Exercise 8

Prompt: Write two pieces with varying points of view. In the first, clearly differentiate between viewpoints, in the second don't give any clear indication

PART ONE:

(Wedding Planner)

The flower petals got into the soups, and the cake was the wrong color. Monica tried to pull the fighting children away from each other, and watched with horror as one of them slurped the punch out of the bowl like cereal milk. No one was sitting down at the right table and the little plastic cards she had spent hours preparing were lying in the mud. Oh the mud! So many puddles of it in the grass even though she had explicitly told the gardener…

(Groom)

Arthur didn’t mind the mud so much; he was more worried that his suit was too loose at the arms and too tight at the waist and that the sun was making him sweat under it all. He felt a bit like one of the stooges, awkward and foolish, a bumbling idiot compared to the sight of beauty next to him. Was she really next to him? His right hand felt numb, disbelieving. But she turned towards him and gave him a smile, oh what a smile! Heart fluttering he turned away and watched the kids play by the punch table.

(Child)

Frankie was dipping his hands into the pink bowl when a frazzled woman gave him a sharp glare and chased him off. He didn’t know why he had to listen to her anyways; she wasn’t even part of the family. He stuck his toungue out at the woman and then ran away laughing, jumping in the mud puddles even though his mom had warned him not to get his new shoes dirty. He felt a tap on his shoulder. Tag, you’re it! And he sprinted after the Gordy, who was already ducking under one of the tables and disappearing out the back hedge. 

PART TWO:

Eloise thought it was getting awfully late. She kept checking, rechecking, and glaring at her wrist watch, trying to edge it onward. She glanced through the corner of her eyes at the man sitting next to her, reading a large newspaper folded awkwardly in his lap. She decided to amuse herself by trying to read the small print in this way, but her eyes grew tired after a while and she fell back into her seat for a while. George Farly didn’t even notice the woman; he was too entranced by a particular story about a double homicide and kidnapping. He didn’t know why he got so interested in such stories; his wife had told him it was a bad habit, but there was something about the thrill of mystery and the shock of indecency that drew him in. He reached the end of the story and looked up with blinking eyes, like a man emerging from a movie theater.  The old woman at the other end of the room watched him look around and glance at the large wall clock by his left. She thought with a fondness of how much he resembled her own son; same concentrated brow, soft hazel eyes, sly, curving mouth. It was strange how the longer you looked at a person, the closer to you they seemed. Already she had made a brother out of the old man by the telephone, a grandchild out of a tired mother’s whining daughter, even a smiling dog in one of the framed wall paintings had become her own slobbering companion.