MIT Open Course — Point of View
While I have written using different points of view, in a short story, I have only ever tried writing in the 1st person. I seem to gravitate towards it as it is the point of view I find easiest to write in. Earlier in the course, the professor talked about how writing takes a certain amount of courage; you are revealing emotions and perhaps parts of yourself through the voice you assume in the narration. The advantage of writing in the 1st person is that it is the most intimate and authentic voice (if you trust the narrator-protagonist that is). Though the 1st person narrator-protagonist may not know everything that the omniscient 3rd person narrator knows, I like the aspect of the reader and narrator-protagonist obtaining knowledge and awareness at the same time. That can help intensify the bond and the feeling of sharing experience between the reader and the narrator-protagonist. An omniscient narrator telling you what someone is thinking or feeling doesn’t quite have the same intensity as the voice of the character who is processing information and working out how it makes them feel. Though both 1st person and 3rd person narratives may take the readers to the same place at the end of the story, the process or journey if you will, is completely different and that is what the story is all about.
One of the stories that we read in the course was The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Not knowing anything about the story, I was pretty shocked by the end. I normally assume that the narrator is trustworthy and is faithfully recalling what is or has happened. I have come across unreliable narrators in other books; Endless Night by Agatha Christie and the Wife of Bath’s Tale in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales come immediately to mind. I have always loved mystery/ crime fiction and have read most of Agatha Christie’s novels and we studied Chaucer in school last year. For some reason, I was expecting The Yellow Wallpaper to be a Jane Austenesque story about the pitfalls of polite society and a woman’s reflection on marriage and motherhood. I could not have been more wrong!
Though the element of surprise and an unreliable narrator is something that I would love to experiment with in the future, I don’t feel quite ready yet as someone who is just starting to write (again). Taking this course has opened my eyes to how much planning, thought and precision comes in writing a short story. Ironically, the more I learn, the more reluctant I feel to put anything down on paper. I feel myself over-analyzing everything now and questioning if the word I chose is correct or if the addition of a certain character is as impactful as it should be. It’s quite maddening actually.
