Brent Farley walked into the room looking for his mother, but instead he found Alice Norman standing near the buffet.
Alice noted that Brent seemed uneasy. “It’s almost as if he wants to get away from me,” she thought.
“She’s looking at me,” Brent reflected, thinking that the red color in her dress was meant for a younger woman.
Lawrence Smith-Jones, the club maître d’, noticed the two and remembered them as children running madly in mud-spattered jeans down near the stream behind the club.
This voice is a potent one. Nothing that happens is beyond its reach. The omniscient narrator can cure cancer, explain what the meaning of life truly is, travel through space and time with impossible ease.
The promise of such power is seductive, but it contains hidden dangers for the first-time novelist. The main problem is the reader: Can you convince him that you are all-knowing? Can your narrative maintain the tension between characters while at the same time speaking with such clarity and superior knowledge?
The reader approaches the novel as a story that has to unfold in a certain unique fashion. She doesn’t know where the tale is going. She doesn’t know if Brent is really a bad man who is intent on beggaring Alice and her family.
In the first-person narrative from Brent’s POV, Brent would know his own intentions, but he wouldn’t know the content of Alice’s heart and certainly would not be privy to the conversation between Nareen and Alice.
The third-person narrator has no deep knowledge of any of the characters, so we have to rely on dramatic interaction to unearth the truth.
But the omniscient narrator knows all. If he doesn’t tell us something, it is because he decides to withhold that information. If he does tell us, it is absolute truth with no gradations of gray. The omniscient narrative voice therefore runs the risk of killing the dramatic tension you are trying to create.
This is not to say that one should never use this voice. Many, many novels (especially those written in the nineteenth century and earlier) use this voice magnificently.
The proper omniscient narrator’s voice can be used effectively with the understanding that even the voice of God can have slight variations and rules by which it decides to impart information.
For instance, your omniscient narrator might be so high and mighty that she doesn’t waste time wondering about the truths or complex motivations of the characters she presents.
Captain Jack Hatter was a seafaring man who got it in mind that he was in love with a princess. He gathered a company of rough-and-ready tars who were willing to follow the handsome young officer to the ends of the earth—as long as there was plunder now and then along the way.. . .
Princess Jasmine Alonza Trevor-MacFord was aware of Hatter’s passion, but she never let on if she would be a willing partner to his lust. When her girl-servants talked about Hatter’s promise to take her by force from her father’s lands, Jasmine would smile mysteriously and change the subject to the weather.. .
From this POV the omniscient narrator
could
tell us many things about her characters but prefers not to. The storytelling is held at a certain distance to keep the reader wondering on many levels: Will Jack take the princess? Will the princess welcome his advances?
This is just one of many possible approaches an omniscient narrative might take. This voice spends most of its time disguised as a third-person narrator but appears in its full force often enough to let us know that there is more to it. Or, the omniscient narrator may place limits upon itself by letting information come out only in a certain time sequence or by individuals giving voice to their feelings.
There are many ways to spin the omniscient narrator so that the unfolding of the novel is still a wonder to the reader.
The problem is that this voice of God has to learn how to limit itself, whereas the first- and third-person narrative voices have built-in limits.
final notes on narrative voice
First- and third-person narrative voices bring with them limitations on what the characters in the novel can say and know.
The first-person narrative can know only what the speaker knows. This tale is limited by the mind and senses, the situation and sophistication, the gender and education, of the narrator.
The third-person narrator benefits from different POVs but can portray only one of these at a time, and there is the further limit that this dispassionate POV cannot, most of the time, delve too deeply into any one character’s inner workings.
These limitations may seem difficult and overly exacting, but I believe that they are the best thing for the first-time novelist. The restrictions placed on the prose by these rules are stringent, but they are also organic in the storytelling sense. That is to say, we live third- and first-person lives.
Personally we know what it is we think and feel. We pass through this life making silent comments on events going on around us. Sometimes we interact with people with conspicuous honesty; other times, not so much. We feel love and hate and fear, and so does everyone else in the world. The fact that everyone knows life primarily through personal experience means that, if a first-person narrative is executed scrupulously, the reader will naturally identify with the voice.
Similarly we all have some experience with the third-person narrative. We have jobs in which people are continually talking: talking to each other, talking behind each other’s back, seducing, expounding, bragging, lying. We are often silent witnesses to encounters on the bus, on the street, or maybe even through apartment walls. We all know what it is to be a silent observer, so when presented with the experience of cool remove that the third-person narrator perfects, we feel that we can understand the story—or at least we are given an opportunity to understand.
The omniscient narrator is a little larger than what we’re used to. This form has no limitations that are not self-imposed. This does not mean that you cannot write a novel from this voice. The problem is that you have to be a consummate storyteller with extraordinary self-control to tell a story in this way.
Other voices are possible. Novels have been written entirely in the first-person
plural,
told entirely by an unspecified
we.
Others address the reader as “you” throughout. But these are idiosyncratic and challenging approaches to storytelling. My advice is that you use the third-person narrative to write your novel (this year). But of course you will do as your heart tells you to.
showing and telling
“The words came right up off the page.” This is the highest possible praise for the fiction writer. It means that when reading the book, the reader felt that they were actually experiencing the sensations and emotions, the life and atmosphere, depicted by the novelist.
The accomplished writer achieves this level of realism by using language that is active and metaphorical, economically emotional yet also pedestrian.
As often as possible the fiction writer shows us events and active characters, vivid images and real dialogue, rather than telling us about the inner workings of someone’s mind or the
reality
of a situation.
Lance Piggott had a great bulbous face, with black pinpoints for eyes and pasty white skin. He spoke in short bursts like a semiautomatic weapon. The bloated leather of his shoes seemed about to burst open from the pressure of his bulging feet. Monsieur Piggott was indeed an explosion about to happen. His secretary, VernaMae Warren, would lean away from him whenever he approached her desk or stomped up to her side when she was pulling files from the green metal cabinets. The skittish secretary feared she would be obliterated by the mere proximity of her juggernaut of a boss.
This in-depth description supplants the more cogent
Lance Piggott was a large, violent man. His secretary, Verna-Mae Warren, avoided him whenever possible.
It is often better if you use images and physical descriptions rather than mere informative language to present people, places, things, and events in your novel. To be told that someone is violent or seems to be violent is too general; the reader is left to come up with their own notions of Piggott based upon their personal experience with violence. But to describe a man who, at every moment, is about to explode helps the reader have a specific sense of that character.
The strong scent of pine tar and eucalyptus stung Mary’s nostrils. The woodlands were alive with the racket of life. Insects clicked and buzzed; what must have been a bird gave a strangled cry, while somewhere a creature, hidden by the dense green-and-gray forest, crunched away, causing the young woman to imagine an ogre gnawing on a tree trunk.
All the while the sun seared her skin. Mary felt a deep satisfaction with the lancing pain and dissonant woodland sounds. It was as if, she thought, she were a wild thing set loose in an unremitting Eden.
This attempt to present your protagonist’s experience of a wildwood area works better than
The sun-beaten woods were rank smelling, filled with dissonant sounds. Oddly, Mary felt at home there.
I hope that these examples begin to illustrate the difference between showing and telling in fiction.
To simply say that Lance Piggott is a violent man is less persuasive than portraying him as a time bomb loose on the world.
Of course a character that is violent, or seems so, might not have the physical attributes or traits that describe his or her nature. Your character, let’s call her Fawn, might be petite and sweet-looking. In this case you could choose the actions she takes when she’s alone to describe her. She could torture small animals or imagine tormenting and killing a rival; she could, talking sweetly but breathing hard, tell a friend that she would beat in her head with a baseball bat if that friend ever crossed her.
A character talking is an action too.
I know that there are the sticklers out there among you who will say that everything expressed in words is told, not shown. After all, telling is a function of speaking, and writing is nothing but an extension of speech. This is true. But there’s a difference between explanation and verbal action.
For instance, “Call me Ishmael” is the well-known first line of the American classic
Moby Dick.
Contrast this sentence with “His name was Ishmael.”
What’s the difference between the two beginnings? The first is definitely stronger on its own. But why? I believe that it is because the original introduction is active; it invites the reader into conversation with a character who, the reader feels, intends to stay around for a while. The character is going to introduce the reader to his world.
“His name was Ishmael” is a flat statement that does not, on its own, draw us in. It is merely a piece of information.
The first example shows something to the reader, or, more accurately,
it attempts to include the reader by engaging with him on a personal level.
In this case, Ishmael is conversing with us. In the first example concerning Mary, she not only smells the forest, but the pine tar and eucalyptus burn her nostrils. This is something else that the reader can imagine feeling.
So I suppose the clearest difference between telling and showing in fiction is, generally, the difference between a purely informational statement and one that attempts to add a human aspect to its repertoire and, in doing so, includes the reader either emotionally or physically.
There are many ways to
show
in language. Below you will find a few of them.
sensations
When experiencing life, we often have physical sensations. Our tongues go dry, the hair stands up on the backs of our necks, our eyelids start twitching. Some people become flatulent when they’re afraid. If you can include the physical reactions to the emotional situations that your characters find themselves in, you will be bringing your readers closer to the experience of the novel.
If the sensation is one that seems out of place, the reader will want to understand, will want to know more. For instance, a police officer in the execution of his duty is restraining a woman who is trying to stop his partner from arresting her husband. In the struggle with the screaming, clawing woman, the restraining officer experiences an erection. You could say that he experienced sexual arousal—you might decide that this is the best way to put it. Readers will certainly wonder what’s going on with that cop.
emotions
Gazing into her walnut-colored eyes, he saw a speck that reminded him of that island he dreamed of as a boy, that place he’d always yearned to be.. .
I know, maybe a little sappy, but you see where I’m going.
Emotions inform our responses to the physical world, and our language reflects those responses: I saw red; her heart skipped a beat; I turned to jelly; my blood ran cold. These are all common phrases used to express what we feel in our bodies. To say “I love you,” or “I love him [or her or it],” rather than using a more vivid expression is not strong enough for fiction. You have to get down to the place where the character (and therefore the reader) feels the emotions that drive your novel.
Maybe your main character as a rule experiences the world as loud sounds and sharp edges. He winces when his boss speaks; he feels the rims of his shoes biting into his ankles when he walks. But when he goes to lunch with Marianne, all of a sudden things become soft and rounded—the air, which burned his lungs on the street, is now soothing him, restoring him. His feet have stopped hurting, and the music being played in the background transports him to a sylvan childhood scene.
Making emotions physical or imagistic helps bring your reader more deeply into the story. Of course you will have to have many simple informative sentences about the characters’ feelings throughout the text, but you must question every time you use flat descriptive language to describe an emotion, impression, or realization.