The Omniscient POV

I hate it. I hate the omniscient POV. There, I've said it.

It just... feels like sloppy writing to me. I know that's not true. You can offer counterexamples all day long. But I really just can't make myself do it.

Now the first person I like. There is so much you can do with it! I mean, you've got a built-in way to disguise the identity of the narrator, since they only have to refer to themselves as "I" and "me." If you want to, things like age, race, even gender can be left vague or revealed as necessary. Plus, you've got this window into their mind that is just so intriguing to me. Not to mention, you can start to play around with the conventions of grammar, even turning the exposition and other functional grammar into the character's own voice.

Sometimes that puts you too deep into a character, or you want to be able to more easily switch POVs. For that, I like the 3rd person limited. You get a lot of the same attributes of the first person, although you do have to give the character a name. But when written well, you can get into a character's head and see everyone through their eyes. Both of these are great for the unreliable narrator, which is one of my favorite tools.

But the omniscient POV, well, it strikes me as lazy. It's just not something I can relate to, dipping into one person's head, then another, describing their emotions in objective terms. Because the omniscient narrator is always right. That POV is the God of the story, and He knows all.

Maybe it's just that I'm not so sure of my characters to be able to state in absolute, objective terms what they must be feeling. I'd much rather hear their own thoughts through the filter of their subjective perceptions, or maybe just watch how they react. It seems purer somehow.

If I have to keep myself out of a character's head, give me the third person objective. It's like the omniscient, only without the omniscience. That is, the narrator can go anywhere and see anything that would be available to an observer, but no thoughts and feelings. It's kind of the voyeur perspective.

I don't know what it says about me that in the worlds I create, I'd rather be a voyeur than God. But I do know what is says about me that even more than that, I'd like to be inside the story.

The Narrator's Voice

Confession: I always wished I had a brother or sister. Or even a cousin my age. I grew up feeling like the point of an ice cream cone with all the weight of generations above me.

Reading:

• "Riding the Doghouse" by Randy DeVita
  
• The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
  

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Catches a Cold"
  

Revising:

• "The Revenant"

Future Projects:

• Dairhenien's Library - Development
  
• Floorcraft - First rewrite of 1-5, first draft of 6-8
• Ferian Fetlock - "Ferian Fetlock Takes a Wife."
  
• "Motley" - Expansion
• "Fireworks and Earthworks" - 5% into first draft
  
• Untitled School Mistress Story

Unpublished Stories/Status (in chronological order of completion of first draft)

• "Pictures of the Old Port" - 5th Draft, Unsubmitted
• "What Price Stamps" - 3rd Draft, Submitted to The American Drivel Review, July 30th, 2008
  
• "The Frost Fugling" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "Black Pudding" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "Cora and the Sea" - 3rd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "Motley" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "Leaves and Sunsets" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "A Happy Ending" - 1st Draft, Unsubmitted
• "The Revenant" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
  
• "Illuminated" - 3rd Draft, Unsubmitted
  
• "A Cup of Coffee" / "Morning Tea" - 2nd Draft, Submitted to Tea: A Magazine, July 29th, 2008
• "Ferian Fetlock Cures a Horse" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "Hattie Donnelly's Favorite Doll" - 2nd Draft, Submitted to 24 Hour Short Story Contest, July 27th, 2008

The top part of this blog is getting way too crowded, so I've figured out a way around that. If you look on the right side of the page, you'll see a link to a wiki entitled "Dairhenien's Library." I'm using that to keep track of all of my stories, their submission status, etc. Once I get it fully updated, I'm going to simplify the header stuff, and just put stuff up there when it changes.

Just now, I finished "Balto" by T.C. Boyle, and it had an ending that made me want to stand up and cheer in the middle of the restaurant. It's about a girl named Angelle and her father, who is a drunk. He picks her up from school one day so drunk that he realizes he can't drive, and he gets her to do it. She's thirteen, by the way.

She winds up hitting a bicyclist. The father tries to pass it off as if he were the one driving, and the lawyer rehearses and rehearses Angelle to get the story straight, but in the courtroom, she tells the truth. I'm going to repeat the last paragraph below, because it was powerful.

She lifted her chin then to look at the judge and heard the words coming out of her mouth as if they'd been planted there, telling the truth, the hurtful truth, the truth no one would have guessed because she was almost thirteen now, almost a teenager, and she let them know it. "I was," she said, and the courtroom roared to life with so many people buzzing at once she thought at first they hadn't heard her. So she said it again, said it louder, much louder, so loud she might have been shouting it to the man with the camera at the back of the long churchy room with its sweat-burnished pews and the flags and emblems and all the rest. And then she looked away from the judge, away from the spectators and the man with the camera and the court recorder and the bank of windows so brilliant with light you would have thought a bomb had gone off there, and looked directly at her father.

Oh, that's good stuff. Listen to the voice of the narrator, with long conjoined clauses that get you into the head of a thirteen-year-old without crossing the line into run-on sentences. Look how the description touches on different aspects of the room so you can follow the focus of Angelle's attention as she looks around the room. See how it grabs your focus and guides it? The reader's imagination is primed to follow what Angelle is looking at. And then with a final triumphant push, the reader is forced to confront the drunk father.

As the last words of the story resonate, you are left with the impression of just how very, very strong this girl is. You realize that although later in her life, this is a scene that might haunt her, it is not something she will ever regret.

It's not a comfortable story to read, but it's one that will stick with me. It made me think about the voice of the narrator in a story. "Balto" was written from two different 3rd person limited POVs, that of the father and of the daughter. Each has a distinctive voice. Angelle's is focused mostly outside herself, to the objects in her vicinity. She is trying very hard not to pay attention to the people who are addressing her in virtually every scene. Instead, she takes in the extraneous details, but what we learn about her character comes from the way she describes them.

The father, however, is entirely self-focused. It's all about how he's feeling, what he thinks about his girlfriend, how the beautiful day is affecting him, how Angelle's fierce looks affect him. That's so totally in keeping with his character... or rather, that's totally how we learn about his character.

That's the magic of this story, and the one thing I hope to carry away from it. The events of this story could have been told in a 3rd person omniscient voice, and the exact same story information would have been conveyed. But it would have been an inferior story. Instead, Boyle chooses to let the way in which the story is told serve as a vessel to convey character, and the result is far more powerful.


Publication Status:

• Submitted: 5
  
• Accepted: 1
• Rejected: 1
• Pending: 3

Omniscient versus Limited

Confession: I have to force myself to remember to eat vegetables. I don't dislike them, per se, but I never seek them out.

Reading:

• The Van, by Roddy Doyle

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Cures a Horse"

Revising:

• "Dolly Hobbles"

I have a great dislike for 3rd person omniscient stories. It feels like cheating to me. I have no problem with several different 3rd person limited perspectives, and I actually quite like a good 1st person narrative. But hovering above a story like some kind of ghost, dipping into anyone's head you want... that's just lazy writing, as far as I'm concerned.

I'm sure my non-existent readership could offer dozens of counterexamples in which this technique was done and done well. But fuck them. I don't like it, and it doesn't work for me, and this is my blog. Take your whiny non-existent opinions elsewhere, thank you very much.

It's not the feeling of distance really that gets to me. I have read 3rd person stories in which the narrative wasn't really centered on a given character. In fact, it was centered on none. We were the aloof observer, unable to see the motivations and emotions of the players, but an invisible witness to all.

That shit is cool.

Now, it's the kind of story where we are told every why and wherefore that I hate. I feel like I'm being jerked around in dozens of directions when that happens, and I find myself not relating to anyone in the story at all.

I prefer a restricted approach because that makes it interested. When a composer creates music, he does it within a framework of musical theory. That's not to say that he can't violate the rules at all, but the violations are the exceptions that prove the rule. Creativity forced along unexpected channels can give surprising results.

Gender and POV

Confession: I eat too much and hate exercise. It's amazing I'm only twenty pounds overweight.

Reading:

• The Van, by Roddy Doyle

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Cures a Horse"

Revising:

• "Dolly Hobbles"

I found it very difficult the first time I was called on to write a story from a female POV. It wasn't even in the first person. It was just... uncomfortable is the best word I can think of to describe it. I knew I was going to get it all wrong, that everyone was going to laugh at me, that I would reveal some sort of great error that would shame me for life.

As a result, the character became even more wooden than she might have been otherwise. It was from her POV, but I resolutely stayed out of her head.

I can tell you exactly when that started to change for me. As a way of learning to write in other voices, I joined a bunch of different forums one weekend. I created a "character" for each of them, and made sure to post only in that person's voice.

The only female character in the lot turned out to be the most successful. Part of it was because I liked the subject matter in that forum best, but I think it went deeper than that. I became friends with the other people there, and as I did, I put more and more of myself into her and her story. When good things happened in my life, they happened in hers. Bad things, ditto. They happened through the filter of the character, of course, but as time went on, that mattered less and less.

I was accepted without reservation, and after a while, I took that for granted. She was consistent, but still developed as time went on. After a few years went by, I gradually posted less and less, gave my excuses, and quit the forum. I did this not out of boredom, but because I had become such good friends with those people, and it pained me to keep lying. But I couldn't tell the truth, because I'd rather they remember her well than me poorly.

That experience taught me one thing--we all have the same motivations. We may act on them differently, or with different results, but the things we want out of life are the same: pleasure, security, fulfillment, peace, love, excitement. We also fear many of the same things too. And the whole trick to crawling up into another person's noggin is to find out how they react to what they fear, and how they pursue what they love.

Armed with that knowledge, I had no qualms about writing several stories from female POVs. And they've been well received, by both men and the lady types. I'm sure if I get something really wrong, someone will be glad to let me know, but if I do mess up, it won't be because I've forgotten that deep down, we're all human.

Damn that was clichéd. I feel like adding a dick or fart joke here at the end, just to balance it out.

The Reader as a Character

Confession: I ate at a Chinese buffet for lunch, and ate WAY too much. I feel like I'm about to pop over here.

Reading:

• The Van, by Roddy Doyle

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Cures a Horse"

Revising:

• "Dolly Hobbles"

I just got an idea for Ferian Fetlock which I think might be a good idea, something distinctive about the story and the series as a whole (assuming I do continue on with the other two planned stories which set up the other two recurring characters.) It's the idea of the Reader as a character.

The conceit of a first person narrative is that the narrator is telling the story. We see it from their point of view. However, except in rare cases, there's no mention made of the fact that the person who lived through those events is actually sitting down at a computer and typing it out, or telling the story to someone else.

My mind goes to P.G. Wodehouse, whose excellent Jeeves and Wooster novels are written from the first person point of view of Bertie Wooster himself. The character Bertie Wooster is a buffoon, who has a hard time expressing himself in anything other than slang terms and various animal noises, but Bertie as a narrator has a peculiar patois of misquoted quotations and flowery prose. This juxtaposition is part of what makes those stories so enjoyable to read, or even more so, to hear read aloud.

Occasionally, Bertie will mention the previous stories as "these little chronicles" or some other fourth wall-breaking phrase, which implies that at some point down the line, Bertie himself is sitting down to compose his memoirs. In a way that stretches credibility, since Bertie never reads anything more difficult than pulp mystery novels. Still, Wodehouse is clever enough to keep the reader from asking that question most of the time.

In every version of Ferian Fetlock so far, at least all I can remember, the POV is first person, always from the viewpoint of Ferian himself. But to whom is he telling these stories? The short answer to that is, the Reader, but that's in the real world. In the context of the story, who is his audience?

That's not going to be the first question the reader asks of a first person POV story, but if I do it subtly enough, perhaps I can make it work.

I'd like to gradually, over the course of the stories, imply that Ferian is on trial. He will certainly commit enough crimes over the course of the stories for that to make sense. If he is speaking, as it were, in his own defense, then I've got an excellent reason for him to try to phrase his adventures in a manner complimentary to himself; however, the truth will still come through.

Let's say that for some reason, he cannot lie. He can, however, use his remarkable talent with words to make the truth dance, and this is what he will try to do. Instead of an earthly trial, then, he's actually making his case to some Higher Power. For that, I'll need to invent some of the mythology of this world... for that matter, I'm still not certain what Lizaju is, other than that he's blue, and has strange abilities.

But for the first story, I don't need to know more. I just need to know who Ferian is actually talking to. Why does he start the story here? Well, for my own purposes, it's a chance for us to meet the character is an archetypal adventure, before we switch up the mix. From Ferian, though, this is the story of how he caught a cold. And in the next story, "Ferian Fetlock Catches a Cold," we see how he meets Lizaju. And in the next one, "Ferian Fetlock Takes a Wife," we meet Cassie, and now our trio of main characters is complete. That should serve as the first act of the larger story... wherever that happens to go.

Time to stop putting it off and actually write it, no?