When you use an omniscient point of view, it is appropriate to skillfully move from one character's point of view to another's. The catch is "skillfully." If you're Virginia Woolf, you'll do fine. Richard Russo, novelist, screenwriter, and lecturer at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, writes that using omniscience is a mature writer's technique -- he didn't attempt it until he was forty.
The omniscient approach, used well, doesn't seek to imitate the close third person technique. The trouble comes when a writer uses the close third person POV from character to character to character, shifting from inside one head to inside another at will and with no transition.
Here's an example from the same novel mentioned in the first posting (I've altered names and other words in the examples). At this point, the author has been using Smith's close third person point of view for several pages.
The first paragraph is tightly inside Smith's point of view, again in his head.
Smith knew that this meant the suspect would probably wind up going to the hospital. The idea didn't much appeal to him. "Get him in a cell."
Now for the second paragraph. I'll repeat the first for contrast.
Smith knew that this meant the suspect would probably wind up going to the hospital. The idea didn't much appeal to him. "Get him in a cell."Jones shrugged. It wasn't that he cared, but Smith's suggestion ran counter to protocol. He wanted to cover himself. "Clear him here first, then."
Whoa. We went from knowing what Smith knows and feels about an idea directly into what Jones feels and desires. Mental whiplash for this reader (especially in the book, where the paragraphs were not separated by a line break). Again, this blatant head-hopping occurred after pages that had held tightly to Smith's point of view. For me, sloppy, undisciplined writing. As it happens, Jones was a minor character who disappeared in a sentence or two anyway, so I have to wonder why the author felt the need to include what he felt and wanted. In an edit, I'd have cut all but the dialogue, and maybe suggested some visualization of Jones's discomfort -- but no interior monologue.
What's the harm in this? I believe that, at some level, head-hopping reduces/damages/breaks the emotional bond the writer has worked so hard to create by being in the close third person. Why? Because the hand of the author is clearly revealed and the reader, either consciously or somewhere down under, feels the manipulation of an external force, which is contrary to being carried along with what's happening to the character she's involved with. The emotional effect of the narrative is diminished and, as Sol Stein says, creating emotion in a reader is the author's job.
What's your take on this?
Next up: continuity and the dumb mistake in the opening pages of Dan Brown's hit, The DaVinci Code.
Hi Ray,
Clumsy POV shifts are annoying, esp. when I have to back track to figure out who's head I am in...your posted example is certainly wobbly, and a good editor should have caught it...this got published? Wait, I'm not surprised.
My work often shifts person to person in first person...but I keep them pretty well divided, if not by chapter then with deliberately spaced scene changes within a chapter with a few subtle cues to tip off the reader which "I" is having a say ( I go with the idea that there is always more than one side to a story). In my novel "Washed Glass" I have a scene in which the two main characters have flowed together while having a conversation, so both POV's are engaged and their internal thoughts are raging along inside them...it was challenging to write and get it right, and it was fun to do... my sample readers have "gotten it" tho' they're savy sorts and were wide awake when they read it...if the reader is half asleep they'll miss it.
Audrey Niffenegger solved the character ID problem in "The Time Traveler's Wife" by putting the characters name at the beginning of each shift...tho' it worked when I was drowsy, at other times I was a bit put off with the added clutter, more like reading a play than a novel. I think most readers could have gotten the character change without that marked a cue.
Anyway, my lunch hour is over, gotta run, have a great weekend! Laura
Posted by: Laura | October 08, 2004 at 10:30 AM