Session 7: Exercise

Here is a 'diagnostic' exercise to complete in time for Session 8:

This is a continuation on from our discussion about being able to discern 'opinion' (or 'personality') from 'description', in order to be able to observe how the narrative voice may be biased.

Select a paragraph of your own text (can be fiction or non fiction), and go through it, highlighting only the bits that aren't opinion or embellishment, but are the bare bones of description about what is happening.

Now go through and look for words that are embellishments, and you'll see that these are either unconscious (the writer doesn't realise they're offering their POV) or intentional (the writer is using the bias in order to give the narrator a personality or an unreliability, perhaps).

You should be able to start building a picture of how the writer is positioning the narrative voice.

Example from Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 1.

Bold is bare bones.
Green is opinion or example of how the words chosen exhibit personality.
Orange is assumption.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They're quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They're nice and all — I'm not saying that — but they're also touchy as hell. Besides, I'm not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.

You'll see the narrative voice is being built up as an 'unreliable' narrator. We can see he is probably young (colourful, colloquial language), has opinions, makes assumptions, and has perhaps even had (or likes to say he's had!) a breakdown.

Which all adds up to a unique Point of View!