Try a New Perspective
Feeling Stuck in Your Story? Maybe a Different Perspective Can Help
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A New Perspective
We all know that the perspective from which a story is written is important. Even if you have chosen your POV for a story, it doesn’t hurt to examine the same story from a variety of points of view. Kahil Gibran’s Jesus of Nazareth tells the story of Christ through the eyes of a score of people who might have known him. It adds depth to the gospel story seeing the life of Christ through so many eyes.
Learning to write creatively is important for nonfiction writers as well.
Writing about an event that happened to you for a devotional or an anthology is much like fiction writing. You probably tell the story from your own point of view (I don’t mean just first person here, but rather as a focus on the event from a particular person’s perspective.) You might write in the first person about something your son did. You can tell that from your point of view - what you did, how it affected you, your interpretation of it, or you could write it from his - how he saw the events, how he felt about it, etc. Even writing how-to’s can be affected by imagining yourself as a typical reader and writing a letter to the editor about how you used the information in the article. Here are a few specific exercises to help you experience different points of view.
Letters
Take an event in your story. Have each of the characters write someone about that event. What happened from their perspective? What did they think about it? What was their perspective? You can even have a bystander or extremely minor character write about it. A variation on this is to write a diary or journal entry.
Observation
Go to a public event such as a play, concert, church service, or sporting event. Watch what happens. Make some notes. When you get home, write about what happened from at least three perspectives. You can even imagine the thoughts of the people. Write in the first person, if that helps you. For instance, after attending a church service, you could write about it from the points of view of the pastor, the choir director, a person in the pew, and the little kid who was squirming all through service.
Your Story, Different Storyteller
Describe something dramatic that happened to you from a different POV. For instance, most of us write personal experiences in the first person. Try writing it in the third. You could even write it in the second person.
Assume you had amnesia as the main character and someone else is telling you what happened.
In a world dominated by generic and often AI-generated content, taking your own writing up a notch by taking a creative point-of-view will set your writing apart from the crowd.