Knowing everything

One thing I'm pretty sure of is that the more confident and generous a writer becomes, the more he will be drawn to omniscience, often out of frustration with more limiting points of view.

Richard Russo, The Destiny Thief

Richard Russo

Novelist Richard Russo taught creative writing for several years, as many writers do to make ends meet. One thing he noticed about his student writers was that most of them wrote their stories using a first-person narrative. Among his objectives as a writing teacher, as he saw it, was to help young writers see that omniscience was usually the best way to tell a story.

A first-person narrator knows only what that person knows, making it challenging to describe what happens in the story when that person isn't around. Readers can learn only what one character is doing, what one character is thinking, what one character is feeling.

Many first novels are told in the first person. Some of these become classics, such as The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby — but many fail, at least in part, because first-person narration limits the author's ability to tell a complete story.

Able writers can overcome this disadvantage, or even turn a handicap into an asset. Ann Patchett uses first person masterfully in The Dutch House, a novel I reviewed here on Monday. Danny, the narrator, doesn't know everything about his own family, but this allows important details about the past to be revealed to Danny little by little by other characters. So much of importance happened in the past, even before Danny was born, that he doesn't so much tell the whole story as have it be gradually told to him. In this way Patchett avoids those annoying flashbacks, so common in novels with omniscient points of view, that might have disclosed too much of the story too soon.

In The Museum of Extraordinary Things, a novel I will be writing about here soon, Alice Hoffman uses first-person narration in the first half of each chapter, then switches to omniscience in the second half, giving her the best of both of these ways of telling a story.

Wallace Stegner has a first-person narrator in Angle of Repose, a man writing a book about his grandmother. But this man tries to use omniscience to write his grandmother's story, hitting a wall when he realizes he doesn't really know what happened to her at a key point in her story. Other authors let each of their main characters tell the story from their own point of view in alternating chapters. Thus skilled writers find ways to use first person without totally sacrificing omniscience. 

Yet Russo favors omniscience for his own novels and recommends it for other writers, especially beginning writers. He says this in an essay found in The Destiny Thief called "What Frogs Think: A Defense of Omniscience." He concludes by printing a short excerpt from Cannery Row in which John Steinbeck does, in fact, tell his readers what frogs think. He couldn't have done that had he written his book in first person, unless he told it from the point of view of a frog. And that would have been a very different story.