Reconsidering Point of View
Thirty-five years ago, Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale, speculative fiction about a totalitarian regime where women are assigned one of five roles: Handmaid, Martha, Wife, Commander, or Aunt.
In an interview with National Public Radio last year, she explained why the time had come to write a sequel.
“People had been asking me to write a sequel for a long time, and I always said no, because I thought they meant the continuation of the story of Offred [a Handmaid] which I couldn’t do,” she says. “But then I thought, what if somebody else were telling the story? And what if it were 15 or 16 years later? And it was also time, because for a while we thought we were moving away from The Handmaid’s Tale. And then we turned around and started going back toward it, ominously close in many parts of the world. And I felt it was possibly time to revisit the question of, how do regimes like Gilead end? Because we know from The Handmaid’s Tale that it did end.”
You can listen to the whole nine-minute interview here:
This novel was possible because Atwood entertained the notion of telling it from another character’s point of view. I find this fascinating.
In my workshops, I often encourage participants to experiment with point of view because the exercise can unearth so much rich material. Interested?
TRY THIS:
If you write fiction:
Revise a scene (or chapter or story) from another character’s point of view.
If you write memoir or other forms of creative non-fiction:
Memoir is, of course, written in the first person. It’s the writer’s story.
But what would happen if you wrote a scene — or even just a letter or journal entry — from the point of view of one of the other characters?
Dive in. Be willing to be surprised.
