God

The Assignment: The spectrum of narrative perspectives goes from benighted, flawed, unreliable first-person narrations to godlike omniscience -- all-knowing understanding of everyone's thoughts and deepest motives.  But God's POV is also, presumably, a first person narration -- or perhaps God speaks occasionally in the royal we or the second-person plural.  What would God see?  How would God know a very ordinary set of events -- or how could mere human readers see all that a god (let alone God) sees?  Since God should know how to be efficient and get right to the point, do this exercise in 200 words.

My Response:

What did I do?

The thought cut through all the others. The hopes and wishes, the fears and needs. Accompanied by such terrible sadness that it could not be ignored.

The thinker of this thought was ordinary by all means. Brown hair, brown eyes. His skin was tanned, though he’d spent no time in the sun. Normally he would be playing video games by himself in his living room. But that day could not be described as ordinary.

A gun wavered in his hand as he fought against the sick feeling that was building in his stomach. At his feet lay a man with a black mask over his face. Pain engulfed his entire being, and as the last bits of consciousness left him, he thought only of the face of his beloved daughter. The one he had broken into this house for in the first place. She had to eat.

The gun clattered to the ground, No, no, no! I can’t have done this, no!

His hands came up to his head, trying to wipe away the last couple of minutes, but they couldn’t. Nothing ever would.

The pain disappeared as the soul left the body of the man laying on the ground, it’s bright shining light unseen by the killer. Soon, all that was left was the jumbled thoughts of a man whose life would never be the same again.

My Thoughts: This one marks the end of the POV section of the book.  I'm sad to see it go, as there were some very interesting exercises, but POV has also never been a big weak point of mine, so I'm eager to move forward and see what's coming.  As for this assignment, I was a little stumped at first, but eventually I figured out what I wanted to do.  I don't know if this is how a god (or even God himself) would witness such a scene, but I thought I made a fair stab at it.

As always, I would love to hear what you thought of my exercise.  And, if you've come up with your own response to it, I would love to see that.  Post in the comments section below.

All exercises are taken from The 3 A.M. Epiphany by Brian Kiteley