I’m getting a bunch of good questions from a Facebook page I recently put up for my Udemy students. So, YAY! This is going to help me get some blogging done, I think.
Recently, I was asked how to tell the difference between head hopping and omniscient narrators.
I LOVE this question. All writers who are working with third-person narrators need to deal with this question.
There are two kinds of third person narrators: Omniscient and limited.
An omniscient narrator can see all things in the story. He’s like God. He can see all things that are happening in all places and he can see what happens in the future as well as what is happening in the present and what happened in the past. He can also zoom right into the hearts and minds of all the characters and see what they are thinking.
A limited narrator, on the other hand, can only see through the eyes of the character who is narrating that particular scene. So if, in scene one, Jeff is narrating, he can only tell what he sees happening in the present and what he knows happened in the past. He can’t tell you what will happen in the future (you cannot write, “Little did he know that by Tuesday he’d be wishing he had not made that silly promise), nor can he tell you what’s happening in California if he’s in China.
It is OK to have more than one limited narrator in a book. So you may have Jeff narrating one scene from China and you may have Annie, back in California, narrating the next scene.
Do Omniscient Narrator’s Head Hop?
An omniscient narrator is a person with a life and a worldview and a personality. He has his own things that he loves and also things that he hates. He has strengths and weaknesses. He’s just like any other man.
So if you want to write a novel with an omniscient POV, you need to know your narrator. You may never introduce her to the reader, but you need to know her. Is she a librarian from a small village? Is your narrator the police chief or a butler or a real estate salesman? Perhaps you’re telling the story through the eyes of a prostitute living in San Francisco’s China Town. Yes, I want you to be that specific. You need to know your narrator.
And, yes, I’m talking about an off-site narrator who may never be introduced to the readers. You need to know whether she’s a Catholic or a Muslim. You need to know whether he prefers cooking or gardening.
Why? Because when you know who your omniscient narrator is, you will never leave his pov and hop between the heads of other characters. If you know your omniscient narrator intimately, you will be able to stay consistently in your narrator’s head.
Head hopping happens when we are in one character’s POV and we switch to another character’s POV.
Here’s an example of head hopping:
Sharon flinched as Max walked out the door. Good riddance. She wanted nothing more to do with him.
Max slammed the door behind him. He was done trying to make the relationship work. She was a pig-headed woman if ever there was one.
~~~~~~~~
The writer is first in Sharon’s POV and then in Max’s.
Here that small scene in an omniscient POV:
Sharon wasn’t aware of how much she looked like her mother as she stared daggers at Max’s back. The afternoon sun flooded in through the open door and set her red hair on fire, and if Max had turned around he might have seen that shining hair and those sparkling green eyes and decided she was worth one more bit of effort. But he wasn’t looking. He was filled with anger that blinded him to her beauty. Blinded him to her love for him. He had firmly tagged her, just as he tagged his specimens in the lab. Pigheaded. That was the label he put on her.
~~~~
How do we know that the second version is in omniscient?
Well, we’re not in Sharon’s POV. Sharon isn’t seeing the sun on her own hair. The narrator is looking at Sharon from the outside—seeing a look on her face that she is unaware of and seeing the sun shine on her hair.
How do we know the narrator isn’t Mark? Because he’s got his back to her. So it’s definitely an outside narrator looking on.
If you take on the persona of the storyteller and you have an idea of who she is and what her voice sounds like, you will naturally tell the story in her POV. You can go into people’s hearts and thoughts. But you also will be looking at them, often, from the outside.
Does that make sense? Questions? Comments?