latent omni

[truepenny]

The Mirador, Chapter 5: 10,808 words

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I've realized something. And this is at least the second time I've realized it, so I'm going to write it out in the hopes that maybe I won't have to reinvent the wheel a third time.

What I've realized is that every book I write has to be written in latent omni.

By which I do not mean every book must be written in omniscient. That would be a silly thing to say, since all of my books to date have been written in limited first person* with multiple narrators. I mean that the deep structure of the book (pick your metaphor: backstage, or the reverse side of the tapestry, or whatever works for you) has to make sense from all perspectives.

That is to say, the antagonist's actions have to make sense from his or her point of view. I've blogged about this before. But it's more than that, which I think is why I had to have the epiphany again. My books (and, please notice, I'm not saying this is true for anybody else--it might be, and I think it might help as a thing to keep in mind, which is the other reason I'm posting this, but, on the other hand, it could just be that I'm on crack) need to have the constant potential to swing wide and zoom in on somebody else. Because if I can write them like that, I won't hit the problems I hit in The Virtu, and that I've hit in The Mirador, where various characters' actions are perfectly logical in service to the plot, (i.e., as part of the surface structure), but make no sense when contemplated in terms of that character's own motivations, goals, and plans. This way lies cardboard villainry, and that is a thing I most emphatically do not want.

I know I won't get Summerdown right on the first pass, and I am (trying to be) at peace with that. But I'm hoping that at least I can make some new mistakes, instead of these boring old ones.

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*It is quite possible to write in omniscient first person. The Victorians did it all the time.

Comments

Omniscient first person?

[mallory-blog.livejournal.com]

You say that the Victorians wrote in omni first person all the time - can you give me a few examples and/or did you mean they wrote in first person and omni in the same novel?

Re: Omniscient first person?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The Mill on the Floss has a first person narrator.

Re: Omniscient first person?

[aitchellsee.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering where on the spectrum David Copperfield or Moby Dick come down, but not wondering hard enough to go look 'em up on Project Gutenberg and read in their entirities to answer my own question. :-)

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

When stories are told in omni, yes, they do have to make sense from all points of view, because all points of view are subsumed within the omni. I think the reason storytellers sway from this overarching coherence when in first person (and I do it myself, and come to the same realization as you) is because how audiences perceive and expect stories has changed, thank you, HOLLYWOOD.

That is, when I look at the average Hollywood "you didn't see that one coming!" story of any kind, the stories would often be strongly first-person-limited if written down. At most we may see one or two scenes of the bad guy chuckling over his work (Speed, Scream, etc), but the bulk of the movie is absorbed with the protag trying to figure out what's going on, and then solve it. Things are thrown in not because they make sense, but because they look cool, and as long as no one pays attention to the entire crew behind the curtain, who cares if the story falls apart on a second look, or from the pov of any non-protag?

I came to the same realization recently, but I went in both directions. My first version of the current WiP was coherent from all levels, but lacked urgency for one of the main protags (that is, no real reason for him to get involved, and he really needed one). So when I rewrote, I... well, I think I forgot about the why for all characters, and instead... let's put it this way. I burnt down half of Chinatown before I realized it made absolutely no sense for someone intent on secrecy to, say, burn down half of Chinatown to make a statement.

*headdesk*

And hence the rewrite, but it did make me think hard about pretty much what you're saying here: the pretty explosions and fast car chases may be fun, and they occupy the protags (and the readers), but if they don't make sense from the villian's POV, then those events don't belong.

Which is really a pity, because I quite liked burning down half of Chinatown. Sigh. That was fun.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Thanks for skipping the cardboard villains. SInce there are already too many of them out there, I don't think your determination to eschew them will result in a shortage.
(Alas.)
One of the things I realized about Brotherhood of the Wolf as I was watching it was that it was so superior to the average Hollywood creature feature because the Big Bad Guy* had real, complicated reasons for what he was doing--and so did all his tools. They did bad things, but they weren't mindlessly evil---and they even tried to limit the evil they did do, especially if it wasn't going part of their Big Plan. Because they knew they weren't really Bad Guys. They were just breaking a few eggs so they could make an omelette.

*The priest. The not-really-one-armed man was a tool.

[davidlevine]

This might be a complete quibble, but did you intend "omniscient first person" to mean something different from "first person omniscient"? To me, the latter is a commonly-used phrase meaning an omniscient narrator that refers to itself (the putative author) as "I", while the former implies an omniscient character writing in first person. (Which is something I think I've seen once. Maybe twice.) Now that I think about it, I'm not even sure why I think those two similar phrases mean such different things. Word order in English is a flexible thing.

To return to the meat of the issue -- yes, absolutely. I think that novels (and even short stories) work best when the author is aware of the feelings and motivations of all the major players. The term "latent omniscient" is a new way of phrasing that, and very valid.

And yes, it is hard. Especially with a large cast. But it's worthwhile.

[davidlevine]

I'd say that most movies are limited third, not first. You don't actually have to use character's-PoV shots and voice-over to make a movie in first person, but I'd say you have to put your focus much much tighter on the character than in the typical movie.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I believe that Hemmingway had a bigger impact on the lit fashion change from first person omni to tight third.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I think the distinction you're making is between whether the first person narrator is a character in the story they're telling or not. Yes? No? Giraffe?

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

Could be. But the element of throwing in what's fancy without conceding a need to justify the action from the antog's POV is a hallmark of filmic telling, I think.

Someone told me a few years back that Brown's Da Vinci Code was bound to be made into a movie, "It's perfect for a movie," he said, "it's written just like one -- lots of little scenes that move so fast they give you no chance to think about why that should happen, or whether it's even credible." At least he granted that it wouldn't make a very good movie, just that it was set up like one.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

I suppose the only truly limited first would be redoing Rashamon for the nth time.

But in dissecting some (of the better) films, there is a definite POV for each scene. It's the way the opening is shot, the angles, where the camera lingers, the close-ups; these are all clues that tell us whose POV rules the scene.

Thinking of recent movies I've seen, it suddenly occurs to me that none of these rules seem to apply to the love scenes I've watched. Those were all much closer to a distant third. (I betcha some film student's already done a dissertation on the psychological pov of a director or editor based on how they stage/cut/frame shots.)

It does seem that filmic tropes have had a big effect on our popular literature, though, from scene length to pacing to 'how much explanation is required' as well as the audience's willingness to just enjoy the pretty pictures and not worry their heads about whether the story, y'know, actually holds water.

But then, this is why I'm reading Monette and not Brown.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I agree about that. Though I think the Brown style preceded movies--used to be found in dime novels, few of which have survived. Louisa May Alcott's potboilers are a great example--lots of fast sturm and drang that doesn't hold up once you think about it, but plenty of emo during the read. Goes for action novels as well. Most of Baroness Orcszy has both--brisk pace, plenty of emo, and the depth of tin foil.

[davidlevine]

Yes. But I can't really say why the difference in the two phrases implies that difference to me.

[heresluck]

I observe with amusement that the flurry of comments about first-person whatever would make an excellent, if belated, example with which to demonstrate to my erstwhile diss director just why terms like "autodiegesis" etc. are so very useful when paddling the muddy waters of narrative theory. Tra la. *g*

[davidlevine]

Oh yes, definitely, a movie or a play can have (almost always does have) a PoV character -- the character at the center of the action, the character whose actions and reactions are the focus of the scene. But having a PoV character isn't the same as saying that character is the first-person narrator.

The line between first and third in film is a lot blurrier than it is in written English, where you can look at the subject of a single sentence and know immediately. (I wonder if there are other languages where this distinction doesn't exist.) You could even argue that, other than scenes where the camera shows us what one character is seeing (their literal point of view), all film is third-person. But I'm not saying that.

Re: Omniscient first person?

[heresluck]

Middlemarch comes immediately to mind.

Re: Omniscient first person?

[heresluck]

I can't speak to Moby Dick, but David Copperfield is typically Dickensian in that the first-person narration is limited, but rather arbitrarily so; David sometimes tells us more than it seems he should be able to know, and at other points tells us considerably less than he knows (due, arguably, to Dickens's own penchant for The Big Reveal, which requires that the audience be kept in the dark for a while).

Re: Omniscient first person?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I think with Moby Dick it depends on whether one chooses, arbitrarily, to assume that Ishmael is also the author of the non-narrative chapters. I can't think of anything in the book that argues against this theory, but I also can't think of anything that argues for it.

Of course, it's been almost ten years since I read MD, so everything I say should be taken with at least one grain of salt and possibly two.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

As a wild-ass guess, is it the difference between which is modifying what? (I.e., in one "omnisicent is modifying "first person" and in the other, vice versa.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Heh.

You know, that's true.

[davidlevine]

Just so. I read "omniscient first person" as a noun phrase, saying that the first person [narrator] is omniscient, whereas "first person omniscient" is an adjective phrase in which "omniscient" modifies "first person" and the whole shebang modifies [narrator]. But I can't defend this on grammatical grounds. My grammatical ear is very strong -- I know what's right and what's wrong and I'm almost always correct in this -- but I'm miserable at remembering the actual rules and the names for the various constructions. I've never even diagrammed a sentence.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

It's true of mine, but I don't think of it as latent omni so much as needing to know what's in everyone's heads and motivations (even though I can't show it because of POV and etc) so that the story will make sense. I don't think calling it "latent omni" is actually useful, because POV terms are about POV, and this is something orthogonal to that, to do with the reality of other people.

Knowing everyone's motivation led me to a terrible hair-tearing in The King's Name when I knew perfectly well what motivated the villain and I couldn't think of any way to reveal it to the reader via the dense narrator who would never in a million years figure it out. I thought of all sorts of subtle ways, and talked about it on rec.arts.sf.composition where people, especially Pat Wrede, suggested all sorts of other subtle ways, and then as it happened, and after I'd started setting up for some (over-)subtle stuff, the dense narrator's rather brighter son figured it out and said in a council scene "You know, I know the villain quite well and I think what he'd doing is..." which at least got the information visible.

The other problem with knowing what is in everyone's head and what their motivation is is that they all want their own stories. The great thing about omni is that they can get them.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

It doesn't seem useful to you. That doesn't mean it's not useful to me.

Conveying the information, I agree, is a horse of a completely different color from knowing the information. I am having this problem myself with one of the antagonists, whose plans are so much more complicated than any of my viewpoint characters have time to appreciate.

He is a sad and grumpy little villain.

[barriequark.livejournal.com]

I usually do a cheat sheet for every character that has an impact on the plot. Who are they, what are their goals and what are their limits, i.e. how far are they willing to go to get what they want? Add in the history notes (abusive father, mother who ate too many strawberries, giving our heroine an aversion, etc.) and the characters becvome so real to me that they can't act out of character, because I know what they would do in any situation. My plots then rise up out of the motivations of the characters rahter than from my own desires and often go in directions I wouldn't have thought of on my own. Keeping them reined into my arc then becomes the hard part. LOL I use a lot of actor tricks when creating characters, the old "What has it got in its pocketses?" questions, what kind of animal, etc. I become rather schizophrenic when writing, all the people in my head giving me notes and complaining about how small their part is. But it seems to work for me. LOL I guess going crazy is a very short trip for me.

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

Weirdly parallel - I was just grumbling about exactly this issue. Remembering what the villains are up to -- and getting it onto the page when the usual points of view don't have a clue.

(I'm also writing about a gay redhead with self-destructive moods, occasionally brain-bending magic and a tendency to use fancier language than those around him. Of course, I've been writing about him for nigh on 10 years now, and he's in a slightly askew here-and-now. Even so, it weirded me out when I realised it while reading the Virtu. {Still jobless, but I figured the credit card could handle one hardcover, as I just paid it to zero. Not regretting it at all. Yummy book - even if the subject matter wasn't always. And I do like Mehitabel enough to hope to see her POV, as I believe you've indicated I will as the series progresses.}