Point of View Writing

Recently in class we did an exercise in which we had to write a short story/account of ours, we spent a little while editing that to prestige before we were asked to switch around and write the same story from the perspective of someone nearby; guess for their view on the situation and present it in another piece of writing.

My first piece was a semi-true - well, everything in it was true, it just may not have all happened on the same occasion, if you see what I mean - story about one experience I had skiing/gliding over a large patch of powder snow beside a ski run. During this account I briefly mention a small ski school group off to the side of the piste; my second story was written from the perspective of one of the children attending this particular ski school.

I think this exercise was interesting to perform, however I am yet to be convinced as to why it has much to do with our english class (Maybe it does, but I just prefer and therefor focus more on the story writing aspects of the class), but I did enjoy it even though sometimes I had to write some negative things about myself from the view of the bystander. I guess this exercise can be a good idea when developing characters for a new project, in fact I might start doing that, coming up with a short account of some incident and then writing from each characters perspectives beforehand to get a better understanding of how they should or could be portrayed in the story.

So, to contradict my earlier opinion questioning the relativity to story writing this exercise had, I now suppose it can be an alright procedure i'd accept in the future.

Again, to bring attention to my personal writing blog - here's the link: http://smouldrfume.blogspot.sg/ - I have posted the original story (written from my perspective) already, and the other is soon to come. I will also be editing both of those pieces over time and will be uploading my progress to this site constantly.