Why Your Story Might (To Your Great Surprise) Crack Open With A Child Narrator
How to experiment effectively with the profound possibilities of a child narrator, including persona, defamiliarization, and that odd forgivable frankness
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“Things look different depending on who is doing the looking and what their vantage point is. Points of view, like microscopes and telescopes, can reveal things ordinarily unseen.” ~Valerie Vogrin
I originally wrote this craft essay on assignment for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, where it first appeared last year. It emerged from a talk I gave at the beautiful HippoCamp Creative Nonfiction conference in 2022. I believe the principles I discuss in this essay are exaggerated with child narrators, but applicable to all narration and therefore worth thinking about and playing around with no matter whether there’s a place for a ch…