Point of View

Recently I served on a jury in a local criminal case. It was an interesting experience, although it took a huge chunk of time out of my summer. (Man-oh-man do lawyers love to talk! But that's an entirely different topic.)



The case turned out to be quite silly, actually, when you got down to the basics of it. The problem was, everything that could have possibly gone wrong in the situation that led to the charges did go wrong. Wait. Maybe not quite everything. Someone very easily could have gotten killed, and they didn't. So that was good.



As I listened to all the testimonies and heard more than a dozen people tell the same story over and over again, one thought stuck out very vividly in my mind. Each story was different. Every single witness fully believed that he or she was telling the absolute truth, and every witness told a different version of the events. None of the stories matched exactly. Some of them were quite similar. Some of them were totally opposite. It was quite an interesting phenomenon.



It made me think just how important point of view is when telling a story. The way the story feels, and the way the reader or listener feels about it, totally depends upon whose point of view it's coming from.


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