Linda Sue Park's Scene Building Premium Workshop

One of the coolest things about the Summer Conference is the opportunity to do the special track options, like Morphing Media, Pitch-A-Thon, Establishing your YA Voice, and the incomparable Linda Sue Park's

SCENE: The Building Block of Fiction

Today's session started out with a discussion of the different P.O.V.s you can use in writing.

How many cameras are there?

Who's holding them?

She cautioned that the challenge of 1st person (and 3rd person limited) is in conveying information that the character would take for granted.

Her first example was how in first person writing, a character can't say, "I walked into the living room, and saw my 13 year old brother in the house."

(Linda made an ALARM SOUND here)

For her, that breaks it - because a character wouldn't be thinking about the age of their brother.

If there are enough of these out-of-character explanations for the reader, it takes you out of the character's mind. And if you have too many of them, readers are just going to think that it's a bad story.


Posted by Lee Wind