Week 4: Famous Last Words

This week, I've really enjoyed trying out different writing styles and experimenting with them in my storytelling. When we were asked to come up with different styles for the storybook project last week, I initially had a hard time coming up with four different styles. It caused me to really have to think about what my personal style is, and how I could depart from said style. For instance, I typically write in the third person narrative though I do switch between limited and omniscient, at least I think I do - sometimes I find it difficult to say for sure. So for my storybook introduction, I decided to switch things up just a bit and write from the first person perspective. This was fun and interesting as I got to experiment with the narrator's voice and personality. I think that is the best part of writing in the first person - the creation of personality. You can, of course, create a character's personality in a third person perspective, but that comes mostly from direct characterization, and outside party telling exactly what a certain character is like. With direct characterization, however, you begin to get into some of the questions like "is the narrator reliable? Can I trust what he/she is saying about this character?" In respect to third person omniscient, the answer is, most likely, yes, but you can't really know for sure. Then there's the third person limited perspective in which the story is being told about other people from the perspective of an outsider to the story. This style may contain bias about certain characters. I think the most interesting way to gain a sense of a character is through indirect characterization, reviewing the thoughts, actions, and words of the character in question. Sure, the narrator can tell  you things about himself/herself and be lying, but dialogue doesn't like, and a character's actions don't lie, and what one is thinking certainly doesn't lie. This week I hope to experiment more with first person narration to step outside of my comfort zone just a little more. Hopefully it works out for me!

Random Fun Fact: Did you know that the novel Crime and Punishment was originally written in the first person? Author Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote almost the entire book (about 300 pages!) in the first person before scrapping the *entire* thing in order to rewrite the novel in the third person. Why might he have done that? What does one gain in the third person perspective that cannot be attained in the first person? What does one lose? Maybe Dostoyevsky was trying to reveal something, or keep something hidden

Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment

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