Black Hippy Chick Day: Writing in God-Mode

The average fiction novice knows everything there is to know about their book—what Sara thinks about when she’s not murdering people, what Greg does when he gets home at night, who the victim was, and what their city was like before their protagonist was even born.

This, we call “The All-Knowing Narrator” and he can bounce from brain to brain with the greatest of ease. If you’re looking for credibility, immersiveness, and authenticity, writing your stories in God-mode will destroy every goal you have. There’s a moment when the reader realises the writer is telling them this story, so they lose their imaginative powers. They begin relating to the author instead of the protagonist, which takes them out the story completely.

Writing from a single perspective might seem to limit your powers, but it actually gives you a whole bag of new tools. If you stay in your protagonist’s brain with absolute discipline, you can use it to your advantage in so many fascinating ways. Without ignorant protagonists, we’d know who Moby Dick’s Ishmael was. We’d never really puzzle over the problems of Lolita. We’d know how Fight Club ended before we even got there, and we’d experience American Psycho’s insanity in a sane and boring way.

Bret Easton Ellis achieved greatness with that book, and one of his methods was to be as annoying as humanly possible. There were infinite diatribes about couture and hygiene right down to who wore what, which label was stuck on the tag, and which season it came from. Those diatribes allowed Ellis to make a mockery of an entire subculture without preaching for a second. All-knowing narrators can’t do that kind of thing. They can’t recreate the experience of psychopathy, depression, or trauma either.

It’s considered good practice to stay in just one brain for the entire novel. Some people get away with switching, but when they do, they do so with discipline. Far be it from me to celebrate Steven King, but he does use an occasional second protagonist to build tension pretty well. If your protagonist can’t achieve something on their own, you might get away with such things, but if you jump into another’s head, never do it thoughtlessly. It might destroy all your hard work in mere seconds.