Editing Course: Week 2
This week we will be working on point of view as well as setting (time and place).
Hi all,
Welcome to the second week of the editing your first draft course!
Last week we worked on the heart of the story — its core — as well as its genre. You will also have had a think about the themes and emotions you want to highlight. These answers will help you refine every other narrative choice which we’ll be tackling in the coming weeks.
Today we will be looking at the narrative, in other words how the story is being told. We talked about story last week, and we will talk in a few weeks about plot and structure. This section on the narrative is about who is telling us (the reader) this story, what do they know, where are they this story from in time and place? There are so many different ways to tell the same story with the same plot using completely different narrative devices. I’m borrowing the distinction between story, narrative and plot from How Novels Work by John Mullan because I think it can help to break it down in this way. He distinguishes between:
Story: material of events and characters and what happens in it.
Narrative: the way the story is told.
Plot: the causal chain that connects events and characters1.
