Playing God

Every piece of writing has to have a viewpoint. Somebody, or something, has to tell the story, and the choice has profound implications for the way a reader engages with your text. The point of view you select is crucial. It’s the window to your literary world, and if it’s pointing in the wrong direction nobody’s going to want to look through it.

Let’s start off with the holiest perspective: the god’s eye view. It’s one of the great advantages of being a writer: you can create a world all of your own and assume absolute, godlike power over it. The third-person narrator can be everywhere, seeing everything, an omniscient voyeur peering deep inside the mind of any character and poring over their most intimate thoughts. Like a giant laboratory assistant, this narrative voice selects the most salient details from the lives of its lab rats and lays them out for inspection. Just look at Dickens for excellent examples of the god’s eye view at work.

But don’t get too carried away, your almightyship. The most problematic disadvantage to the omniscient third person is a lack of engagement with the world it’s describing. You can be so busy hovering over the landscape, picking out details, dropping in and out of people heads, or floating through houses like an errant spirit that you lose focus, and forget to engage with the characters. In the same way, a narrator faced with such an enormous landscape, and so much scope, confronts a real nightmare trying to decide which things matter to a reader, and which things don’t. Like a kid in a candy store, you don’t always know what to go for first.

Back in the early days of the novel, authors often favoured an omniscient third-person approach because it allowed them to state their mind whenever they felt it necessary. This didactic, intrusive style sometimes worked – take the learned intrusions of George Eliot and the cosy asides from Jane Austen. But the presence of a third-person narrator who offers an opinion on everything that is happening can become a bore. In certain texts it’s OK to venture off on an erudite digression, but don’t lecture people on how they should read your work. It’s far better to take a subtle approach and gently steer people towards your way of thinking. You can push readers in the right direction with clever narration and characterisation, but you can’t boss them around.

One clever way of getting round this is to use your third-person narrator ironically. Yes, it’s that word we all hated at school, but it’s a great method for subtly adding opinion and humour to your work. The key thing to remember is that the best irony is implicit, and only hinted at. If you start explaining why it’s ironic, it stops being clever and just becomes annoying.

To cut a long story short, irony occurs when there’s a discrepancy between what a character or narrator thinks is true and what is really true. This can be with dialogue: ‘“I never eat more than one dish for lunch,” she muttered proudly as she finished her third course’; with beliefs: ‘She stepped confidently into the alley. Nobody would attack a little old lady, she thought, especially in the middle of Glasgow’; with expectations and results: ‘Saddam laughed to himself – the Americans would never invade Iraq’; or with appearance and reality: ‘He stepped forwards. The old rope bridge looked perfectly safe’. These are pretty obtuse examples, but it shows how irony can be used to make a point without rubbing your opinions in a reader’s face.