Crafting Point of View

Book excerpt: Craft matters. Point of view matters-its controlling effect often overlooked in the study of authors' rhetorical choices. This book showcases creative writing from students in the University of Vermont Honors College course, Crafting Point of View, that evolved through experimentation. These writers tackled stylistic imitations of novelists, memoirists, and poets who chose unconventional points of view in their prosaic and poetic story telling: the dialect and direct-address of Celie's letters to God in Alice Walker's The Color Purple; the masterful and inventive manipulation of multiple points of view, sometimes within the same chapter or paragraph, in Lydia Davis's Collected Stories-predominantly "Break It Down"-and Abigail Thomas's Safekeeping; the surreal seemingness of "How to Tell a True War Story" in Tim O'Brien's metafictional The Things They Carried; the ways for means that poets like Maya Angelou, Donald Hall, and Jane Kenyon shift points of view, sometimes to alter the lens on pain; and the utilization of that "say you are...," "imagine this," all-inclusive assumedness of the second-person in Jay McInernay's Bright Lights, Big City and Mark Richard's House of Prayer No. 2. In the explorations that follow each story, essay, poem, or media message, student reflections on the crafting process will enlighten readers about the power and purpose of this often-undervalued element of style in writing: point of view.