In our last Beginner’s Guide to Point of View, we considered first, second, and third person narration, but that is only the first choice an author must make when choosing POV. The choice between an omniscient narrator and a limited one is a question of how knowledgeable you want your narrator, and by extension your reader, to be. It may seem natural when you first sit down to write, but a change made on the fly can create large plot holes and implications for your readers.
The best option for your narrator is largely influenced by your own writing style, but considerations should be made for your subject matter as well. Your narrator’s knowledge will influence elements such as humor, suspense, continuity, irony, timeline, and insight into your characters. Here are some strengths and weaknesses for each:
Omniscient Narration
Your narrator knows everyone and everything past, present, future encompassing this world and even possibly beyond. They are able to tell the reader what anyone else is thinking, how anything works, or where anything is. Who, what, when, where, why, how. Your narrator knows the answer to it all.
Strengths Your narrator is a great medium to explain complex concepts simply and without question of motive. Scenes can jump in time, space, and from character to character with little friction. Authors can, and must, share everything of knowledge that will become relevant later in the story at the time of the first consideration.
Weaknesses Having a narrator that knows everything dampens the reader’s ability to experience emotions such as surprise, shock, optimism, betrayal, uncertainty, and others that are informed by a lack of knowledge. It also decreases the emotional connection to conflict. Any reason a narrator would withhold knowledge must be explained.
Limited Narration
Your narrator’s knowledge of the story is severely restricted – usually to a single character’s experiences or a single setting for a space of time but not always. They are only able to give insight into the story as seen from this narrow window.
Strengths A narrow point of view opens up the opportunity for mistakes to be made, things we take for granted to be mysterious, and conflicts of misunderstanding because readers have only one understanding of the narrative. With clearly define lines of what the narrator knows, an author can hold onto secrets and small pieces of the puzzle to be revealed until the optimal moment.
Weaknesses Complex concepts must be explained as the characters experience them, and prior knowledge must be vocalized and used after the problem is clearly defined. Any changes to time, space or character must be clearly defined and explained.
Somewhere in Between
The narrator has blend of knowledge and limitations on that knowledge with parameters set by the author that must be strictly adhered to. The most common point of view. Very rarely do narrators explicitly have exclusively limited or omniscient POVs, despite our natural instinct to categorize them as such.
Strengths Writers have full control of how much knowledge they need to tell the story and how much they can retain as a mystery. Essentially, it has the strengths of both limited and omniscient points of view.
Weaknesses Once boundaries have been drawn or otherwise pushed in the universe, they are always in play. This opens up the phenomenon of plot holes wildly if a conflict could be circumvented by knowledge that could be obtained in ways similar to previous experiences. A good example of subgenre plagued by this phenomenon is time travel, but holes can appear even in smaller, interpersonal conflicts.
Though most authors opt for a blend of omniscient and limited narration, in order to succeed the author must then keep vigilant about the boundaries of knowledge their narrator keeps. Can they access characters emotions or just see what is visible on their faces? Are they limited by rooms or views through particular characters’ experiences? Is there something extraordinary in play that influences how much the narrator knows? When I begin a big-picture edit on a book, I keep a list of these kinds of things to help weed out POV-based plot holes, and I suggest to all my authors to do the same as they write, too.