Showing Point Of View through a Concrete Example, # 8

In a series of craft notes, we’re illustrating Point of View. If you want to see the first step in this process, click here to see Alice Munro’s version, in First Person Informant.

Really Inside The Moment

Third person and first person can also be limited to one person and use interior dialogue that is stream-of-consciousness, nearly always in present tense and starved of punctuation. It has to be completely in the character's voice and avoid any of the author's voice.

After supper oh so boring, i can't stand it until my daddy says Want to go down and see if the lake's still there? i jump up – my heart shouts – i grab his hand. Momma just a lump at the table making that horrible horrible set of clothes for me the humiliation of a cut-down old suit and dress into dowdy old wool things that i will have to wear to school next fall and i shall surely die when the other girls see me but we can at least get out of the house hot and no air to breathe into the cool of the dark evening the drive the road under the moon, finally away from her and from Little Brother who calls from his screened in porch down the veranda whining and such a baby he says Bring me an ice cream cone his horrid face pressed up against the screen like a moon and i shout at him You will be asleep and he will like a fish flopping on his bed in the dark.