Good fiction is timeless. And yet trends in writing styles do come and go. Once, omniscient point of view was something of a standard for storytelling. These days, most books are written either in first person or in a very close third person limited narration.

But you don’t have to follow the trends. I think there’s plenty of room in the current market to reintroduce audiences to good old omniscient point of view.

There are just two hurdles to get over. First, you have to learn how to do it yourself, especially if you haven’t read it very much yourself. And second, you have to get past the expectations of readers and editors who aren’t used to it.

What is omniscient POV?

The name says it all: omniscient, all-knowing. While a limited point of view can only tell you what the point of view character knows, omniscient frees you up to include any information you want.

But it’s not quite that simple. While you are free to include whatever information you like, you also need to present it to the reader in a clear way. Third-person limited gives us a frame to work with, the thoughts of the POV character. Omniscient also has a frame: the narrator.

The narrator is not usually a character within the story, but they need to be a character in your head all the same. Maybe that character is just you, as if you were telling the story to a person in the room beside you. Or maybe it’s a teller within the universe of the story: a chronicler, a visionary, someone in a position to know more or less the whole story of what happened.

So when you choose what to reveal, don’t imagine you are literally God, seeing inside every single mind and knowing every single thought. Instead, you’re telling a story, so your focus is on those facts that are relevant to the story. You are free to drop in historical background, physical descriptions of anybody, witty asides to the audience…but you still need to have a certain amount of focus. Usually, you won’t sink deeply into the characters’ inner thoughts.

Omniscient’s strengths and limitations

Each point of view you could use comes with its own pros and cons. I personally love first person because it allows me to write in a unique voice. Third person limited lets you easily write from as many points of view as you like, with the reader having no difficulty following because the character’s name is right there.

What does omniscient do for you? My favorite thing is that it allows you to include literally any information you want. You can include a character’s backstory, worldbuilding facts everyone in the story would take as commonplace, bits of wisdom you want to share, and your own (or the narrator’s own) opinions.

Consider what a hard time first and third limited POV has with physical descriptions of the narrator.

First person:

He was looking at me oddly, probably because I am short and blond and it gives the impression I am much younger than I am.

I might want to describe this character a lot more, but she’s not thinking about her appearance right now except insofar as it relates to the plot, so it would seem out of place for her to say more than that. That said, I feel that in first person you don’t need that much physical description. Hopefully the reader is fully inhabiting the character and doesn’t need to picture them.

If I were trying to write third limited, I might say something like this instead:

She ran her fingers through her long brown hair and blinked her emerald eyes.

Then I look it over and go, wait, would she really be thinking about the color of her eyes? Who is ever aware of the color of their eyes while looking out of them? So I try again:

She gazed into the mirror: long brown hair, emerald eyes, that triangular scar above her eyebrow which she hadn’t yet dabbed with concealer.

This has the problem of being a little bit cliché (gazing in the mirror being overdone because it is the main time real people actually think about the way they look) and at the same time still being limited in what I can say, because if I go on too much the character looks obsessed with her own appearance.

But in omniscient, I can say whatever I like about the character’s appearance and it does not have to follow their own self-impression.

She was short and plump, with curly brown hair and wide brown eyes. She was under the delusion that she wasn’t particularly handsome, because her mother had told her one had to be slim to be beautiful, but in fact at least six men and three women were in love with her at that very moment.

Here I can include anything I want about how she looks, anything I want about how she feels about how she looks, and what other people think about how she looks. I can even include what she looked like when she was younger and what she will look like in twenty years, if I want to. The main danger is getting carried away like Dickens or Hugo tend to do. Remember that it only takes a few key details to give a good first impression of a person, and the rest can be built up as we learn more about them.

Omniscient is also great for zooming way out and giving a bird’s-eye view of a family, a city, or a whole society. This is invaluable in speculative work, because it gives you a chance to briefly explain the world you’ve created without having to sneak it into thoughts or dialogue.

The pitfalls

The main danger with omniscient is the temptation to ramble. If you can say anything, you start to feel you can say everything. You can start from the dawn of time and give the city’s whole history. You can mention a comb in a secondary character’s hair and get carried away and give its entire history since it was made. For the sake of your word count and your reader’s limited attention span, try to keep digressions to a minimum. When you give some background information, it should be for a reason.

The second issue is that it is less immediate. First and third limited both place you directly behind the POV character’s eyes. If it’s done well, you will feel exactly what they feel. Omniscient pulls you back a little. Even when you’re talking about a character’s feelings, you aren’t the character. You’re a narrator telling how somebody feels, with a bit of distance inherent in being told this by somebody who survived the whole story.

You can add additional distance if you want: you could describe that someone was terrified in a funny way, sharing a little joke with the reader because you both know they’re going to be all right even if they don’t. Or you can describe them being happy with a slight note of doom that suggests something bad is about it happen.

But it’s pretty unavoidable that omniscient allows your readers to be a little more detached and less emotionally involved, which is probably why it’s less popular these days. Received wisdom is that a story is supposed to take readers on a big emotional journey, and if it doesn’t, it’s less of a success. But personally, I think there are different kinds of books and they’re not all meant to be like that. Some make you laugh, or take you on a more intellectual kind of journey. And some omniscient books take you on an emotional journey anyway, because you still care about these people despite not being inside their heads.

The dreaded headhopping

The standard rule of writing these days is that you must stay inside one character’s head and one character’s head only. If you don’t do that, you’re headhopping. If you’ve ever tried to write omniscient, you’ve probably gotten this feedback. It’s frustrating because that rule only really counts for limited POVs, and if you’re writing omniscient, you are allowed to include the thoughts of more than one character.

However, the criticism isn’t wholly wrong, and I’ll tell you why.

Readers, consciously or not, are aware of the frame of a story. They know what perspective they’re being told it from. So if they are settled in comfortably behind somebody’s eyes, they’ll feel a disconcerting jerk when they are yanked out of there and into a different frame.

If you’re writing omniscient, you must make sure your reader—a reader who’s probably much more used to limited POVs—is aware of your frame. It shouldn’t feel like you are bouncing among the insides of the different characters’ heads. It should feel like you are seeing them, for the most part, from the outside.

This is headhopping:

Joe sighed. Everything was a disaster.

Mary was sitting on the couch. She really should call her mother. Her head hurt.

Steve paced the room because this was all his fault. What had he even been thinking?

Each paragraph is “good writing” in limited-POV terms, because it does what we are always told to do. It omits filter words and puts us directly into a character’s head. But it’s doing that sequentially with different characters’ heads. The frame is not consistent from paragraph to paragraph; the reader tends to feel disoriented.

An omniscient POV would be more like this:

Everyone was restless and unhappy, deeply aware that this effort had been a disaster. Joe sighed, Mary rubbed her aching head and thought about calling her mother, and Steve paced while blaming himself.

Here, we aren’t in any of these heads, even though we are given a peek at what they’re thinking. The point of view remains that of the narrator, who happens to know what everyone is thinking.

The trick to omniscient is keeping your frame steadily out of anybody’s head. Make sure you do use the filter words you wouldn’t in a limited POV, because they are how we know whose thoughts are whose. And don’t focus too much on individual characters’ inner thoughts; that’s not what this POV is for. Instead you will focus on events, background information, and sometimes the mood of the group as a whole.

A few examples

The best way to learn how to use omniscient POV is to read widely among authors who use it well. Here are a couple of examples of great omniscient writing.

From The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien

Just over the top of the hill they came upon the patch of fir-wood. Leaving the road they went into the deep resin-scented darkness of the trees, and gathered dead sticks and cones to make a fire. Soon they had a merry crackle of flame at the foot of a large fir-tree and they sat round it for a while, until they began to nod. Then, each in an angle of the great tree’s roots, they curled up in their cloaks and blankets, and were soon fast asleep. They set no watch; even Frodo feared no danger yet, for they were still in the heart of the Shire. A few creatures came and looked at them when the fire had died away. A fox passing through the wood on business of his own stopped several minutes and sniffed.

‘Hobbits!’ he thought. ‘Well, what next? I have heard of strange doings in this land, but I have seldom heard of a hobbit sleeping out of doors under a tree. Three of them! There’s something mighty queer behind this.’ He was quite right, but he never found out any more about it.

Now some people find this bit a little out of place, since The Lord of the Rings is canonically supposed to have been written by Frodo out of everybody’s recollections. But it’s the style The Hobbit is written in, lingering on as they leave the Shire, and I personally love it. It’s like a movie, or a bedtime story (which is how The Hobbit started out).

From The Wounded Sky, by Diane Duane:

The ship in warp runs, in otherspace, right through the comet, unharmed, barely noticing.

In this universe, however, space writhes and wrenches, its fabric strained; the comet contained in it shatters into a cloud of stone splinters, ice fragments and twinkling water-vapor snow. Yet after a little while the troubled space quiets, the ripples flow away-and the remains of the comet, not having been hit by anything in this universe and thus taking no acceleration from the “impact,” continue on along the same orbit through the long night.

Three hundred and a few years from now, two sentient peoples formed up for battle will be watching the skies for the comet which has since time immemorial been the gods’ signal to them to begin killing one another. Instead of the comet-banner blazing across their sky, however, what they will get is a dazzling rain of stars. Tremendously relieved, they will rejoice at the long-prayed-for sign of an armistice in Heaven, go back to their homes, and beat their swords into plowshares. Here and now, an unseen something fleets by so swiftly an observer would probably never perceive her at all. A flicker, a shimmer, a passing thought in the endless silent ruminations of the universe, the USS Enterprise cruises through on patrol.

This is a set of events that no one in this universe could possibly know. That’s the fun of omniscient—that we can see a zoomed-out perspective and chains of causation unknown to anyone at all at the time.

From Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and some other guy:

It was a nice day.

All the days had been nice. There had been rather more than seven of them so far, and rain hadn’t been invented yet. But clouds massing east of Eden suggested that the first thunderstorm was on its way, and it was going to be a big one.

The angel of the Eastern Gate put his wings over his head to shield himself from the first drops.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said politely. ‘What was it you were saying?’

‘I said, that one went down like a lead balloon,’ said the serpent.

‘Oh. Yes,’ said the angel, whose name was Aziraphale.

‘I think it was a bit of an overreaction, to be honest,’ said the serpent. ‘I mean, first offence and everything. I can’t see what’s so bad about knowing the difference between good and evil, anyway.’

‘It must be bad,’ reasoned Aziraphale, in the slightly concerned tones of one who can’t see it either, and is worrying about it, ‘otherwise you wouldn’t have been involved.’

‘They just said, “Get up there and make some trouble,”’ said the serpent, whose name was Crawly, although he was thinking of changing it now. Crawly, he’d decided, was not him.

‘Yes, but you’re a demon. I’m not sure if it’s actually possible for you to do good,’ said Aziraphale. ‘It’s down to your basic, you know, nature. Nothing personal, you understand.’

‘You’ve got to admit it’s a bit of a pantomime, though,’ said Crawly. ‘I mean, pointing out the Tree and saying “Don’t Touch” in big letters. Not very subtle, is it? I mean, why not put it on top of a high mountain or a long way off? Makes you wonder what He’s really planning.’

‘Best not to speculate, really,’ said Aziraphale. ‘You can’t second-guess ineffability, I always say. There’s Right, and there’s Wrong. If you do Wrong when you’re told to do Right, you deserve to be punished. Er.’

They sat in embarrassed silence, watching the raindrops bruise the first flowers.

You see how we get a little of their thoughts, but never in a direct way. They’re filtered. And we get information that they’re not thinking, a slowly zooming-in view of the world and then these two beings.

Can you? Should you?

I’m definitely in favor of bucking trends and writing in omniscient. But if you do, study those who have pulled it off well. That’s how you can be sure you’re doing it as it was meant to be done, and not simply headhopping around like you’re writing limited POV but lost the guardrails. J. R. R. Tolkien, Terry Pratchett, and Douglas Adams are acknowledged masters of the form, each with a different narratorial voice.

Other news

From April 23-30, I’m hosting the Aliens & More Sale. This sale contains books of all kinds involving at least one major non-human character: not just aliens, but shifters, vampires, monsters, and even sentient objects. They are priced from free to $1.99, so take a peek if that’s your kind of thing (which, if you read my work, it probably is). Bisection is in the sale for 99 cents if you haven’t gotten to read it yet.

Soon–as in, sometime in the next few months, though I haven’t set a date–I’ll be releasing a novella I wrote in the Imperial Mars universe. I had no intention of writing any such thing, but I thought I’d write a little short fanfic about Kostya and Sagan and it has spiraled out of control. So if anybody is interested in that, keep an eye out. I will probably be making it free for subscribers and then putting it up in the usual places at $3 or so for everybody else.