Before we can go on an adventure with a character, we need to become friends with them. Learn about them. Empathize with them.
One book that does that extremely well is The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. At the beginning of the book, the main character is in one of the most uncomfortably-relatable scenarios: being dragged to a party by a friend that she doesn’t want to go to.
There are two main points of view to write a story from: 1st person and 3rd person. (Yes there’s 2nd person and the distinction between 3rd person limited/omniscient, but that’s a story for another day.)
When you write a story with a narrator saying “I/me,” then it’s 1st person. If it’s a narrator saying “he/she,” then it’s 3rd person. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages.
To show them off, let’s take a look at the same scene written in both 1st person and 3rd person.
For the last stream, we were joined by special guest Abbey, so we decided to try a new exercise: Abbey and chat wrote the beginning to a story, and then I had to complete it.
I left the room as they concocted the beginning, and when I was allowed to come back… I immediately regretted the idea.
I had no idea how to make sense of Abbey/chat’s story. Much less knowing where to take it, I barely understood it!
But then something clicked, inspiration hit me, and I knew what I had to do. Thanks to a few fun other suggestions, we ended up with something pretty beautiful: (bolded section is what Abbey/chat wrote that I had to finish)
Good times were had during our latest writing stream. We started off with a fun exercise: we used a random word generator to get 10 random words, and then we wrote a story using them as the first word in each sentence. Because that’s how great writing gets done.
The words were: construct, announcement, arrange, suffer, ladder, constitution, audience, sweat, like.
I somehow ended up writing what seems like a speech made by a crazed dictator. Funny how… that happens? Read it here in all its glory:
