Knowing everything

What do you notice happens during this snippet?

What had he missed? He rested his hands on the joysticks, looking left and right for another control. His right hand moved slightly and suddenly the hook soared up from the ground. It was working!

Unknown to Alex, heat sensors concealed inside the handles of the joysticks had read his body temperature and activated the crane. All modern cranes have the same security system built into them, in case the operator has a heart attack and dies. There can be no accidents. Body heat is needed to make the crane work.

And luckily for him, this crane was a Liebherr 154 EC-H, one of the most modern in the world. The Liebherr is incredibly easy to use, and also remarkably accurate.

Point Blanc(2001)

We've highlighted two sections:

In the first section, the narrator stays close to a character as in normal third person limited/omniscient point of view.
In the second section, the narrator 'detaches' from any characters and goes into a description of crane design and brand positioning.
None of this is known by the main character, or any character in the scene!
So this is purely narrator or authorial omniscience.
This is the narrator giving information to the audience, which none of the characters in the story know, purely for the benefit of the audience.

In this specific scene, there's a good reason the narrator goes into omniscient mode: if they didn't, then the audience would not understand why the crane suddenly started working (body temperature activation) or why Alex could drive this crane at all (this model is designed to be especially easy and accurate).

But you can go even bigger

With 'godlike' omniscience, the narrator kind of floats above the story world and can describe not only characters, but also histories, industries, cultures, patterns, insights, themes, ideas—whatever they want.

In the examples below, do you agree with where the boundaries between normal third person point of view and genuine authorial omniscience have been drawn?

Adjouembe excused himself to go to the bathroom. He was impressed at the black marble and the way the urinals looked like sci-fi technology, like helmets of Star Wars characters.

In the dining room, Mr Malady quickly whipped out his phone and dealt with a series of messages from creditors, including a frustrating dispute with a catering supply ship that was refusing to dock on the island unless he paid in full.

Meanwhile, far below, in the fusion power complex, a disaster was brewing. One of Mr Malady's many short-changed suppliers had been steadily reducing their efforts in quality control, and now a crucial housing in an experimental reactor had developed a crack. That crack was widening.

Everyone was shouting at the guy in the water. "Lie still! Swim! Float! Dive! Punch it on the nose! The nose!" Casey, even though she was terrified, wasn't going to abandon him, so she spun her board around and swam towards him. His eyes were white as popcorn above the waterline. The shark's dorsal fin was turning.

The shark itself was confused. It was a juvenile, still learning its way in the world. It had been chasing a dolphin, lost it, and now was trying to figure out what this new thing in the water was, and if it was worth eating. So far it didn't think so; whatever it had first bitten was hard and tasteless. Not like normal food. Sharks have a rich sensory array: not just sight (relatively poor) and smell (incredibly powerful) but also pressure and electromagnetic sensors. For this shark, the smell was nothing worthwhile; there was no blood in the water.

But all the motion in the water and micro-contractions in the swimmer were making it curious to take another bite.

How you highlight the shark depends on whether or not you think it's a character.

Given we are talking about it's goals, motivations, and feelings, it feels like it's a character, so diving inside the shark is just another example of third person omniscient point of view.

It's when we provide general information about all sharks, information not known by either character in the snippet (Casey or the shark) that we use pure authorial or narrator omniscience.

This one might be challenging because you have to think of something for which it's worth going 'beyond' your characters.

The snippets on this page have provided a few examples of what you can do:

Provide some history or context for something in the scene.
Describe a process happening elsewhere.
Describe inner workings of something in the scene.
You could also simply give a godlike opinion on whatever is happening in the scene. (We'll see a variation of this on the next page.)

Whatever you choose, pure authorial omniscience means the characters should know nothing about it.

Write a snippet that uses authorial/storyteller omniscience to describe something of which third-person characters in the scene are unaware.

Third person omniscient can have a few different effects:

It can make the whole world feel familiar and known, which in turn can make the audience feel reassured and safe even when the story itself is quite dark.
It can create a sense of epic scale by placing the characters within a much larger social, cultural, and historical context. (Some of the biggest epics in English literature are written in third person omniscient.)

The challenge with this point of view is sustaining it: to talk about so much of the world, the narrator needs to know about it—and that's a big challenge.

We've said that in omniscient mode the narrator knows 'everything'.

We usually take that to mean 'everything within the story world'.

But what if the narrator is aware of things outside the story world...

...including you?

Point of view

Knowing everything