Creative Writing
Graziano
Assignment #4: Shake the Point-of-view
For your next assignment, you will need to write a story where you use an unconventional
point-of-view or try something a little more challenging with a conventional one. In most
fiction, either the first-person or the third-person is used, but there are all kinds of
interesting things you can do with the point-of-view or the means of perception.
1. Write a story using the second person. Look at “How To Talk To a Hunter” as a model.
In many ways this is the effaced first-person. Remember, you’ll still have a speaker.
You’ll also want a story with action and narrative hooks. A character-sketch in the
second person won’t quite cut it.
2. Use the epistolary form. Set up a story in the form of a letter from one character to
another. You might make your story a series of letters (or emails) between two
characters. In other words, you’re using two first-person voices speaking to one
another.
3. Try the first-person plural speaker. We saw this in “Popular Girls” and in some ways, in
Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” You could use either story as an example and see
what you can do with this voice.
4. Use an Unreliable Narrator. This might be one of the most difficult first-person voices
to pull off. You can look at “Why I Live At the P.O.” or “Sarah Cole” for examples.
5. Try writing a story from the first person p.o.v of the opposite sex. Try to see if you can
successfully inhabit the mind of the opposite sex. Or use this premise and contain
some of the aforementioned assignment.
Your stories can be about anything. Just make them interesting and have fun with this. The
point is to get you to take some literary risks, try different things. If you have an idea of your
own—perhaps, you want to tell a story from the first person point of view of an inanimate
object—while you’ll have plausibility issues, go for it.
These drafts are due Friday.