Before you start writing a story, you need to
determine what voice and point of view you are going to use.
Voice: Are you going to write using the first person or third person
voice? When writing in the first person voice, you use "I" (or for first
person plural, "we") and the storytelling is limited to one character's
viewpoint. When writing in the third person voice, you use "he" or "she" and
you have some additional options, like telling certain parts of the story
from different characters' view points. Most of Misfit McCabe is written
using first person. See if you can tell when third person is used.
Point of View: What point of view boils down to is who is telling the
story? Is one person telling the story, do you need several people to tell
the story? Does the reader only get to experience the thoughts and feelings
of one character or do you want them to know things that happen outside of
your main character's perspective? Sometimes a story will have so many
different points of view that it becomes confusing to the reader because
they are not sure who is telling the story now. If you are writing a story
that has a shifting point of view (you want to tell the story from more than
one character's perspective) then you need to make sure that when you change
point's of view that the shift is well defined. Some ways to capture this is
the start of a new chapter or paragraph (for shorter stories). As someone is
reading your story, they should always know who is "talking".
Misfit McCabe is written in first person and from the point of view of Katie
for the majority of the book. We know what is happening to Katie, what she
is thinking and feeling and we know it as if she herself is telling us the
story. We don't know anything outside of Katie's perspective, what is
happening to other people in the story when they are not with Katie, and we
don't know what the other character's are thinking or feeling. If you choose
to write something in first person, you can only write about that one
character's thoughts and feelings. For example, when Katie and Timmy are in
the shed, I couldn't write what Timmy was thinking or feeling, I could only
tell you what seemed to be happening through Katie's eyes, or what Katie
thought Timmy might be thinking. What first person allows the writer to do
is to bring a reader closer into the mind and feelings of their character.
The use of first person is less common than third person, because in some
ways it is more limiting. Sometimes detective or mystery stories are written
in the first person, because the writer doesn't want the reader to know
anything outside of the point of view of the detective. That helps the
writer to sustain a little more of the mystery. I chose to write Misfit
McCabe in the first person because I thought it would help the reader's
identify more with Katie and help them to understand some of the way she was
feeling.
When using third person to write your story, you can introduce the point of
view of more than one character and you can describe thoughts, feelings, and
actions that happen away from the main character. You can also choose to
write a story from one point of view, but use third person to create a
little distance between the reader and the character whose point of view is
telling the story. For example, if you were writing a horror story and your
character was a horrible person who went around killing people, you could
choose to tell the story entirely from that character's point of view, but
you might want to use the third person voice because you want to create some
distance between the reader and the character. In this case, you probably
don't want the reader to identify with the killer.
I am going to try and illustrate how the use of first person can help the
reader identify with the feelings of a character vs. how third person can
create a little distance.
Here is the first person example:
I was so mad that I felt like my head was going to
burst. I had taken all of the insults from him that I could stand. It felt
like they were churning inside me and any moment would come spewing back in
the bitterest words I could find.
Now for the third person example:
Lorraine was so mad that she felt like her head was
going to burst. She had taken all of the insults from him that she could
stand. She felt like they were churning inside her and any moment would come
spewing back in the bitterest words she could find.
Because first person uses I, it is easier for us to think in those terms of
ourselves. We can say - "Yes I have felt just that way before too." Using
third person, we, as the reader, feel more like it is happening to someone
else.
There's actually a lot more I could say about point of view, but I think
I'll save that for another time. I just wanted to give you something to
think about so that when you write a story, you know that you do need to
think about these very important items and make a choice about which voice
and point of view you want to use and why.
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