I was just watching a YouTube video which tried to explain why narrating a novel in third person omniscient is wrong but third person limited is right. The young woman explaining all this was personable, eloquent and prepared with arguments for her thesis. Ultimately, she was foursquare against “head hopping; meaning switching back and forth between points of view in a scene.
And who knows, maybe she’s right. Maybe subjecting the audience to the point of view of two people within a dialog is just too confusing for audiences. But you know what? I have a feeling if a story is interesting enough and the characters sympathetic, I’m guessing that the audience is following along just fine and just wants to find out how the plot will progress. I think a lot of times editors edit even when they should be reading and feeling whether the story is achieving that minor miracle we call entertainment. And if E.E. Doc Smith used too many exclamation points and Robert E. Howard had Conan grunt the same way in too many scenes, I’m sure a competent editor would have demanded these faults be eliminated from the final version of the book. But would that have added significantly to the entertainment value of the story? I don’t think so. Sure twelve-year-old me and current me are different readers. We notice different things in the same book. I would see the pulp aspects of the writing and even the temporal changes in writing and culture that have occurred over the course of almost a century since these books were written. But I can still enjoy the story as a story. If it elicits emotions or makes me think about a scientific point the author is trying to make then even if the prose is far from deathless, I can be entertained. I don’t need Shakespeare in space.
So, here’s my point. The book publishing industry is dying. And it’s not dying because of the prevalence of the third person omniscient point of view. It’s dying because the gatekeepers of publishing just as the gatekeepers of movie-making consciously squeezed all the fun out of novels in order to advance a social justice narrative that they thought was mandatory to push. So, the cure for this isn’t better editing. It’s better writing, writing that keeps the interest of the readers. Better plots and better characters and more fun.
Of course, I went back and tried to decide if my narration was third person omniscient or third person limited. And by golly I think it was omniscient. Now I could go back and rewrite the novel by switching the point of view in all of the tens of thousands of words to third person limited. But then it wouldn’t be my story. Because I don’t think that way and so I would be stumbling about trying to rework the sentences to fit this requirement of the narration. Well, I guess editors have to eat so I can’t blame them for pushing the party line that provides them with work.
But I just can’t see it from their point of view.
I think the fondness for first person (often unreliable) or third person limited viewpoint comes from a fundamental aspect of modernist philosophy. That aspect is that in modernist thought there is NO absolute truth. There’s my truth and your truth and (heaven help us) Kamala Harris’s truth. The Omniscient narrator belies this point, for that story, their narrative is the truth. They deny that such can exist in support of their raging relativism. I think the second issue is the types of “stories” they write. Plot is limited or irrelevant, the characters aren’t characters but more archetypes or mouthpieces for… Read more »
You bring up some very good points. When my narrator is describing a thermonuclear detonation in an enormous mine shaft he’s going to need to explain a lot of stuff including the the rationale of the attackers and the condition of the victims. Omniscience is pretty useful in that circumstance.
I wonder if the need to explain details is part of what drives SciFi to third person omniscient narration. This is so for Scifi especially the more hard or technology driven parts of ScifFi. This may also partially explain why what we see being written leans to soft SciFi or even straight-up fantasy. It is kind of like in my own field of software engineering where the admonition was to Never use Goto. But there are certain places (e.g. error recovery in driver startup) where jumping out of the task to the recovery code is far easier to read than… Read more »
And I will say Tregonsee, the video I was watching wasn’t specific to science fiction so maybe the stylistic preferences fit with literary fiction. But I didn’t decide on third person omniscient because just deciding on third person narration was as deep as I thought about it. I write probably based on what I’ve read over the years. I put on the page what I hear in my head when I’m imagining the story. Now the spoken dialog is the easiest stuff because all I have to decide is whether I write “He said” or “He asked” or something else… Read more »
A further thought I have is that in some Genre (e.g. Mystery, especially Murder Mysteries) people started to flow away from omniscient narrators to first person narration. Part of this is that knowing everything ruins the joy of a mystery. Part of it was just to throw more red herrings into the mix, We start with an untrustworthy narrator, and in some cases (e.g. At least One Agatha Christie mystery) the Narrator IS the murderer. Scifi underwent some of this (Look at folks Like Ellison, Spinrad and even (wretch) Dhalgren). Honestly, the viewpoint is a tool. Far too often I… Read more »
I’ve written some shorter works in first person. I found it works well with humorous stories especially.