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Changing Your Point of View

As essayists and bloggers, most of us here at yeah write share our stories in the first person. And there is a ton of power in those eyewitness accounts, particularly when they amplify the experiences of people whose voices too often are marginalized. But sometimes, we shy away from the third person because writing objectively about the stories of other people seems to us to be more the province of feature writers or journalists or novelists.

I’d like to challenge you this week to seek out the stories of those around you and to raise their voices by using your own.

You can do this even within the scope of a personal essay you might ordinarily voice in the first person. Few of our stories take place in a vacuum but are, instead, inspired by and plotted out according to not only our own actions, but also our reactions to others. So consider swapping in one of those people as your main character instead of yourself.

There’s enormous value in writing in the third person. In an example from fiction, the entire plot of the Akira Kurosawa movie Rashomon explores perspective as multiple witnesses retell the story of the same murder, challenging the viewer to reexamine her perceptions of memory, motive, truth, and lies. But even in nonfiction, writing from a different person’s point of view is excellent practice in developing the backstory, personality traits, and motivations of your cast of characters. You can gain an entirely different outlook on the same plot by viewing it from the angle of someone with different desires, needs, and experiences. Teachers often use a similar exercise with kids to help them think critically, gain empathy, and walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.

Writing from different perspectives isn’t new to yeah write. Long-time yeah writer Christie Tate, who blogs at Outlaw Mama, once took a childhood story about the time her grandmother put her baby doll in the trash and told it from three points of view: her own, her grandmother’s, and the doll’s.

Writing from another point of view not only exercises all of your characterization muscles, it’s also a great way to find inspiration. Not sure what to write? Well, there’s another side – or three – to the million stories that have already been told.

Yeah write super challenge #2

The third and final round of super challenge #2 is almost complete! Our participants are currently biting their nails in anticipation of the results as our judges turn in their final scores. Wish them good luck in the comments! They deserve it!

Did you miss out on registration? Don’t fret! Just sign up for our email blast so you don’t miss out on any announcements regarding future super challenges.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

Nonfiction know-how:

boundaries

It’s that time again. Yeah, you guessed it: the season of family holidays. When the biggest thing on your mind is how your family is driving you absolutely freakin’ nuts and you can’t think of anything else to blog about, but you swore that with NaBloPoMo kicking off you’d write at least something every day. Don’t worry. Rowan is here to help you through it.

Want more info?

Is this your first time here? Check out Sunday’s post which kicked off the week here at yeah write. Our email subscribers can also join us in the yeah write coffeehouse at its home on Facebook. If you’ve never taken the time to read them, please take a moment to familiarize yourself with our submission guidelines. The rules are a little different for each of our challenges and we’d hate to have to send back great writing on a technicality.

Did you happen to end up here because you suddenly saw yeah write in your stats? Sometimes members of our community spot excellent writing and they send those posts on over to us. We hope you don’t mind. Take a look around and get to know our community. We’re sure you’ll be happy here.

Have questions you can’t find the answer to by poking around the site? Email us or find us on Facebook and Twitter and we’ll happily help you out.

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How to submit and fully participate in the challenge

Basic yeah write guidelines: 1000 word limit; your entry can be dated no earlier than this past Sunday; nonfiction personal essay, creative opinion piece or mostly true story based on actual events.

1. In the sidebar of this week’s post, please grab the code beneath the nonfiction badge and paste it into the HTML view of your entry
2. Follow the Inlinkz instructions after clicking “add your link” to upload your entry to this week’s challenge grid
3. Your entry should appear immediately on the grid if you don’t receive an error message
4. Please make the rounds to read all the entries in this week’s challenge
5. Consider turning off moderated comments and CAPTCHA on your own blog

Submissions for this week’s challenges will close on Wednesday at 10pm ET. Voting will then open immediately thereafter and close on Thursday at 10pm ET. The winners, as always, will be celebrated on Friday.

Thank you for sharing with us your hard work! Good luck in the challenge…[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

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