Honesty in writing

[Brian G Turner]

So I picked up a novel - first chapter, good close POV. Second chapter is omniscient and hides character names.

I now realise why I don't usually like it - it's not simply distant, it's dishonest. It's purposefully trying to keep information from the reader.

Now, there's a time and a place for that - I accept that. In this instance - as in many - it's confusing without needing to be. But it's made me realise how important honesty is in fiction.

Honestly is about taking the reader by the hand and being open about everything - flaws, emotions, events. You can tackle really complex themes this way.

But a writer who doesn't take the reader by the hand, but instead pushes them away? If that's not the intention, then it's simply bad writing. It's being dishonest not only with the reader, but also themselves.

Honestly, I wish agents, editors, and publishers would take better note of what they're producing.

Or maybe I'm just very lucky, that I've had people such as Teresa, and loads of chronners, point out stupid mistakes as I've made them, before trying to be published.

Just ranting, 'tis all. But thought the issue of honesty, rather than specifics of badly done omniscient, might make for an interesting discussion with further contributions.

 

[Dan Jones]

3rd person close doesn't necessarily have to be honest, if you've got a devious or unstable narrator. Plenty of people wouldn't be honest with themselves, and therefore that self-delusion may come across on the page.

On the other hand, having an omniscient narrator, and therefore distanced as you say, could lend an impartiality to affairs, showing events, flaws etc without the biased colour of a particular character's lens. Therefore one could argue that omni is more honest.

Sorry, I'm being Devil's Advocate here a tad, but just to make a point that I'm not sure 'honesty' is the right word in this instance.

 

[Phyrebrat]

I have to agree with DG; a lot of my stuff has relied on unreliable narrators and they're definitely honest.

Thing is I'm one of those hopelessly forgiving readers; even typos in SP stuff hasn't bothered me if the story or characterisation is good.

pH

 

[Ogma]

There's a difference though between an unreliable narrator and deliberately holding back vital details simply for dramatic effect.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

It comes down to whether the author or the character is hiding things. I hate people not being named in prologues and what not, although in first it's fine, because I don't think 'Jo sat to type....' but if it's in third, the author is playing with me. I also don't mind unreliable narrators - I consider every close character to be one because our view of the world is always skewed by our agenda, but think they need to be done well to convince. But authors playing with me to hide plot things (@DGJones - hidden texts ) - I put the book down and walk away.

 

[Hex]

I don't mind it. I liked Iain M Banks when you just knew he was messing you about and he was going to surprise you in some way. I suppose that's a playful narrator.

Like most things, when it's done well, it works.

 

[HareBrain]

But authors playing with me to hide plot things (@DGJones - hidden texts ) - I put the book down and walk away.

I thought of you and him when this subject came up!

And I was thinking about it when writing something recently. If a POV character in close third is reported as thinking "He knew his plan would soon come to fruition", and the reader isn't told what that plan is at that point, but it's dribbled in as the story goes on, would that annoy?

It doesn't annoy me, and neither did @DG Jones's text thing. I wonder if this comes from a different attitude towards mystery, which we've touched on elsewhere. (Still waiting for that blog post ...)

 

[ratsy]

I am doing something like this in my new WIP. My character knows more than is revealed but he's not hiding it deliberately. I'm just slowly releasing the information with some flashbacks to important scenes with his wife before she dies. I think it can work well.

I suggest reading some Gillian Flynn since she does it brilliantly.

 

[Phyrebrat]

I think it's about playing your characters authentically; if the hidden fact is something that'd be forefront in their mind but the author hides it, it's a character fail - unless they're in a fugue state.

pH

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I thought of you and him when this subject came up!

And I was thinking about it when writing something recently. If a POV character in close third is reported as thinking "He knew his plan would soon come to fruition", and the reader isn't told what that plan is at that point, but it's dribbled in as the story goes on, would that annoy?

It doesn't annoy me, and neither did @DG Jones's text thing. I wonder if this comes from a different attitude towards mystery, which we've touched on elsewhere. (Still waiting for that blog post ...)

It's coming on Friday. Maybe. If I get time to write anything...

Yes, it would still annoy me terribly, I'm afraid. But it wouldn't bother me from a distant narrator. Or, possibly, in comedy. But if we're close to his thoughts, yep, I'd be well annoyed.

@ratsy - I had to read the end of Gone Girl at the one third through point in order to finish the book - it was irking me so much I couldn't read on without knowing who to trust.

But I think I'm an aberration on this matter, so can be safely disregarded.

 

[Kylara]

I love omniscient narrators. Adore them. I think part of what i like about them is the fact that the reader has to do a little of the work to work out what is important, what isn't, instead of some of the more in your face aspects of first or very close third. Omni also allows some element of waffle

But no narrator/character can get away with purposely not telling things for long. I have a main character in my WiP who doesn't have his own close 3rd and is generally a bit on the "mysterious" side (not actually mysterious for long, but never spelled out) and appears a fair bit in my omniscient sections (most of the novel).

I wrote a piece about 1500 words for a short story workshop last academic year in total omniscient narrator. Was fairly distant and had some lovely description bits condensed into 3 sentences at a time to fit in the word limit. There was also no real main character other than some demonic walls (most of the heavy description, more and more found out about them and they kept reappearing throughout the piece) and the people were just developed plot points. I guess it was a merge of "lit" and fantasy. It wasn't fantastic, but we only had a week. However, no-one in the workshop (about 14 students, all 19 other than me and another mature student) liked it at all. Except one passage of description about a moon I nicked from my WiP. They were all confused by the distance of the narrator and the lack of obvious MC. The guy running the workshop liked the concept and was the only one who worked out the walls were the MC.

So anecdote = I think modern readers are much less forgiving of omniscient narrator, especially as it is a style that doesn't only point out specific things, but points out lots and expects the reader to judge for themselves what is important. Modern readers rely too much on the information almost spoon fed to them by first and third person narrators. Omni allows the author to hide things in plain sight, bring in random other stuff (or is it random ), and just give that little bit extra worldbuilding. It doesn't stop the narration from dipping in and out of heads, or getting closer to and further away from the characters.

Anyway, I love omni and love writing in it.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Oh, indeed, unreliable narrators are a different issue.

Here's a snippet of what I was referring to, for clarity purposes:

Seven men picked their way along a street...a burly figure at the rear stumbled and fell...a thin, clean-shaven man barked with amusement...the burly man retched again...[dialogue] agreed his companion...Most of his companions smiled, but the stock redhead at the front...

That's from the first couple of pages of the chapter. Then names are slowly dropped via dialogue, and applied accordingly after.

And then the men start refering to each other by name. And the names slowly fill out the blanks.

It reminds me of how I tried to write my original first draft, 15 years ago - introducing names only as they were mentioned. I posted a sample on chrons a couple of years later, and someone pointed out that I really should learn about POV use. So I read about it, and realised I'd been doing it wrong.

For comparison, I've picked up another Lee Child book - the main character, Jack Reacher, has just encountered four men, and no names are given. But we don't need to know them, because everything's happening through Reacher's clear (First Person) POV. It works as it needs to - it isn't trying to obfuscate anything for the sake of it, and at the expense of clarity.

I dunno. Maybe I'm really railing about what I personally perceive as bad POV writing - maybe good POV writing has a feeling of honesty.

Or, just maybe, I feel that I see someone doing something that I long ago dismissed as a mistake - though whether it really is or not is another thing.

 

[SilentRoamer]

This is interesting.

Sometimes though honest doesn't even play a part.

War of the Worlds and The Road don't ever name their protagonists, The Road doesn't even name a single character. Both of these work better for their withholding of the truth at least IMO.

 

[Dan Jones]

But authors playing with me to hide plot things (@DGJones - hidden texts ) - I put the book down and walk away.

Dear me, someone's not going to let that one slide, are they!

It doesn't annoy me, and neither did @DG Jones's text thing.

Glad to see it's at least divisive!

Perhaps we should call this literary device "Jones's Text", a bit like "Chekov's Gun." That can be my one and only everlasting contribution to the world of literature

 

[Piousflea84]

Seven men picked their way along a street...a burly figure at the rear stumbled and fell...a thin, clean-shaven man barked with amusement...the burly man retched again...[dialogue] agreed his companion...Most of his companions smiled, but the stock redhead at the front...

The passage you quoted is not so much an "omniscient narrator" as a "movie camera narrator". It allows the reader to see and hear but not to smell, feel or understand anything about the scene. I find this distasteful whenever I read it, but I'm not really sure that I should.

In the modern (post-Hollywood blockbuster) era of fiction writing, we genre-savvy readers expect our authors to use close-perspective and true-omniscient points of view... not because they are the only correct ways to write, but because they are the most obvious things that written-word can do better than TV/cinema. When the author utilizes what would have been called a "fly on the wall PoV" in the 1910s, it's now called a "movie camera PoV" and ripped to shreds in critique groups because it's too damn close to cinema. I'll admit that I am usually one of the first to cast a stone at the "movie camera PoV" narrator.

 

[MWagner]

I don't mind fly on the wall PoV in fiction. In a sense, it cultivates a more active approach to reading because you need to fill in the feelings and internal drama yourself. To me, that's the great strength of prose over film- that it's shared creative experience rather than a one-way push. It can be very satisfying when a character whose thoughts you are not privy to behaves in the way you anticipated because you understand the character. Or when you feel great emotion and tension without any character saying or thinking anything.

Film actually offers a range of emotional distance as well. Although we rarely hear the thoughts of the characters on screen, most movies employ all sorts of techniques to imply what characters are thinking and feeling, from close-ups to camera angles to expository dialogue to musical cues. Some movies, such as those that adhere to the cinema verite model, are far more restrained with those devices. As in fly-on-the wall prose, you have to make inferences about what the characters you see on screen are feeling. Like all approaches to storytelling, detached third-person POV can be done well or it can be done poorly.

 

[Brian G Turner]

The passage you quoted is not so much an "omniscient narrator" as a "movie camera narrator". It allows the reader to see and hear but not to smell, feel or understand anything about the scene. I find this distasteful whenever I read it, but I'm not really sure that I should.

IMO it's just badly done omniscient. It is like a film effect - but because so much information is purposefully hidden, it's like watching figures cloaked entirely in darkness, whose faces we never see. Whether it's a few pages of text, or a few minutes of screentime, it can only get tiring.

Ranting!

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

I hate it when I think the author is being what I call "artfully mysterious" -- keeping things from the reader when it serves no purpose except that the writer seems to think it's a clever thing to do. Or to set up surprises where there isn't going to be a sufficiently big pay-off to justify any confusion.

And the way a lot of people do it, it's a bit of a cliché as well, which is definitely not a good way to start a story.

Some writers do it well, but it can be such a cheap device because it's so easy for the writer to lie to readers, and unless there is a very good reason I'm with Jo, it makes me unwilling to keep on reading.

Like in a mystery novel where the reader doesn't have all the same clues as whoever is doing the detecting. That can feel like a cheat. On the other hand, Sherlock Holmes very often has information that isn't available to readers (because, for instance, he's written a monograph on identifying exactly what kind of cigar a suspect was smoking by examining the ashes). Except that we expect that sort of thing from Holmes, so we don't feel cheated.

 

[Vladd67]

I hate it when I think the author is being what I call "artfully mysterious" -- keeping things from the reader when it serves no purpose except that the writer seems to think it's a clever thing to do. Or to set up surprises where there isn't going to be a sufficiently big pay-off to justify any confusion.

And the way a lot of people do it, it's a bit of a cliché as well, which is definitely not a good way to start a story.

Some writers do it well, but it can be such a cheap device because it's so easy for the writer to lie to readers, and unless there is a very good reason I'm with Jo, it makes me unwilling to keep on reading.

Like in a mystery novel where the reader doesn't have all the same clues as whoever is doing the detecting. That can feel like a cheat. On the other hand, Sherlock Holmes very often has information that isn't available to readers (because, for instance, he's written a monograph on identifying exactly what kind of cigar a suspect was smoking by examining the ashes). Except that we expect that sort of thing from Holmes, so we don't feel cheated.

What do you think about the Ellery Queen style where near the end he says basically "OK dear reader, you know all that I know who do you think did it?"

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

I think that's a bit of a gimmick. It works with the Ellery Queen stories because that's what readers expect, but elsewhere it could come across as a little too arch.