How to Be Less Afraid of Omniscient Point of View

An omniscient narrator—that godlike knowing, the bird’s eye view—holds the potential to access characters’ minds while also panning out to observe the wider sweep of place, time, and history. For a writer, that’s a lot to juggle! In practice, omniscient narration exists in degrees, and it’s up to us to decide how all-seeing our narrators are, a task that demands not only a slew of narrative choices, but also a certain finesse to pull off. In this seminar, we’ll tackle the scope of omniscience by learning to shape it to the specific needs of our fiction.