending this week in Speculative Fiction: #TwilightHate

Perhaps I should have seen this coming. In a graduate class of literary fiction writers, I would certainly expect to hear my fair share of rants against Ms. Meyer, and I myself am not really a fan, but I did not expect a class of Fantasy and Science Fiction devotees to be so ardent in their dislike. Much to my surprise, I find myself coming to her defense, saying things like "she obviously knows her market" or "we can't argue with her sales," but for my students, such petty concerns don't matter. The disdain they feel comes from the heart, over-flowing in such scathing critiques as "but, Dr. Griffiths, vampires don't sparkle."

Herein lies, I think, an interesting point: my students are under the impression that there are rules for vampires. As a student not only of writing craft but of British literature, I find this interesting. After all, once Byron brought the "vampyre" into English consciousness in his Don Juan reference, it seems British writers were largely making up the rules as they went. By the time Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, he had a wealth of invented English mythology as well as the older eastern European tales to draw from, but that didn't stop him from taking some license in creating his own count, nor did Anne Rice feel bound to his rules when, a century later, she wrote her best-selling novel Interview with a Vampire. Yet, I don't hear my students lodging the same complaint about those. I don't hear them saying, "but, Dr. Griffiths, vampires aren't Egyptian."

Of course, they tell me that their problems with Meyer's novel are based in the poor quality of the writing, but push them on this issue and I'm not sure they'll be able to articulate exactly what they mean by that. Judging from some of the other books they love, I'm guessing the problem isn't language or characterization. The Hunger Games, for instance, is another high-interest, plot-driven book, but it doesn't thrill me on the level of insight and lyricism in the way that Louise Erdrich's or Toni Morrison's work routinely does.

The problem, I believe, lies in the expectations they have for the book. The problem with a vampire sparkling is not a "bad writing" problem. It shows no failure of the imagination. What it violates for my students is the idea of the monster, and therein lies the issue. Their disappointment with Twilight has everything to do with generic expectation: they are looking for horror, but what Meyer is writing is romance. A monster may not sparkle, a romantic lead can... at least, for millions of her readers, he can. Twilight haters may not want a literally dazzling lover, but Twilight fans do.

I heard a really interesting discussion of the sparkling vampires on an episode (and I wish I could remember which it was... perhaps world building?) of Writing Excuses in which podcasters Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler, and Mary Robinette Kowal discussed the plausibility issues with Meyer's vampires. They pointed out that she had taken away the classic vampire weakness, a fatal sensitivity to light, and given them nothing in return, except perhaps a overwhelming sensitivity to ennui. Why, they asked, wouldn't such creatures take over the world? It's a great question, but I wonder if again it highlights the expectations of horror and other speculative fiction readers, with their insistence on plausibility in the worlds that their fiction creates, rather than those of romance readers, who ultimately want love to triumph over plausibility.

In the end, though, what I love about Writing Excuses is that they always come back to the same ideal in their writing tips: write what you feel is awesome. However much we may disagree with her artistic choice, Meyer did that for her romance and found a huge market who shared her desire. For those of us in other genres? Well, perhaps we won't be writing sparkling monsters any time soon, but if we too adhere to discovering what's awesome, perhaps we can learn something from Meyer's novel after all.

In Defense of Teaching Fantasy Writing

Speculative fiction is big in Utah. Writers Orson Scott Card, Brandon Sanderson, Brandon Mull, Stephanie Meyer, and many, many others have all called Utah home, and most of my Advanced Fiction writers are working on fantasy novels of their own, so perhaps it is unsurprising that in my first year here, I find myself teaching a course devoted exclusively to writers of Speculative Fiction.

I'll be bold and venture this generalization: most creative writing programs in the country look down on genre fiction in general and spec fiction in particular. Most graduate programs and many undergraduate programs will discourage their young writers from "wasting their talent" on writing sci fi or fantasy novels, and they have some good reasons for this, the best being that many writing students fall back on writing flat, stereotypical characters who follow expected plot points. Teachers argue that writers of genre fiction aren't challenging their imaginative abilities by creating something wholly new.

The problem with this argument is that it ignores the same pitfalls in literary fiction. I've heard agents complain about "MFA fiction," for example, by which I suppose they mean the beautifully written novel about nothing in particular. I've heard others complain that all MFA writers write about is cancer patients or self-absorbed twenty-somethings, the stock characters of literary fiction. I don't want to denigrate my peers by implying that these stereotypes are just; they may have some grounding in fact, but they overgeneralize. However, the best literary writers break from these stereotypes to write moving stories that get at core human truths. And therein lies the problem with the argument against allowing students to write genre fiction, because I would argue that the best spec fic aspires to the same purpose of illuminating what's best and worst about humanity.

When I began prepping my spec fic writing class, I was the first to admit that I'd shunned SF for quite some time and that I had quite a lot of reading to catch up on. I had read The Hobbit, LOTR, and waaaaaay back in my youth, the original Dragonlance trilogy, but I had no idea what SF looked like now. I asked my students, friends, and colleagues to help me generate a reading list, which included Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens, George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones, Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, Joe Abercrombie, Brandon Sanderson, etc., etc., and what I quickly discovered was that my own assumptions about fantasy--and those of my colleagues--were well and truly out-moded. The best fantasy novels had long moved on from the stock character types of Dragonlance and into political dystopias with keen attention to plot. Good Omens was a romp, the voice of which kept me engaged from page one to the end. Gaiman's American Gods paired and inventive premise with an engaging literary writing style. The characters in Joe Abercrombie's Heroes were as complex and nuanced as any I'd read in literary fiction, and while I have some issues with George R.R. Martin's love of the word jackanapes and his need to cling to the phrase "game of thrones" once he'd discovered it, I can't fault his ability to offer compelling imagery or his deft juggling of multiple viewpoints over a sustained narrative.

I quickly realized too that I had read far more SF than I thought I had. Because Margaret Atwood and Neil Stephenson are often housed in the literary shelf at the bookstore, I hadn't thought of Oryx and Crake or Snowcrash when I assessed my own reading tastes as strictly literary. Acknowledging that the boundaries are far more permeable than we sometimes imagine, I quickly listed other spec fic novels: Gulliver's Travels, The Monk, The Mysteries of Udolfo, Frankenstein, Dracula, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and so on. I realized that my friend Kirsten Kaschock's brilliant novel Sleight was speculative, as were the works of Italo Calvino, Aimee Bender, Anne Carson, and Franz Kafka. In short, I realized that "speculative fiction" is a false label wrongly associated with escapism and a sort of childishness, when many current SF writers are doing far more politically and artistically important work than is commonly acknowledged.Yes, there is still a good deal of bad writing out there, but the genre is deep with quality writers and writing.

Whether the average MFA program acknowledges it or not, speculative fiction is becoming a dominant literary form, not merely a pop genre. (Perhaps I should say "again becoming" since critics now acknowledge some of the best gothic fiction as literary.) The problems students encounter in trying to write spec fiction (hackneyed characters, insufficient attention to plot structure, etc) are common to all genres of writing including literary fiction, and the world building spec fic writers must do deepens their awareness of the necessity of setting and its affect on character and plot in ways that are deeply educational. There's enough to say on this point to write a whole post, but I'll stop there for now.

Thankfully, some writing programs, such as the one I teach in, are starting to be more open-minded and accepting, but the bias is still all too present. I had it myself. I'm glad to say, my students have educated me, and I have come to know better.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

I knew Loki was in the book--a friend had spilled as much--but he went right by me at first, as he'd gone by my friend, because, as in any good coin trick, I was looking at the wrong hand. I hadn't realized I was being played yet, though I'd volunteered myself to the con.

Fiction is a grift, and Gaiman does it exceptionally well. I've only met one person who read this book who was disappointed with it. His grounds? He felt Gaiman came up with an amazing premise (gods alive in America) but that he let it become the story become about a girl's murder and a car left on thin ice, waiting to stink. I see his point and why he wants more, and if anything, I'd want to book to go the other way. The murder was far more compelling than the gods. I'm more biased towards the living that way, and found the gods more difficult to connect to, slowing the book for me at the moment it was amping towards its climax.

But these are minor points. The main one is this: both of us read to the end, waiting to see what would unfold, not knowing where it would go. The world, fantastical as it was, was still too real to set aside.

Ultimately, this is what the book is about for me: the slight of hand a great fiction writer accomplishes. Gaiman does it again and again in clear prose that seems to hold no tricks in it. The honesty of the writing allows me to believe old gods walk the earth, even in America, along with dead girlfriends and embodied technological wonders and writers for whose grifts I'll again and again enlist.