Activity

Really examine every time you use “look,” “watch,” “see,” “feel,” etc., and any other words that “filter” (via John Gardner) the prose through a perspective that is already well established. If we are in Jose’s close-third perspective, for example, we don’t need to know that Jose looked at the cloc…

Extended to larger parts of a story, like scene, the order of things is crucial. Take a story like Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Hell-Heaven,” in which a daughter narrates her mother’s crush on a family friend. At the end of the story, the grown-up narrator reveals a secret: that after the friend got married, t…