6/24/13 meeting recap

Next monday's prompt: Take a story you've already written and write it from a different perspective. Another characters voice, a different tense, or take a third person story and let one of your characters tell it in their own words. Have fun!

Perspective and tense.

We did a little experimentation on monday to see how writing in different tenses and perspectives change the way that we write. While there are formally dozens of perspectives and tenses, we only looked at a few. And each presented it's own flavor.

Present tense: Leads to more "blow by blow" story telling. It's more engaging, because we tend to be learning things as characters are learning of them. Works well for building suspense, or for doing a quick switch of expectations for humor. 

Past Tense: Can be very similar to present tense, as though the story is commenting on events just after they happen; particularly in a third person perspective. A first person perspective makes it much easier to give a sense of distance between the teller and the events. Which works well to put the reader in a place where the narrator knows more about the way the story unfolds than they do.

Future Tense: This one gets confusing quickly, but has a definite purpose. We imagined a short story told in reverse. The events of the story are laid out in detail to the reader, and at the end the unsuspecting protagonist steps into the first event of the story. Excellent for creating a twist and making a story that you just have to read a second time.