Old exercise, slight return: Penny's Dilemma
FinsburyParkCarrots
Seattle, WA Posts: 12,223
I wrote this exercise for this forum a long time ago but we have many new contributors since then. Please have a go!
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I'd like you to attempt a short piece of prose narrative featuring a character called Penny who is in a dilemma. The nature of her difficulty, you can choose entirely for yourself. What I'm really interested in here is to ask you to explore the possibilities of representing Penny's consciousness. However, your main constraint is that Penny must always be referred to in the third person. She is not the narrator even though it is her thought being represented.
I'd like you to take note of the following:
When a third-person, "omniscient" narrator plunges into the consciousness of a character and represents their thoughts but still in the third-person, this technique is called focalization.
And there are different levels of focalization. Used to great effect, the narrator can display a particular level of empathy with a character, for a different effect. Let me demonstrate how this works.
A character's quoted monologue, "Have I wasted my time in this job all these years?" would, in focalization, be converted to the third person and the past tense, using for example the following three techniques:
1 She wondered if she had wasted her time in her job, all those years. This sentence is an example of what is called psycho-narration. The narrator is reporting indirectly the character's thought, changing the pronoun and tense, and substituting the demonstrative adjective "those" for "these".
2 Had she squandered her time by remaining in that occupation for all those years?: This sentence is an example of narrated monologue. Note that there's no phrase such as "She wondered" in this example to identify the prominence of an obtrusive authorial narrator here, which means we have greater emphasis on the character's thoughts, without any additional narratorial reportage. However, the language used is more writerly than in the character's own quoted monologue, so we say that here is an example of narrated monologue of the dissonant kind.
3 Had she wasted her time in his job, all those years? This is narrated monologue of the consonant kind, because though it phrases the character's thought in the third person and switches tense, it is the closest kind of focalization we have seen to the original example of quoted monologue quoted above.
Example 3, and, to an extent, example 2, are known in linguistics as free indirect discourse. Such discourse is 'free' because it's not preceded by phrases such as "She said" to make it reported speech that emphasises the narrator's standpoint; it's indirect because it's not a first person utterance.
So, I'd like you to produce a piece of work which shows all three kinds of focalization mentioned above, in operation.
* * * *
I'd like you to attempt a short piece of prose narrative featuring a character called Penny who is in a dilemma. The nature of her difficulty, you can choose entirely for yourself. What I'm really interested in here is to ask you to explore the possibilities of representing Penny's consciousness. However, your main constraint is that Penny must always be referred to in the third person. She is not the narrator even though it is her thought being represented.
I'd like you to take note of the following:
When a third-person, "omniscient" narrator plunges into the consciousness of a character and represents their thoughts but still in the third-person, this technique is called focalization.
And there are different levels of focalization. Used to great effect, the narrator can display a particular level of empathy with a character, for a different effect. Let me demonstrate how this works.
A character's quoted monologue, "Have I wasted my time in this job all these years?" would, in focalization, be converted to the third person and the past tense, using for example the following three techniques:
1 She wondered if she had wasted her time in her job, all those years. This sentence is an example of what is called psycho-narration. The narrator is reporting indirectly the character's thought, changing the pronoun and tense, and substituting the demonstrative adjective "those" for "these".
2 Had she squandered her time by remaining in that occupation for all those years?: This sentence is an example of narrated monologue. Note that there's no phrase such as "She wondered" in this example to identify the prominence of an obtrusive authorial narrator here, which means we have greater emphasis on the character's thoughts, without any additional narratorial reportage. However, the language used is more writerly than in the character's own quoted monologue, so we say that here is an example of narrated monologue of the dissonant kind.
3 Had she wasted her time in his job, all those years? This is narrated monologue of the consonant kind, because though it phrases the character's thought in the third person and switches tense, it is the closest kind of focalization we have seen to the original example of quoted monologue quoted above.
Example 3, and, to an extent, example 2, are known in linguistics as free indirect discourse. Such discourse is 'free' because it's not preceded by phrases such as "She said" to make it reported speech that emphasises the narrator's standpoint; it's indirect because it's not a first person utterance.
So, I'd like you to produce a piece of work which shows all three kinds of focalization mentioned above, in operation.
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
Penny wondered had she wasted her time at her job.
It had not been a lousy job, had it?
It was a good job, as work is good.
But she’d been fired, and that was lousy. Being fired, let go, expelled, excommunicated, removed, disposed of, banned from your place of work are pretty lousy things, in most minds, even that of omniscient narrators, wasting folks is lousy.
Her work was fulfilling.
Her long thin fingers moved over keys. Something musical, magical, came out. The freedom of thought that her job provided made her smile.
She smiled even now thinking of it. It was a small smile on a young face with old eyes. She’d seen a lot, and then her long thin fingers had made music out of what she’d seen.
And then she’d been fired. So the dilemma was really quite simple and not much of a dilemma at all; the job had not been lousy as it was not a waste of her talents; however, being fired was lousy as it wasted her talents, and most waste was quite lousy.
She moved the mouse up to the file button, clicked on it, and hit print. She picked the paper up from the tray. She propped her feet up on her desk. Old eyes scanned what she’d made. She crumpled it up and tossed it. It was a good toss, she thought. Her wrist was still poised in a follow through, which made her giggle. The paper had landed in the middle of her recycling bin. No rim, all bin.
She laughed feeling a certain since of fulfillment that comes from making a good shot.
And she laughed thinking that years ago, she’d owned a waste basket, but today as in every day since she’d been fired, she felt freed. Ownership? Waste baskets? They were very much a part of her past, which no longer made her tense, and her former employers could waste away.
Penny is free to recreate, which makes much more sense.
of course, i am fond of nonsense, especially nonsense poetry, the owl and the pussycat is a favorite.
Yes, that's consonant narrated monologue.
I'd say the diction was more writerly here; this is dissonant narrated monologue.
The first sentence here is psycho-narration. The remainder seems fairly consonant with her voice, though the construction of the last sentence is writerly.
Good stuff. You ticked all the boxes and made art in the process. That's what these exercises are about: Aiding, not stunting, creativity.
mm...I´d love to try, as writing is my favourite hobbie...but my english isn´t good enough to play this games....sorry....lucky for me I can understand enough to read your posts....keep on this road, I love this kind of threads
Federico
you don't have to be strong in english to post here, eddie sings in other languages too.
thanks can't wait to read it.
Ok...thanks...I´ll be posting soon...