SHE WROTE: Keeping It Real Addendum

Every time I write on head-hopping, infodump, or real time, I keep forgetting omniscient POV. I think it's probably because I work so much with romance writers, or maybe because I write in third limited almost exclusively, only a few stories in first person, and never in omniscient. If I don't write in it, can it exist? Well, yeah. Jeez.

Third Omniscient is when the storyteller is God, sees all, knows all, is clearly in the text. There is no real time because the Now of the story is the author telling it. Pratchett is Third Omniscient and he's a genius at it. Tolkien. A lot of thrillers like Bob's are third omniscient. A lot of nineteenth century lit is omniscient. Omnsicient is very distant, but it's great if you're an author who likes to comment on the story and has no interest in creating real time. Generally, romance authors, well most modern authors, do want to create that willing suspension of disbelief in real time, do want the reader to feel that what the characters are experiencing, he or she is experiencing. It's a tricky one to explain because of course Pratchett and Tolkien create a willing suspension of disbelief, too; I believe utterly in Death and Vimes and Susan when I'm in Discworld.

Anyway, if you're writing in omnisicent, you can head hop because the only head you're really in is the head of the storyteller god. You can move out of real time because the actual real time of the story is the storyteller telling the tale, not the character experiencing it. And while I would still caution about infodump, if you have a magic voice like Pratchett, you can give your laundry list in the story and it'll be marvelous. Pratchett even does prologues that begin nine thousand years before the story and you don't know why until three-quarters of the way through the book. Right after the first prologue, he puts in another one that happens only a month before the beginning of the book. Then the hero is executed in the first chapter, which of course has no real effect on him going on to be the hero of the book for the next three hundred plus pages. Then Pratchett tacks on an epilogue headed "Some Time After" where he ties up an annoying little loose plot thread. (This is Going Postal, great book.) When you're in omniscient, and you write like Pratchett, you can do that.

Actually, if you write like Pratchett, you can probably do anything.

But if you're writing third limited, write third limited. The beauty of third limited is that it's LIMITED. That's where the intensity and the connection come from.

POV. It's a beautiful thing.