Monday, September 24, 2007

September 24-30

From The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien:
"Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then , interrupting the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis or personal opinion...What you have to do, Sanders said, is trust your own story. Get the hell out of the way and let it tell itself. But Rat Kiley couldn't help it. He wanted to bracket the full range of meaning."
This is a hot topic among fiction writers. This question of how much the narrator should intrude. I think it depends on the purpose of the story. Some of my favorite books have had bossy, intrusive, insight-dropping narrators. But, let's use this discussion as a prompt for this week.

Prompt: Write a story about money in which the narrator gets the hell out of the way and only shows.

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