Rashomon

use multiple points of view to expand your narrative

In Akira Kurosawa’s seminal 1950 film Rashomon, there are four points of view that tell the same narrative differently. Rashomon has become a catch phrase for describing this sort of mosaic narrative. Whether you’re not interested in using multiple points of view or not, you can use the concept to expand your narrative world. Try writing an existing scene over from a different point of view — or a few of them — to capture different details of the world, different possible understandings of the situation at hand. Then you can go back into your original text and augment it withmaterial that the limitations of your primary POV had led you to overlook.