Writing Trick: Going the Opposite

A lot of writing advice is centered on exercises, which I fully support. I’m a guy who naturally focuses on statistics; I keep track of how not just how many stories and novels I’ve written, but how many pages of material I’ve written over the years. Which is weird since I deprecate word counts so much, but the fact that I keep track of stats is just a tic of my strange brain, it doesn’t mean they’re all that useful.

So, I’m obsessed with how much I’ve written over the years, but that sometimes means getting locked into channels where you produce more. There’s a comfort zone for all writers, after all, and it’s not uncommon to find yourself writing the same sorts of stories or articles all the time—especially if you start getting paid for them. After all, if the world wants nothing more than to pay you for sasquatch erotica, you’re probably gonna write a lot of it.

But sometimes you need to break out a little simply to try something different and shake off the cobwebs, so the occasional writing exercise is usually invigorating and instructive. One trick I like to indulge in is simple but effective: I take something from my life and I write it from the opposite perspective.

The Hero’s Journey

We’re all the hero of our own story, after all; there’s a tendency to always remember things in a way that is self-flattering or that at least serves your personal narrative. And hey, I support that. My own self-mythologizing is how I keep my sanity, because if I admitted to myself how much of a shambolic jackass I’ve been in my life there would be emotional repercussions no one is prepared for.

That’s why writing something from someone else’s perspective can be a rich writing experience. Take a moment—it doesn’t have to be a negative one; it could be your wedding day or the day you wrestled a bear and saved the lives of six cub scouts—and write it up as a story, but tell it from someone else’s perspective. Maybe the POV is the police officer who arrested you for public urination. Maybe it’s the person whose house you TP’d on Mischief Night when you were 15. Maybe just the person who sat next to you on the bus yesterday. Tell the same story you experienced by imagine it from another person’s perspective.

Simple … but effective. Being able to see the many sides of an experience is a powerful tool for a writer.

Of course, for some reason when I imagine my experiences from other POVs I am always wearing a tuxedo and a monocle. Strange how that happens.