Watch Where You're Standing: Voice and Perspective in Fiction

There are certain technical choices that you make when you write fiction. Usually these choices are made at the beginning, instinctively, and you don't even notice that you've made them until you realise you've made the wrong ones. And then, midway through the text, you have to change not just your mind, but the minds of your characters, in the hope of better reaching the minds of your readers.

This course examines these choices. When do you need to make them? How do you make them? What are the options available to you? How do you change your mind?

The choices, broadly, are these:

• Who is speaking to the reader? Is it you?
• Where is the narrator standing? What view do they have of what's happening?
• Are there more interesting places from which you could tell this story?
• Is there a character who can do the job for you?
• What narrative voice should you use? First person? Third person?
• If you use first person, will the perspective be too limited?
• If you use third person is the perspective too diffuse?
• Maybe you could use second person? First person plural?
• Can you be omniscient?
• Can you just stay out of it entirely?

These are the sorts of questions that should be on our minds as we start to write. And they stay on our minds. They involve a complicated layering of decisions which are interdependent and which can be elusive; involving character, language, intention, and of course, trial and error. This course will reflect on these choices. We'll name, and try to understand, the options open to us. We'll examine how great writers have adopted startling standpoints to create startling, memorable fiction. We'll try to deepen our own appreciation of what we can do, and how we can do it. There are no easy answers, but if we ask the right questions we may uncover new paths into our own writing.