Why not omniscient voice?

It just depends on how close you want your reader to be a part of your story.

I’ve been working with an author who has written a “self-help novel”. Basically, he wants readers to come away having learned a lesson after reading his fictional book. Fiction with a moral? Whatever you want to call it, he’s a new author (this is his first book) and he thought to make it more immediate to the reader by writing the first two sections of the book in the first person, present tense (one section is about the hero, the other about the heroine), and the third section (about the two of them coming together) in omniscient, present tense.

I, personally, don’t like books written in the present tense. In fact, I’ve only read one series written in the present tense that I’ve liked (written by a very experienced author). I hated many, many more. But, okay, I could live with this book being written in the present tense.

What I couldn’t live with was his omniscient point of view in the third section. He couldn’t understand why. He thought that if we knew what everyone was thinking we’d understand them and their motives better. We’d know what every character is thinking and feeling as they go through the story.

But that’s the problem. If we know what everyone is thinking, we are kept at arms length from the characters. We can’t identify with…