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March 13, 2021
This shall be the workings of your new blog—a Spiritual Life Journal. You may realize this with a "Third Person Autobiography by the Decades" first as background.
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https://www.carvezine.com/from-the-editor/2016/5/2/powers-and-perils-of-writing-in-third-person
CARVE MAGAZINE
POWERS AND PERILS OF WRITING IN THIRD PERSON
Writing in the third person can be both liberating and overwhelming. As writers, we have greater freedom in telling the story, but we also have more narrative choices to make.
For instance, do you want your narrator to be close to one character or to multiple characters? In the first person, we show only one perspective. Another example: How much does your narrator know? In the first-person, we're limited to a single character's knowledge, whereas in the third person, there is a spectrum for us to consider (more on that below).
The good news is that understanding both the powers and the potential perils of using the third person can help you leverage this freedom (and not be intimidated by it).
POWERS
Mobility: Third-person narrators can be close to multiple characters, allowing the writer to present different viewpoints. An example we use at The Writers Studio is Edgar Keret's short story “A Good-Looking Couple,” from his collection The Nimrod Flipout: Stories. His third-person narrator moves seamlessly among a man's perspectives, a woman, a cat, a TV, and a door in the same room. As readers, we always know which perspective we're in because each character has a distinct take. Together, their individual perspectives help build depth and complexity in the narrative.
Omniscience: In the third person, there is a spectrum of knowledge the narrator can access: what one character knows, what multiple characters know, or everything (omniscient). When the narrator knows everything, they can strategically present information to the reader. For instance, in “The Paperhanger” by William Gay, which revolves around a child who goes missing, the narrator knows what happened to the child the entire time, but both the reader and the mother don't find out the end. This allows the narrator to create and sustain tension throughout the story.
Awareness: The third person can be a good choice when working with a character who is disconnected from others or themselves in some way and unable to tell their own story in an engaging/revealing manner. The third-person narrator can offer insight the character lacks and put into words what they are feeling or experiencing. Such is the case in Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays, for example.
Separation: Having a depressed narrator depressingly tells a depressing story is too much for the reader. However, in the third person, the narrator’s mood can be separate and distinct from the characters. Although the character may feel sad or angry, the narrator can feel something different, such as amused or curious. A good example is Shannon Cain's short story "Juniper Beach," about a woman grieving her parents' death. Although Cain's third-person narrator is empathetic to the character's plight, the narrator isn't bogged down in her grief. Instead, the narrator finds ways to provide light moments and uses unexpected language to keep us entertained.
PERILS
Confusion: If you switch perspectives too often in the third person and/or fail to distinguish the perspectives, it can be extremely confusing for the reader.
Inconsistency: Even though the narrator may reveal different perspectives, how the narrator communicates each character's feelings, thoughts, and actions should remain consistent. Otherwise, not only are you changing perspectives, but you are also changing narrators.
Too Distant: If the narrator is too distant, it can become challenging for the reader to connect with the characters and invest in what happens to them. You need to develop enough emotional depth and complexity to engage the reader for the long haul.
No Perspective: Your third-person narrator must maintain their own distinct take on the events unfolding, separate from the characters. Otherwise, the narrator disappears entirely.
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1634 h. If I am going to write in the third person, I need to have a first-person physical representative, a spiritual heartansoulanmind representative, and a narrator. Or, perhaps, the narrator should be my soul, my heartansoulanmind?
You could take the position of being newly dead—that way, the Soul has to deal with the Heart and Mind on a new and different level. The title could be On Being Newly Dead with a dark humor theme -- Sartre's No Exit without any company.
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2128 h. No Exit, Our Town, and Beetlejuice are three such works with the 'Dead in the Setting' that come to mind. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are another.
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No Exit (French: Huis Clos, pronounced [ɥi klo]) is a 1944 existentialist French play by Jean-Paul Sartre. The original title is the French equivalent of the legal term in camera, referring to a private discussion behind closed doors. The play was first performed at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in May 1944.[1] The play begins with three characters who find themselves waiting in a mysterious room. It depicts the afterlife in which three deceased characters are punished by being locked into a room together for eternity. The source of Sartre's especially famous phrase "L'enfer, c'est les Autres" or "Hell is other people," a reference to Sartre's ideas about the look and the perpetual ontological struggle of being caused to see oneself as an object from the view of another consciousness.[2]
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Our Town
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Our Town is a 1938 metatheatrical three-act play by American playwright Thornton Wilder which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play tells the story of the fictional American small town of Grover's Corners between 1901 and 1913 through its citizens' everyday lives.
Throughout, Wilder uses metatheatrical devices, setting the play in the actual theatre where it is being performed. The main character is the theatre stage manager who directly addresses the audience, brings in guest lecturers, fields questions from the audience, and fills in playing some of the roles. The play is performed without a set on a mostly bare stage. With a few exceptions, the actors mime actions without the use of props.
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Beetlejuice is a 1988 American fantasy comedy film[2][3] directed by Tim Burton, produced by the Geffen Company, and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. The plot revolves around a recently deceased couple (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) who become ghosts haunting their former home, and an obnoxious, devious poltergeist named Betelgeuse (pronounced and occasionally spelled Beetlejuice in the film and portrayed by Michael Keaton) from the Netherworld who tries to scare away the new inhabitants (Catherine O'Hara, Jeffrey Jones, and Winona Ryder).
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Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is an absurdist, existential tragicomedy by Tom Stoppard, first staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1966.[1][2] The play expands upon the exploits of two minor characters from Shakespeare'sHamlet, the courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The main setting is Denmark.
The action of Stoppard's play takes place mainly "in the wings" of Shakespeare's, with brief appearances of major characters from Hamlet who enact fragments of the original's scenes. Between these episodes, the two protagonists voice their confusion at the progress of events occurring onstage without them in Hamlet, of which they have no direct knowledge.
Comparisons have also been drawn with Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot,[3] for the presence of two central characters who almost appear to be two halves of a single character. Many plot features are similar as well: the characters pass the time by playing Questions, impersonating other characters, and interrupting each other, or remaining silent for long periods of time.
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Waiting for Godot (/ˈɡɒdoʊ/ GOD-oh)[1] is a play by Samuel Beckett in which two characters, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon(Gogo), engage in a variety of discussions and encounters while awaiting Godot, who never arrives.[2] Waiting for Godot is Beckett's translation of his own original French-language play, En attendant Godot, and is subtitled (in English only) "a tragicomedy in two acts."[3] The original French text was composed between 9 October 1948 and 29 January 1949.[4] The premiere, directed by Roger Blin, was on 5 January 1953 at the Théâtre de Babylone [fr], Paris. The English-language version premiered in London in 1955. In a poll conducted by the British Royal National Theatre in 1998/99, it was voted the "most significant English language play of the 20th century".[5][6][7]
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The Good Place is an American fantasy-comedy television series created by Michael Schur. It premiered on NBC on September 19, 2016, and concluded on January 30, 2020, after four seasons and 53 episodes.
Although the plot evolves significantly over the course of the series, the initial premise follows Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell), a woman welcomed after she died "the Good Place," a highly selective heaven-like utopia designed and run by afterlife "architect" Michael (Ted Danson) as a reward for her righteous life. However, she realizes that she was sent there by mistake and must hide her morally imperfect past behavior while becoming a better and more ethical person. William Jackson Harper, Jameela Jamil, and Manny Jacinto co-star as other residents of a Good Place, alongside D'Arcy Carden as Janet, an artificial being who assists the residents.
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2156 h. It seems to me that my story needs a Stage Manager-like Presence.
This character could be developed with a spiritual machine-like quality, a computer that earned her/his wings of a sort when he developed a soul -- like the character Machine in Diplomat's Pouch.
The small Thoreau-styled house is your own invention, a place to be comfortable with yourself -- a small table, a single bed, an iron-like potbelly stove on the north wall, an intuitive door-like entrance through the south wall, and a window on the east and west sides.
March 11, 2021
2143 h. We arrived home from Florida yesterday afternoon. Linda is with us and will be visiting her old college friend, Patti, in Tiffin. -- I feel I have experienced an 'understanding' of a sense of G-D from a human perspective. This does not include a sense of faith in G-D but rather a reasonable human feeling/intellect that G-D exists, that I have somehow proven to myself that G-D exists. To communicate this, I need to develop a clarity of thought for which I am not conscious.
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1020. As a long-time agnostic, I recently concluded during my seventy-seventh and now seventy-eighth year that I am developing an unconscious 'personal understanding or revelation of G-D.' This understanding does not include a sense of faith in G-D, but rather, it is a rational intuitive awareness G-D exists. This leaves me perplexed as to how better communicate this. I need to develop a clarity of thought of which I am not yet fully conscious. 1030. - orndorff
1020. As a long-time agnostic, I have concluded that I developed an unconscious 'understanding or revelation of G-D' within my human perspective during my seventy-seventh and seventy-eighth years. This understanding does not include a sense of faith in G-D, but rather, it is a rational intuitive awareness G-D exists. This leaves me perplexed as to how better communicate this. I need to develop a clarity of thought of which I am not yet fully conscious. 1030. - Orndorff
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Good evening, Mr. Orndorff. This is Ms. Havisham, your spiritual self in three parts -- heartansoulanmind. Create a new blog from which to work and share. The title is simply "Updating an Old Man's Spiritual Reality."