The Challenges and Opportunities of an Omniscient POV

Kevin Day Photography

The most prevalent point-of-view used by writers today is the third-person limited POV (sometimes spread across multiple characters), as well as the first-person POV.

It’s pretty rare to find a contemporary novel written with an omniscient narrator—which is why Celeste Ng found it a terrifying realization, while writing her first novel, that her story required one. She says:

The idea made me incredibly uncomfortable. To me, omniscient narrator called to mind the Dickens model: a Big Booming Voice who bossed the characters around, a know-it-all who judged everything. Someone very unlike me. As a shy person, I’d always rather listen than talk, and I seldom feel comfortable making definitive pronouncements.

But she found a way of thinking about it that made it work. Click here to read her entire essay on the “quiet” omniscient narrator, which appears in the latest Glimmer Train bulletin.

Other pieces in the bulletin:

The Place Where Writing Grows by Natasha Tamate Weiss
On Quelling Writerly Doubts by Molly Antopol
Some Material May Not Be Suitable for Children by Peter Sipe

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