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mbarkerWriting Excuses 20.15: Third Person Omniscient
Key Points: Third Person Omniscient. Where no character can go? Deploy it carefully. Dealing with complex dynamics. Narrators. Prologues. Omniscient can have a voice. Be careful of headhopping, make sure your reader knows whose head they are about to get. Use your turn signals! Beware the paralysis of choice.
[Season 20, Episode 15]
[Mary Robinette] Hey, guess what? The 2025 Writing Excuses Cruise is over 50% sold out. During this week-long masterclass, I'm going to be leading writers like yourself through a series of workshops designed to give you the tools to take your writing to the next level. Space is limited, but there is still time to secure your spot. We're going to be sailing out of Los Angeles from September 18th through 26. Regardless of where you are in your writing journey, this event is your opportunity to learn new skills while exploring the beautiful Mexican Riviera. Whether you're revising a story, reworking a character arc, or revitalizing your plot, you'll leave more confident in your current story and bolstered by a new set of friends. Join us on board at writingexcuses.com/retreats.
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[Season 20, Episode 15]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Third person omniscient.
[Mary Robinette] She's Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] They're DongWon Song.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] He's Dan.
[Erin] She's Erin.
[Howard] I'm confused.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] We are continuing our section talking about proximity. We're talking about how close the perspective is to the characters of your story. We are finally to my favorite of these, which is third person omniscient. I love omniscient because I feel like it gives the author so many tools to play with as they're telling the story that they want to tell. I think there's been a real drive in the past few decades of getting closer and closer and closer to the character, getting that perspective really locked into the character's emotions and interiority. There's been a real drive towards first person. I was talking last time about there's sort of a default toward close limited. But I do love it when we get to step back, zoom out, see what everythings happening in the room, find out what's happening next door, what are the neighbors having for dinner, which Joe down the street thinking, what's the gas station attendant thinking. Like, being able to get the broadest perspective of what everyone is experiencing in the moment, to me, can sometimes be such a rich and filling and exciting narrative experience.
[Howard] One of my favorite examples of third person omniscient as a tool that is doing a thing that no other POV/proximity tool could do is the very short chapter in Act III of Tom Clancy's, I think it's The Sum of All Fears. Where a nuclear device is detonated in a football stadium. The chapter is called Three Shakes. We step into omniscient and we describe the quantum effects, the particle effects, the EMP effects. Because part of what happens is the blast hits, electromagnetic blast hits the TV antennas, satellite antennas from trucks, and results in shorting a satellite out in orbit. He describes all of the electronics of that happening, and, you know what, there isn't a single character on scene for whose point of view that works. Because they're all dead.
[DongWon] That's the thing is you can do so many things within omniscient that you can't do if you're limiting yourself to a character who's in the scene. You can get into the subatomics. Right? You can get into spaces where no people are, or get into the heads of people that your protagonist doesn't have access to, like the villain characters, like side characters. But, because of the free range you have, I also think that third person omniscient is the most difficult of these three sort of basic…
[Mary Robinette] Yes…
[DongWon] Ones we're talking about. Like, first person, third limited, those and third omniscient are, like, the three most common that you see. I do think third omniscient is one to be deployed very carefully. So, for you guys, what are the pitfalls? Like, when have you tried this and how has it worked out for you?
[Mary Robinette] For me, I'm not actually sure that I've tried to write anything in omniscient.
[DongWon] Yeah. It's pretty rare.
[Mary Robinette] For me, I haven't had a story yet where I felt like I needed that extra distance. I think about novels like John Scalzi's Collapsing Empire, when we're looking at a more contemporary example of this. Or Dune. Where it's trying to look at these very, very broad things. But then I'm also thinking about, like, Liza Palmer's Family Reservations, which is, again, a more contemporary example. It just came out last year. Of third person omniscient. What all of these are doing, for me, is that they're dealing with big complex inter-dynamics where you're jumping… And I just haven't written that kind of story yet where I'm dealing with that sort of complex relationship dynamics, whether it's empire spanning or family spanning. So, yeah, I haven't… I don't think I've used omniscient yet.
[Howard] Back in 2008, during the very first season of Writing Excuses, there was an episode which was particularly memorable for me, because it's one in which we were talking about these tools, and I knew what exactly zero of the terms meant.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] That was a good time that was very much Howard gets to be the every person character who is educated at a much faster rate than any of the listeners could hope to be educated. But it's the point at which I learned that the POV that I was usually writing in for Schlock Mercenary is what we call third person cinematic. Because we're not looking inside people's heads, and we're not following a character around so much as we are following a camera. But the existence of the narrator, who would often express an opinion or state a fact or there would be footnotes meant that I was doing third person cinematic with dips into and out of omniscient. In 2008, I was doing, I think, a pretty good job of writing and illustrating Schlock Mercenary. But once I had names for these tools, once I knew what I was doing, I… It's not that I knew what I was doing. Once I knew the names for what I was doing, I was able to start figuring out what I was doing and how to switch. I guess I wrote third person omniscient for close to 20 years on and off. Recently, I sat down and tried to play with it as a tool, and I'm realizing, "Hum. This is not as easy as it was when I was drawing pictures."
[Laughter]
[Dan] I think I've only written omniscient once. It was in what was essentially a prologue. The third Zero G book, the plot hinges on a bunch of nine-year-olds, because it's middle grade, understanding how extremely fast travel works. Because we already learned in book 1 that it took almost 100 years of travel for the spaceship to get from Earth to this other planet. Then I needed them to understand that another ship left later but got there first. So the prologue is essentially, kind of like Howard was saying with the Tom Clancy stuff, it's a scientific explanation of how the speed of light works and how extremely fast travel works. There is no perspective, there is no character that we're getting that from. But it had to be there. Now, you asked about what are the pitfalls of this. One of the major pitfalls of this was trying to write this without it sounding didactic. Trying to write this in a way that sounded like it was part of the book. Every writing group that I ran this through, which I guess was only two, but to writing groups completely rejected it at first. Because, like you said, third person limited was and is kind of a default for a lot of people. So getting this scene that's not let me give you a textbook first, that's aimed at nine-year-olds to explain what…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] FTL is really kind of didn't set right with them. I had to fine tune it a lot before readers were able to kind of accept that it should exist.
[Erin] So, I was… When you initially asked the question, I was, like, I've never done that. Then I realized I did it a ton.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Recently.
[Yup]
[Erin] So I wrote a series of posts… This is an interesting sort of… To give a little context. So, for Pathfinder, for Paizo, for the Pathfinder setting, I wrote a series of short fiction pieces about the deaths of various gods. They were setting up for an actual God dying in their worlds. So I got to write a bunch of what if stories of, like, what if this other God died, what if this third God died. All of them are as if it was like a seer saw the future and was like… So it's like an omniscient unnamed seer is, like, here's what happens when the God of farming dies. So for each one, I wrote, like, about the specific death and then the implications for the world. So I was going to, like, what actually happens in the death scene and then looking at this other character's affected this way and it makes all the crops die and this other thing happens. So it was a bunch of very small things for different characters and it was all omniscient. But what it makes me think of is two things. One is, like, I was thinking about this earlier with that Tom Clancy example, is that a lot of times, omniscient is the perspective of the world. The reason, like, that it can be used… There are many reasons to use it, but I love it when it feels like this is the world telling a story, and the world is bigger than the people in it. So one person cannot contain the world, it's only by looking at multiple people in the spaces between people that you can really understand what the world is doing. I think one of the first times I remember seeing it is in The Wheel of Time book openings…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Where it's always that section that's like…
[Mary Robinette] The Wheel Turns.
[Erin] The wheel turns, and a whole bunch of people, like, here's this farmer and his affected, and here's this whatever…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And they're affected, to give you a here's the state of the world as of… We've been following these characters that shape the world, but to remind you, here's how the world is affected and here's how ordinary citizens are seeing their lives change as a result of everything that's happening. Then… But how to, like, then make it interesting is something I thought about is for each God, like, they have a specific domain, and I actually tried to let that change the rhythm and style of what I was doing. When I talked about the God of hunts being hunted, I went for shorter, more like reporting on…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Like, this is happening, that is happening. The way you would in a hunt or a fight scene almost, but, like the world is fighting. When it was the goddess of beauty, I went for longer sentences that had, like, a longer cadence, like the soft feel of beauty. So that way, the world changes.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] And the world's perspective changes, and it changes the way that I was able to use omniscient in those places.
[DongWon] I do think that's, like, one of the pitfalls, is that people think that just because you zoomed out, you lose the voiciness. It can still be as voicy in omniscient as you can be in close limited. I want to talk more about that and the use cases for it. But before then, listeners around the world looked at their podcast apps and realized it was about time for a break.
[DongWon] Okay. So we've been talking a little bit about the cases where we've tried to use omniscient in the past. For me, I think these are often the very cinematic moments like Howard was talking about in terms of, like… I think of, like, disaster movies where, like, you suddenly see the asteroids falling from a dozen perspectives of people who are about to die in a variety of ways…
[Aeeeee]
[DongWon] That you have met for five seconds. Right? When it comes to these scenes, we talked a little bit about head hopping in the third person limited episode. But what are the things that you find yourself needing to do when you reach for omniscient to keep it from being unmoored, keeping it from being overwhelming, whether to you or to the reader?
[Mary Robinette] So, I can really only speak about it from a reader's perspective at this point.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] But I love reading omniscient. What I find when I'm reading omniscient is that I'm given direction about where I'm headed. So that I don't just arrive in a character's head. There is narration that precedes it that that then drops me into the characters head. So the narrator, the author, is directing my attention so I'm already focused on them, and then I get their thoughts. So it's like… It is that zooming in, and then zooming back out again, without that sign posting, that's where I think we get to the flaw of head hopping, which is, I suddenly have someone's thought and I don't know who it belongs to. I thought I was with this person, but now I'm over here and I didn't see it coming. That's, for me, where it falls apart when I'm reading it in student work. But when I'm reading, like, Jane Austen… She's extremely good at directing my attention. Some of my favorite works are also things where sometimes there's not a character on stage. Douglas Adams does a really great job of this with Hitchhiker's Guide. It's like this is where we're headed right now. Now we're going to spend a little bit of time in this person's head, and then we're going to come back and talk about Babel fish.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Humor is one of the places we see omniscient the most.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Actually. Because Pratchett uses third person…
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[DongWon] Omniscient all the time. Where you kind of need to step back and point out the grand irony of whatever's happening here. So, I mean, it makes sense if you were using it for Schlock, both because it was comic, but also it's very much the humorist's voice is that omniscient voice.
[Erin] Yeah. I often think of it as, like, being in a car with somebody and they don't signal when they change lanes.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Like…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] You can get away with that…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Once or twice, but if you're constantly going, someone's going to be like, are you okay? Do I need to take the wheel from you? But, like, a good driver, even if it's just for a moment, even if it's… Maybe it's sometimes it's a really, really explicit signal. They actually, like, put on the signal light. Sometimes it's the way they look over…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] If you see them and you're in the car, you're like, oh, okay, I understand what you were doing there. So I think it's figuring out how are you signaling to the reader that the changes happening, so that if you do change without a signal, there's a reason for it. Like, oh, we were about to hit a boulder. Then it makes sense to them for the re… Like, the reasons that you were doing it.
[Howard] There's an argument to be made, yes, for creating without deliberation or conscious access to the tools you're using. But that is not the way I prefer to make art. I always like to deliberately deploy the tools. If I'm going to signal a turn with just my head, I'm going to know that I'm doing that before actually doing. For the record, though, I always use my turn signals.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] I don't just use my head because I don't want to be hit by another car. And I always…
[DongWon] [garbled] sticking your head out the window of a car…
[Laughter]
[garbled] [Who drives that way?]
[Mary Robinette] We've got somebody… Someone that we know in Chicago, my husband was like [garbled] with Chicago drivers that they don't use their turn signals? This person replied, "I ain't giving nothing away for free."
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] But I do feel like sometimes we see that with writers, that they'll think…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, the reader has to work for it. I… That they won't give information because they feel like somehow it cheapens the experience, which I do not understand.
[Howard] Not a fan. Not a fan.
[Erin] I think it's the same reason that sometimes people feel like everything that happens in the story has to be a surprise.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Like, holding back the twist is where the power is. Because I think it's like once readers realize that, like, I've done something really clever or I surprised them, they will value it more. But in truth, a lot of times, the twist you can see coming… It's the car wreck in slow motion, so to speak…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Is actually really compelling, because it's like you know it's there and yet you… They don't avoid it, and it really draws the eye in a way that I think people don't realize sometimes.
[Dan] Yeah. That calls to mind what's actually one of my very favorite uses of third person omniscient, which… There's a scene in The Lions of Al-Ressan by Guy Gabrielle Kay, where a huge disaster has just happened, a character has just died. But we don't know which one. We know that there were three main characters present, and some horrible thing happened. I can't remember what the horrible thing was. But before he tells us who died, he goes and checks in with every single other character in the story. All of the side characters, some random people, and is very slowly kind of circling in. I do believe that he uses linebreaks every time that he jumps ahead. Which is…
[Mary Robinette] I do… No… Because… He may not. Carry on.
[Howard] Yeah. But it felt like he did because of how clear it was.
[Dan] Yeah. He made it very clear every time we came into a new perspective. So whether or not it looks like limited, he was very clearly doing omniscient thing of just making sure that we got this character's reaction to the big disaster, and then move on to the next one. Part of the effect of clearly sign posting which head we're in is that we are... in our own heads, we're mentally checking off, okay, this person's safe. Okay, this person's safe. Then, by the time we finally get into that… We get the perspective of the two or three characters that were actually present and we learn who died, it's devastating.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, he's very good at using that. There's a… In, I think it's Tigana, he has the scene where we go… Someone dies with an arrow… From an arrow. We see the scene, and then he effortlessly takes us back in time to someone who had been… To how the shot was fired and who it was with… Who fired and how it happened. That's, I think, one of the other things that you can do with omniscient is… We've been talking about moving from person to person, but I think you can also move us around in time in ways that are significantly easier than when you're trying to do third… Where you have, like, okay, here's a line break, and there's a header. It's like seven months previously.
[DongWon] I mean, that's what's so exciting about omniscient is the range of possibilities is just vast. Right? Because you can… I've seen people just like dip back into we're going to talk about the creation of the universe for a second now. You know what I mean? Like, that can be such an exciting narrative move because it allows you to build momentum, allows you to set things up, it allows you to put things in context in all kinds of fun ways.
[Howard] One of my favorite bits of my own work is the beginning of book 20, which is called Time for a Brief History, which is a play on the Steven Hawking… I'm going to read it very briefly.
A little under 14 billion years ago, there was nothing. That early nothing is surprisingly difficult to draw. Not drawing anything is easy. But these blank panels upon which the lazy, lazy artist hasn't expended any effort still occupies space and still experience time. The nothing at the beginning of the universe did neither of those things. In point of fact, it only did what it was. Nothing. Until suddenly it didn't.
It was so much fun to write that, and it's an omniscient voice. But it's an omniscient voice that has voice. It has an opinion.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Howard] It sets a tone for the book. It sets the tone for the story. And it tells you what you're headed for.
[Mary Robinette] It also has a very clear relationship with the reader, which is, I think, one of the other things that omniscient can do that you get in first person.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] But omniscient can reference the fact that it is a story in ways that third person limited fundamentally… You can… Technically, I do this at the beginning of Shades of Milk and Honey. Because I start with this voice-driven opening. Since we're quoting work…
The Ellsworths of Long Parkmead had the regard of their neighbors in every respect.
It's like this is this very, very distant thing.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Mary Robinette] Then I come into one character, which is the Honorable Sir Charles Ellsworth. But then the rest of the series is Jane. It's the only spot that I pull way back like that. I use that a little bit at the beginning of the others, because I'm trying to do the Austenian nod. But I never do the omniscient thing that Austen does. But it is that… Is offering the reader that, hello, here's our relationship.
[Erin] The thing that keeps coming into my mind as I'm listening to all this is this phrase, like, even God has intentions. In some ways, God has to have more. So one of the things you hear when people are inventing things are that constraint actually helps creativity.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Because you can't do everything. So it helps you to like focus in on the things you can do. I think that gets back to what you're saying about why omniscient can be so tricky is you can do anything. So how do you know what you want to do? So I think one of the things if you're writing omniscient is to think about what is the intention of what you're doing? As all… If you're reading your lovely works, like, you had a really… You both had really clear and very different intentions in mind, and the circling in of the people that died… Like, there's a very clear intention there of what that omniscient is on the page to convey to the reader.
[Mary Robinette] That makes me realize that I think that part of the reason I've never written omniscient for anything besides the, like, barest touch of it at the beginning of a book is the prowess of choice. There's so many choices that, like, I don't even know… I also have not had a work that needed it. But I've been sitting here as we've been podcasting, thinking maybe I should try omniscient, and the thought of trying it fills me with such existential dread…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Because there are so many more choices…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] That are available to you that you now have to make.
[Howard] Yeah. That's what I'm struggling with in the omniscient work in progress right now.
[Mary Robinette] Right.
[Howard] I identified it almost immediately. I was like, oh. Oh, this is paralysis of choice. Okay. Well, I choose to come back to this later.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Well, as the omniscient narrator of this particular episode, I… Unfortunately, we are out of time, and I'm going to take us to our homework. So, what I would like you to do is to describe a street scene. I want to have you describe a scene where your main character is walking down a street and I want you to move us through that scene of the character moving through this street seen through the perspective of 5 to 6 bystanders observing this happening. Focus on sensory details. What is everybody seeing? And how can you use that to say, oh, the smell of this, the sound of that, the look of that, is establishing where your main character is in the scene, and be clear about whose perspective are we seeing this from?
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
