How to Write Fiction Read Online Free PDF

“third-person subjective”.
    At the other extreme, a third-person narrator can be a God-like voice who knows everything and is equally in the heads of all the characters: “third-person omniscient”.
    Third person can lack the intimacy of first person, the sense the reader has of identifying with the narrator. On the other hand, a third-person narrative can be enriched by its flexibility – a third-person narrator can go anywhere, do anything, know everything.
    Second person
    Using the second person is a challenge. It’s very limited in knowledge, and over an extended piece it’s unsettling for the reader. It can start to sound rather bullying or it can force you to identify with a character you feel very much at odds with.
    At the same time there can be an overwhelming intimacy about the second person which can make the writing very powerful.
    The point of view we think in is first person – our own perceptions and our own words – so we’ll start there.
    1 Write a portrait of yourself – your physical appearance and your personality – from your point of view, in the first person.
    It will have a fairly limited point of view, as you don’t know the “objective” truth about yourself, you only know what you think. It’s likely to have a kind of intimacy, although it might be critical as well as sympathetic. See what you discover when you do this:
    2 Using the same basic facts and information, rewrite this portrait from the point of view of one of your parents.
    The subject of the portrait, yourself, will now be a third person in the writing. The parent narrating will know different kinds of things and might have different judgments. They might conceal and reveal different things and for different reasons. They have a vested interest here, too: they are connected to the person they’re describing and might feel ashamed, proud, responsible, guilty or self-satisfied. There might be some distance on the subject: this time the intimacy may be with the parent doing the narrating.
    3 Now rewrite the description from the point of view of someone writing your biography, a hundred years in the future. This person may have access to all the above information and more, but might, on the other hand, know certain things.
    This will be a third-person account. There may be no limitations to knowledge, and although there may still be judgments, the narrator won’t have a personal stake in the description. The subject will be seen at a great distance and in an impersonal way; the subject will be seen to be just one individual among many, and all affected by the mood and theories of the times.
    These narrators are all trying to tell the truth as they see it. But let’s explore the murky depths of untruth.

    4 Write a portrait of yourself, in the third person, using the same basic facts, in the form of an obituary.
    No one ever says anything bad in an obituary. This usually means that the whole truth is not usually being told. Sometimes an obituary is just one long gush. A more interesting obituary is where the person giving it never actually says anything bad about the dead person, but you get the picture just the same. The pleasure is in reading between the lines.
    5 Now we’ll try the other end of the spectrum: write the portrait of yourself from the point of view of your worst enemy. It should still sound like the truth, but it will be slanted to bias the reader against you.
    Have a look now at all these versions. Which one did you find most interesting to write or read? Which was funniest? Which was most enigmatic? Which was most dramatic? Did any of them suggest stories within stories, layers of meanings?
    Once you’ve written a piece, in whatever point of view came naturally, you can ask yourself what other points of view are possible for the material and which one might work best. Some more than others will offer potential for suspense, drama, pathos,