Fiction Prompt #2

Take a particularly important memory of yours and make yourself a minor character. Tell the story from the point of view of someone else in the memory. A brother, mother, best friend, a waiter, a bartender, the ticket guy, the person at the next table.

The point is to use the memory’s contents but not its meanings. So that there’s a charge there, and intense details, often, but not something sacred to you, not at the center. Diminish your importance and take on someone else’s point of view.

I came up with this exercise as a sample exercise for students applying to Fiction 1, who often, as they tell me, have nothing.

1 Comment

  1. A great idea, too, for those people who write so close to the bone, who endeavor to tell a particular story “because it really happened.” Sometimes real life isn’t all that interesting, so maybe a different POV would help.

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