Omniscient POV
Word count: 1115
Seema asked a question about the ominiscient point of view on Zendom - specifically, how it differed from a wandering limited POV. I said:
In the omniscient POV, it’s the narrator (generally the author) who sees and knows all. If you’re leaping from character to character and having each character tell what he himself knows, then it’s not omniscient, it’s just very choppy limited POV. If, on the other hand, you can tell it’s the author (or narrator) providing the information, then it’s omniscient. It can be hard to tell the difference.
Not surprisingly, this was misunderstood. Some writers do leap from head to head while writing the omniscient POV, and only occasionally make it clear that there is a narrator’s POV present. That makes it hard to tell the difference.
Better examples of omniscient POV convey character and feelings without leaping into everybody’s head. Tolkien was mentioned as an example, but it’s easier to open any pre-20th century work of literature if you want to see the omniscient POV in action. Jane Austen is my favorite example of what can be done mainly through the medium of dialogue, without all this modern head-banging.
So I’ve been considering shifting Colony from its original head-banging omniscient POV to a more restrained example of the bird’s-eye perspective. The scenes I’ve written recently are in limited omniscient (that is, third-person limited POV) because I’ve gotten into the bad habit of writing that way. Like most fanfic writers, my initial style was omniscient. I didn’t change until someone pointed it out to me, and now I’m starting to find it tedious to pick a POV character and follow him through a scene (unless it’s Tom). I like the idea of omniscience better.
The Internet Writing Workshop has a nice omniscient POV exercise.