All Seeing Eye in the Monastery of the Holy Cross, Jerusalem Photo by Ze'ev Barkan , via Flickr I’ve always loved adventure fiction. As a child, I read and re-read novels like Dumas’ The Three Musketeers , the works of Raphael Sabatini, and C. S. Forrester’s Hornblower chronicles. Adventure novels like these feature (a) multiple point-of-view characters; (b) parallel events taking place in multiple locations; and (c) complex action set-pieces: hair-breadth escapes, elaborate ruses, natural disasters, and fight sequences—everything from a one-on-one street brawl to a full-scale clash between rival armies. When I started writing (at the age of 10), I instinctively followed my favorite models, not only in terms of content and structure, but also in terms of writing technique. It wasn’t until I got to high school that I discovered I was using Third Person Omniscient narration. The term “omniscient” comes to us from the Latin omnis (all) + scire (to know). In Third Person Omni...

Omniscient : having complete or unlimited knowledge, awareness or understanding. In this Point of View (POV), the narrator is a God-like character. The narrator knows everything about all of the characters, places and events involved. You can put the readers inside anyone’s mind at will and the author can state facts that none of the characters are aware of. Now this may seem like “the key” to you. We could tell the story so much quicker. Why should we worry about who is able to know what—that seems so complicated, right? But look at this example, something beginning writers often fall into: He bit his nails and thought that she did not understand him. He watched her and wondered what to say. She brushed her hair and thought that he needed therapy. It is jarring, and can bump the reader out of reading concentration, which is absolutely not a good thing. You want the reader to identify with your main character(s) and to keep turning the pages. This POV is considered rather an...