The most common perspective for novels and other stories is one of authorial omnipotence. It also happens to be a point of view that I strongly dislike.

The basic idea is that in the world the author has created, they know everything. The storyteller is privy to what happens between characters and inside of them, at the scene of the action and away from it. Any way that the story can be advanced is at their fingertips, and the characters have to contend with the author as some kind of a deity.

The first problem I have is that life never unfolds this way. We never truly understand the motivation of anyone else, but merely surmise it from the clues in their actions. It is terribly artificial to reach deep inside of someone apart from us suddenly, and it requires a suspension of disbelief akin to when someone suddenly bursts into song in a musical.

Another serious problem, as far as I am concerned, is that the author limits their own reach by extending it too far. A story told from omnipotence can only be a story, and the process of reading it is set up to be fundamentally similar to a reading by Homer at an ancient court. It relies on the imagination of the reader to become involved in it, and as such the level of detail needed to rope them in has to be compelling and holistic. Action and plot are easily weighed down by this need to pry open the imagination so that the story can creep in.

There are alternatives to authorial omnipotence. The most interesting is a first person narrative, a story told more as a confession than plot. This device is difficult to use well, and I have to confess that I have never felt that I mastered it. The author writing in first person has to take on many characteristics of an actor, getting deep inside their lead so that their world, from motivations to observations filtered through their perspective, make sense.

In “Downriver” I used another device that lies somewhere in between the two. It was written as a memoir of the lead character, an “as told by” recollection. The advantage here is that the comfortable third person narrative can unfold the details of the created world, but emotions and motivations of one character can bubble out as needed. It is a somewhat unusual device, but it was used by such romantics as Hermann Hesse and W. Somerset Maugham. As something of a neo-romantic myself, I enjoy learning from the giants.

What it boils down to in the end is that authorial omnipotence is a perspective that we are used to as readers. This comfortable way to unfold a tale is ignored at the author’s peril, unless they are very good at the craft. But omnipotence must have its limits if the story is going to hook the reader and pull them through the plot without a terrible struggle. I didn’t become a writer to play god, but I do believe I have something to say. Whether or not this is an arrogant perspective is up to the reader and up to my ability to say something to a real human being I have never met. I like to start out by not pretending I am a god and extending my open hand to say, “Hello, welcome to my world!”