Canadian author Lisa Moore offers a workshop on writing point of view, 9:30 AM to 12:30 PM, Saturday, September 9, at the Delta Hotel.
The cost is $35, and includes light refreshments. Sign up for the afternoon session as well for a discounted price of $60. Buy your tickets at https://guelph.snapd.com/events/view/1069398.
This fiction workshop will focus on point-of-view – first person, second person, third person and every person in between. What does the omniscient narrator mean in the world of big data and google maps? How do we flit through time and space in the story to show the moments that concretize character and provoke epiphany? How do we follow the synaptic sparks of stream-of consciousness so that we know each character inside and out? Like the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin - how many points of view can fit in a single story? What is the role of the unreliable narrator and how does such a point-of-view create dramatic irony? What are the uses of psychic distance in narrative? What does the intimacy of the first person narrator offer the plot? And what are the drawbacks of a first person narrator?
What does it mean to switch point-of-view mid-narrative? Does a jarring point-of-view switch give a complacent reader an enlivening jolt? Does a seamless point-of-view switch help maintain suspension of disbelief? What is the only part of the newspaper written in the second person? What happens when the vocabulary and diction of the narrator differs from the characters? How do we employ point-of- view so that the reader gets a story the likes of which they have never heard before? We’ll be digging into these questions and doing a few writing exercises to come up with the answers.
Participants are asked to find their daily horoscope on any date in August, 2017 in a newspaper or magazine. Note that the horoscope is written in the second person. Write a fictional story, no more than 500 words, based on the horoscope and also written in the second person. Note that the second person addresses a ‘you’. This point-of-view can create an eerie voyeuristic tone, or alternatively, a sense of intimacy. Use the horoscope to create a story with a beginning, middle and end. Make it rich in sensory detail, narrative tension, dialogue and action. Create atmosphere and a concrete setting. Be experimental. Have fun!!