Sample Exercises

Writing Exercise #1

Your suggested writing exercise for this lesson revolves around narration and point of view.

In Luke 15, Jesus tells the Parable of the Prodigal Son using an omniscient narrator. The narrator sometimes shows things from the younger brother’s perspective, sometimes from the older brother’s perspective, and sometimes from the father’s perspective (though the narrator doesn’t really get into close third-person except possibly with the younger brother, when we get a little peek at his inner monologue).

Your writing exercise is to retell this familiar story from the point of view of one of two main characters.

Retell the parable using the older brother as a first-person narrator.  Or, retell the parable in close third-person from the perspective of the father.

Remember, whether you’re writing in first-person or close third-person, you’re only showing and telling what your point-of-view character can see and hear. You have the option of telling what’s going on inside your point-of-view character’s head, but you can also choose only to show what your character sees by looking out. That’s up to you. However, according to the rules of close third-person and first-person narration, you can only get inside the head of one character (your POV character).

Writing Exercise #2

In one paragraph, describe a person (fictional or real). But here’s the catch: You can’t describe the character directly. You can only describe one room in the character’s house. To put it another way, describe a room in such a way that the reader feels that he or she knows the person who lives there.