Different Perspectives From Different Authors
It is a natural thing for people to have different perspectives. For example, two people may watch the same speaker present on their career. The speaker mentions his rough upbringing, his efforts in school, and then his success in life. While one viewer may see this as an inspirational story and be impressed by how much the speaker has overcome. The other viewer may see the speaker as egotistical for highlighting his accomplishments in such detail. Though the two viewers heard the same story their opinions can vary based on their ideals and preferences. This is the same with authors. When two authors write about the same story, their opinions will naturally be different on aspects of the story. These may be big or small differences, but no two stories will be exactly the same.
It is a common known fact that different people have different perspectives, which means an author is going to have a different perspective from another author. Authors tell a story from their own perspective. If authors tell a story from their own perspective and different people have different perspectives, that means that authors tell the same story differently.
Authors tell the same story differently, not necessarily because one is trying to intentionally lie, but it’s because they tell it according to their point of view. They tell the same story differently, because they emphasize different aspects relative to their views. A prime example of this is a situation in which two people get into an argument. One person may blame the other for something, and a second person may not see himself at fault, but rather, think that his friend did something wrong first.
It is for this reason that we have the expression “to stand in someone else’s shoes”. This way, the same situation may be explained or described differently by two different authors. The other example of this is if someone saw a car wreck happen. A truck hits a van. There are two viewers. Viewer 1 sees the accident occur and says that the truck is at fault. I’ll draw an arrow right here and write “fault”, because Viewer 1 thinks the truck is at fault. They saw the truck hit the van.
Viewer 2 was paying more attention to detail, and he cast fault on the van. The van ran a red light. Because the van ran a red light, it wasn’t supposed to be an intersection. That’s why the truck hit the van. The truck had a green light, but the van had a red light. We have Viewer 1 and Viewer 2, and both are just going off what they saw from their point of view, from their angle. Based on the information that they know, Viewer 1 thinks the truck is at fault, while Viewer 2 thinks that the van is at fault.
You can see here, both from this example in the earlier example where I talked about arguments, how people’s point of view causes them to emphasize different aspects of a certain story. That’s why two authors can tell the same story two different ways.