All language subtitles for Masterclass Margaret Atwood Teaches Creative Writing - 06.Point of View Case Studies

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"Alias Grace" is based
on a double murder that

took place in 1843
in which the man

servant was hanged for
the murder of his employer

Thomas Kinnear.

The housekeeper
was also murdered

but that murder was never tried.

but that murder was never tried.

The Maid servant,
Grace Marks, was

condemned as an accessory
in the first murder

although we know she didn't
shoot Thomas Kinnear.

She was condemned because she
had a window of opportunity

in which she could have told
on the man servant, McDermott,

and she didn't do it.

So that's why she
got a death sentence.

But then a lot of
people petitioned

on her behalf and her
sentence was commuted to life.

Right before he was
hanged, McDermott

Right before he was
hanged, McDermott

said Grace Marks helped me
to strangle Nancy Montgomery.

He was, however,
a well-known liar.

But just because somebody
is a well-known liar

doesn't mean they're
lying on every occasion.

He gets hanged, she's the
only person left alive,

and she never told.

So that's the basic story.

And the novel is
about the attempt

to discover the truth on behalf
of a pre-freudian psychiatric

to discover the truth on behalf
of a pre-freudian psychiatric

doctor who has been
commissioned to prove her

innocent by some
reformists who think

that she was a young girl
wrongly sentenced to life.

So she claims to
have lost her memory.

She can't remember
what happened.

And he's trying to find out
where that part of her memory

may have gone.

may have gone.

So it's told through Grace.

She's telling the story.

She's telling the story to
him, but she's also having

some thoughts of her own.

And he, in the third
person, we hear his story

about him trying to
find out the truth.

And we have Simon Jordan's
mother's letters to him.

And we have his conversations
with other people

who were involved.

who were involved.

And we also have some
newspaper accounts and poems

and literary works of that
time and from the supposed

confession of Grace Marks.

Although you don't know of
course, whether it really

was because, I hate
to break this to you,

but newspaper accounts
are not always accurate.

This is the beginning
of "Alias Grace."

This is the beginning
of "Alias Grace."

So it is the first
couple of pages.

But the wrong thing about it is
that it's in the wrong person.

It's in the third person.

And I in fact,
wrote hundreds pages

of "Alias Grace" in
that third person.

And then two things happened.

I was doing this in France,
and I was on a train to Paris.

And I got a blinding headache.

And I got a blinding headache.

And in the middle of
that blinding headache,

I realized that I
was going to have

to throw out that
first 100 pages

and transpose them
into the first person

because it wasn't going
to work in the third.

And this is something that can
often unblock a book for you,

either changing the
person from first to third

or from third to first.

And if you're really
daring, to second.

And if you're really
daring, to second.

Or changing the tense
from present to past,

from past to present can
often make all the difference.

So if things are not
working, you can try that.

And each person for
a second and third

gives you quite a different
relationship to the story.

So as a first person
narrator, Grace can lie.

So as a first person
narrator, Grace can lie.

As a third person narrator,
it was a lot harder

for her to do that.

So that is those first pages
but in the wrong person.

A lot of things
just don't work out.

The wastepaper basket
is your friend.

It was invented for you by God.

There's a form of
storytelling that you

can call witness literature.

can call witness literature.

Witness literature is
always first person.

And some witness
literature is real,

you know what was it
like in the gulag.

And some witness
literature is fictionalized

witness literature.

The "Handmaid's Tale"
is told almost entirely

from the first person
and almost entirely

as remembered consciousness
because the central character

is in fact recording
her memories of what has

is in fact recording
her memories of what has

happened on a tape recorder.

So this is her memory of what
it was like to be in this room

that she finds herself
living in against her will.

"A chair, a table, a lamp,
above on the white ceiling

a relief ornament in
the shape of a wreath,

a relief ornament in
the shape of a wreath,

and in the center
of it a blank space

plastered over like
the place in a face

where the eye has
been taken out.

There must have been
a chandelier once.

They've removed anything
you can tie a rope to.

A window, two white curtains.

Under the window, a window
seat with a little cushion.

When the window is partly open--

it only opens partly--

the air can come in and
make the curtains move.

I can sit-in the chair
or on the window seat,

I can sit-in the chair
or on the window seat,

hands folded, and watch this.

Sunlight comes into
through window too

and falls on the floor,
which is made of wood,

in narrow strips,
highly polished.

I can smell the polish.

There's a rug on the floor,
oval, of braided rags.

This is the kind
of touch they like,

folk art, archaic, made by
women in their spare time

from things that
have no further use.

A return to traditional
values, waste not, want not.

A return to traditional
values, waste not, want not.

I'm not being wasted,
why do I want?"

So in this case,
the regime of Gilead

isn't real although everything
in it is based on real things.

So somebody might find
this and know it happened.

And that's what she's doing
because she records all

of this, and then she hides it.

And lo and behold, several
hundred years later somebody

And lo and behold, several
hundred years later somebody

does find it.