Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Part Two: Detached Narrator Tell the same story using the detached author or “fly on the wall” POV. Part Three: Observer-Narrator If there wasn’t a character in the original version who was there but was not a participant, only an onlooker, add such a character now. Tell the same story in that character’s voice, in first or third person. Part Four: Involved Author Tell the same or a new story using the involved-author POV. Part Four may require you to expand the whole thing, up to two or three pages, 1000 words or so. You may find you need to give it a context, find out what led up to it, or follow it further. The detached author takes up as little room as possible, but the involved author needs a fair amount of time and space to move around in. If your original story simply doesn’t lend itself to this voice, find a story you want to tell that you can be emotionally and morally involved in. I don’t mean by that that it has to be factually true (if it is, you may have trouble getting out of the autobiographical mode into the involved author’s voice, which is a fictional mode). And I don’t mean that you should use your story to preach. I do mean that the story should be about something that concerns you.