"Skilled fiction-writers can guide the imagination, cuing readers to use their senses so that they fantasize more richly than they could alone (Scarry 1999, 3-9). If it serves a storyteller's artistic aims, a writer can prompt readers to imagine a scene from several perspectives at once. Creative writers can accomplish this goal by blending appeals to readers' visual and somatosensory (bodily) senses."
"Daughter of the sun god Helios and the ocean nymph Perse, Circe is scorned by her divine relatives, then exiled to an island for using her powers. She learns that she has a knack for transformation and can use herbs and incantations to "turn creatures to their truest selves" (Miller 63). On her island, she feeds a lost, hungry captain and his crew (not Odysseus and his men, who arrive later), but she uses her powers against them after the captain rapes her."
Skilled fiction writers guide readers to imagine from multiple perspectives simultaneously by combining visual and somatosensory cues. Sensory cues prompt readers to construct richer fantasies and to identify with characters while also imagining perceptions that protagonists lack. Madeline Miller's Circe provides an example of point-of-view craft, giving Circe her own voice and showing how transformation and power dynamics are perceived. The novel portrays Circe's exile, her mastery of herbs and incantations to "turn creatures to their truest selves," and the use of perspective to depict traumatic events such as rape and retaliation. Fiction-reading can develop the ability to imagine situations from multiple viewpoints.
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