3 Strategies for Snaring the Senses

Recently the question of omniscient POV has come up in several classes, so I started reading some examples of it. One of the best I hit was Sherwood Smith’s Inda series. I figured, why not go to Sherwood and ask some questions about how she pulled that off.

What drew you to using omniscient point of view for the Inda series? What sorts of stories work particularly well with that POV? Were there any models that you looked when working with it?

I had always written in omni. I’m a visual writer (with all its pluses and pitfalls), which means I see a movie in my head””not just dialogue but characters’ inner lives. Omni always seemed the easiest way to get that movie down.

But when I started selling, I was told to switch to limited third, which I had to learn.

Segue up a couple decades, I was desperate to escape the limitations of third, and omni was no longer (trigger doom music) Forbidden. I had to relearn omni, by which I mean consciously grasping the difference between omniscient voice and head-hopping. (Some readers will call omniscient voice head-hopping. My guess is that some of these readers might have had little exposure to early novels.)

To review omni, I went back to the eighteenth and nineteenth century books I’d grown up reading, with an eye to the development of narrative voice: I noted how Jane Austen invented the modern novel with her mostly-offstage narrator, which had been influenced by Henry Fielding‘s rudimentary narrative style in Tom Jones, and Samuel Richardson‘s experimentation in Clarissa. I reread William Thackeray‘s Vanity Fair, whose narrator strides right out on stage, breaking the fourth wall to directly address the audience.

I came to the conclusion that every novel, actually, has a narrator. Including those written in limited third or even camera-eye view. But many writers don’t recognize that. Maybe they don’t need to. Everybody’s process is different. For me, it’s a helpful rule or reminder for handling diegesis as well as mimesis, and how to incorporate elements like public, private, and intimate space (each with its discrete focus), how to slide into free indirect discourse, etc.

Anyway, with Inda””with any big, braided story””I find limited third so, um, limiting. It’s so difficult to get all the POVs in you want and not jerk the reader back and forth in time, or break the narrative into little scenes in order to properly isolate those POV changes. If you’ve got a narrator, and know why that narrator is telling the story, I think one can better see the entire structure of the novel, and determine how many POVs to use, where, and when.

What difficulties presented themselves as a result? What did you have to be mindful about as you were writing?

Slipping too frequently into diegesis, especially when tired, and summarizing what ought to be scenes. When I say tired, I don’t mean single sessions, though that is true, too. I mean those long months, even years, it takes to write a novel””sometimes forgetting it takes a few hours to read it. Another aspect to be mindful of is limiting the access to characters’ thoughts to those needed for not just the action through-line but the emotional through-line. And cut out all the other voices yammering, or they can proliferate fast into side-stories.

What issues did it present when rewriting?

Those side-stories. Also, figuring out when to let the narrator come forward.

Was there anything that surprised you about using it?

Not really, because I’d grown up writing omni. The surprise was the realization that all novels have narrators.

One of the biggest concerns about using omniscient POV is that readers have been trained to spot “head-hopping” as a flaw. Do you have any strategies for avoiding this?

Some readers are not going to like it no matter what. Maybe a matter of taste, or of training””if you’d grown up reading only first or third, omni can come as a surprise. I’ve heard readers say they won’t read first person, or second, or present tense, or omni. That’s a taste call. I think it makes it easier to get used to when the writer works to make certain that every shift or transition is grounded””that there are no floating pronouns so the reader is forced to go paging back for the antecedent. (And yeah, it’s so easy to screw up even when trying to focus on that specifically.)

What are you working on right now and what POV is it in?

A series, called the Young Allies, that will begin coming out from DAW next summer. It is all complete, and written in omni. Same narrator as Inda.

What’s the best entry point into your work if a reader’s looking for a book to start with? Inda or something else?

I guess that depends what type of story they are looking for? YAs I usually direct to Crown Duel, which is an early work, but it’s stayed in print since the nineties. (I recommend the ebook version though””it has fewer errors.) Then there is the four-book Inda series, for fantasy, and the ebook version of Exordium, a five book space opera I wrote with Dave Trowbridge.

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For more about Sherwood Smith, visit her website at www.sherwoodsmith.net. Follow her on Twitter here.

It is difficult to describe how Catherynne M. Valente’s new book Space Opera manages to be so wonderfully resonant of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy yet so insistently, inimitably her own. And yet, that’s the challenge.

Valente’s skill manifests in a book that bounces right along, full of glorious, funny, wonderful, sparkly explosions of humor and wit that still, just as Adams always did, manages to say Insightful and Interesting Things about Human Nature. And it’s funny. Did I mention that this is a funny book? It’s the story of failing rock singer Decibel Jones and his dysfunctional band, the Absolute Zeroes, who have been chosen to represent their world in an interstellar challenge that determines whether or not the Earth will be destroyed.

But it’s more than an updated Adams. It’s a little deeper and a lot better about things like gender pronouns and interestingly diverse cast. It has much more fashion and quirky stylistic details than HHGG, with fabulous living starships that resemble coral reefs, so much music of so many kinds, and enough eyeball kicks on every page that one fears sometimes for the safety of one’s figurative vision.

The first two chapters are admittedly slow going. The book doesn’t really find its legs until a bit into chapter three, after we’ve finally been introduced to protagonist Jones “lying passed out on the floor of his flat in a vintage bronze-black McQueen bodysuit surrounded by kebab wrappers, four hundred copies of his last solo album, Auto-Erotic Transubstantiation, bought back from the studio for pennies on the pound, and half empty bottles of rosé.”

At this point the alien invasion that’s been textually hovering in the wings for a while hears its cue and manifests:

“¦in everyone’s rooms at once at two in the afternoon on a Thursday in late April. One minute the entire planet was planet-ing along, making the best of things, frying eggs or watching Countdown or playing repetitive endorphin-slurping games or whatnot on various devices, and the next there was a seven-foot-tall ultramarine half-flamingo, half-anglerfish thing standing awkwardly on the good rug. Crystal-crusted bones showed through its feathery chest, and a wet, gelatinous jade flower wobbled on its head like an old woman headed off to church. It stared at every person in the world, intimately and individually out of big, dark, fringed eyes sparkling with points of pale light, eyes as full of unnameable yearning and vulnerability as any Disney princess’s.

This passage demonstrates the clean virtuosity of Valente’s prose in Space Opera. I’ve loved her other works, particularly The Orphan’s Tales, but this is a very different style for her and it’s truly impressive to see her execute it with the same seemingly effortless grace. Omniscient point of view is handled beautifully, and shows how well suited it is to large scale works like this one.

Space Opera will delight Valente’s fans and undoubtedly bring a new crowd her way, because it’s just plain good and funny and wonderful. I can’t imagine what Valente will pick for her next project. At this point I’m convinced she could make a set of instructions for assembling an IKEA dresser beautiful and engrossing. And I’m looking forward to that read.

(Saga Press, 2018; available April 3)

You can read review at http://thegreenmanreview.com/books/catherynne-m-valentes-space-opera/