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Change Your Point Of View

Today were looking at point of you again, but in a slightly different way

The prompt

Pick a point of view you don’t usually use and write a story in it

Tips

*Look back at the stories you’ve written this month or in the past. Do you have a favorite point of view? Do you always default to first person or third person? Write a story today in a different POV.

  • If you flip back and forth between different perspectives frequently, just decide which to use today based on what you’ve written so far this month. What have you done most of? Choose that.

  • Each point of view brings with it restrictions and possibilities. If you frequently right in the same point of view you may be limiting yourself

  • To demonstrate the power of POV, you may want to repeat the exercise we tried earlier in the month of taking a story that you’ve previously written and writing it from another point of view. This time however I want you to keep the same character as the protagonist. Simply change the “I said “to “he/she/it/they said”.

  • Try to focus on the opportunities that this new perspective offers. If you’re shifting from third person omniscient to a limited/first person perspective, **really dig into the facts really dig into the characters thoughts and emotions. In these more limited perspective there’s no excuse for “Telling Not Showing”. Everything can be written as if we’re riding along on their shoulder, experiencing everything with them.

  • If you’re moving from a limited perspective to a third person omniscient, celebrate the fight that you cannot see things from different peoples’ perspectives. The most effective, least confusing way to do this is to have seen breaks between each head hop in the short story. (You probably don’t want to do it more than a couple of times but it can be quite fun to have most of the story told one person’s perspective then have a line break and give another character’s perspective as the conclusion of the story revealing a lot about the truth of the situation that, perhaps, the first character didn’t know.)

  • If you hate moving away from your favorite point of view that’s fine. You don’t ever have to do it again. Sometimes creative failures are essential to teach you what to avoid in future.

Leave a comment telling us what you discovered in your writing today. Perhaps you are very versatile with point of view or perhaps this was ridiculously hard. What did you learn? And remember, if you’re enjoying these prompts,share them.

16 thoughts on “Change Your Point Of View”

  1. Got this finished early again. I went through and realized I only had 3/19 written in 1st person this month. So, I decided to add another to that count. It also means I met my goal for Nola & Yasmin’s story for this week(this technically is just a scene in the larger story, but it can almost stand on its own. Honestly, a lot of my pieces this month have been like that).

    https://fallonbrownwrites.wordpress.com/story-a-day-september-2016/story-a-day-september-day-25-the-corridor-beyond/

    1. I’ve found StoryADay a really interesting exercise in writing complete scenes (almost as short stories) It’s made my current novel much more compelling to its first readers. They always wanted more pages when they got to the end of one of the ‘almost stand-alone’ chapters.

  2. This was a hard writing day for me. So I combined a couple of prompts- the all dialogue prompt with a mini mystery. It’s awful, and it’s talking heads. But it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
    And I now have 25 days of new stories- granted some stories better than others. But tomorrow is another day. Hoping for a better one. 🙂 ps- Julie- does a really bad story even count?

      1. Thank you, Thank you, THANK YOU, Julie! It’s so nice to have a supportive community when one is feeling down. Or when one is feeling UP too. Appreciate this story group.

  3. I have rewritten my Sphinx story in the second person. It was fun.

    Charles Stross did it infinitely better in Halting State. Mine is more a riff on a computer game. It’s only 300 words but it’s proof of concept. You couldn’t write anything very long as a game, it would get tiresome.

    1. Nicely done.

      And great minds think alike! I suppose the second person is the one that most of us use least!

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