Whose Story Is It? Writing from a Clear Point of View

By: Madeline DiMaggio

Narrated by: Madeline DiMaggio

Deciding on a point of view is one of the hardest tasks a writer faces. Here is expert advice on discovering whose story you are telling, and on point of view as seen by the characters, the audience, the writer, the camera, and more. And you'll hear DiMaggio's own point of view on what it means to be a writer - passion for the process, learning about yourself, scaling the wall of rejection and growing with your characters.

Key Concepts:

Opposing points of view create conflict which propels your story

A character's principal trait determines his/her point of view

Novelists should study screenwriting to learn how to think visually

Awareness of who you are as a writer will make your story shine

©2001 Madeline DiMaggio (P)2001 Writer's AudioShop

Know your audience...super educational talk!

The best of Madeline DiMaggio in a clear, concise presentation designed to get you to create outstanding material. If you write this is worth listening to over and over!

Going to keep this in the stack

Very good listen for writers that just need a quick slap in the face. That slap that just says, "stop it, go write". I will listen to this again, I'm sure.

Point of View or Autobiography??

I was so disappointed! I was expecting a lecture in the use of point of view in writing, and how it affects the story, instead she told a bunch of autobiographical stories about her life in the industry! There was nothing I could have taken away from this to help me become a better writer. Her main mesage was that Hollywood is tough, you'll get rejected a billion times, but keep writing.

Not worth money I spent. Bummer.

Screenplay advice from a sitcom writer

Madeline DiMaggio wants you to know that her workshop is not about points of view, per se. In other words, she?s doesn?t know jack about ?limited omniscient,? or ?first person? ? all that boring stuff you learned in English class. No, no, no, hip, cool Madeline, who enunciates strongly in the polished style of, say, a junior college instructor, wants to dispense with such formal approaches to writing. After all, what?s the point, right? To her, ?point of view? literally means ?who?s telling the story.? Is it a man? A woman? A dead body lying on a gurney? It?s a pretty unimpressive take on point of view, I must say; she should be admonished severely for misusing the term.

One should also know that this workshop is geared towards screenwriters, not novelists. So if you are a novelist, run far, run far away? What makes a good screenplay, you might be asking yourself? According to Madeline, lots of white space, lots and lots of white space ? in other words, not a lot of dialogue. Later she contradicts herself by reaching out to novelists and encouraging them to study screenplay writing so that they can learn to write what? Yep ? good dialogue, which as it turns out, is pretty important after all.

The workshop starts off very seriously, like a class on writing; she lists off various categories of points of view in her wonderfully confident manner. It?s exciting, but it?s all smoke and mirrors. For a moment, one almost feels the need to take notes, but then the ?lesson? quickly dissolves into the usual pep talk stuff found on most of these recordings. She tells you her personal success story, laden with downfalls and little lucky breaks; we find out about her experience writing Kojak episodes and Rhoda; the audience laughs appreciatively, she takes questions, she encourages, ho hum. Because it?s all delivered well, it?s fun to listen to, but it?s not much more than that. It's certainly not going to teach you very much about writing. Two stars.

POV: poser exposer.

I think somebody deleted your program and let their girlfriend record a joke version of the explanation of literary point of view. She has to be somebody's girlfriend. No self-respecting female in any level of management would allow this waste of time to be offered to the public.
The woman attempts to explain the meaning of point of view as the everyday use of the term with barely a tangential connection to writing.
And that's about as far as she gets. The content doesn't approach junior high school quality on the subject.
The only reason I can think of for it even being recorded is that the presenter seems to be full of herself and probably said, Why not. Somebody might buy it. Evidently, two fools met.

NO POINT OF VIEW

This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?

Definitely not writers. Lets get things straight here. When we are talking about a point of view we are not talking about the camera's POV or what the actors are seeing we are talking about which character in the film the author decided to TELL his story. Period., We are 30 min into the book and she is still trying to impress us with her pseudo - analysis of some mediocre films. The best Analysis of Point of View, I ever heard was from one of my professors at Columbia Film School in the 80's Frank Daniel ( AFI USC ) He developed what they call today the sequence approach or the mini movie method.

Would you ever listen to anything by Madeline DiMaggio again?

NO

How could the performance have been better?

If it was better written - reedited and rehearsed and Re- edited again. Live lectures should not be re-sold to the public they were already sold once. They should be revised and re-edited carefully.

Any additional comments?

It would be Fair if we could read or listen the first chapter of the book before we buy it,