Installment #5: POV

Writing ByTrying My Hand At Writing A Novel

Feb 9

Here’s the knuckle-biting, emotionally-excruciating, colossally-critical question that consumed every waking moment this week — 1st person or 3rd person narrative?

The outline is done — mostly. I’m still missing some bits of the story that I think I’ll find along the way. I know who done it. Kinda. I reserve the right to change my mind if a twistier, less trope-y idea flies into my head at a later date. But for now, I’ve settled on a pretty unexpected bad guy.

And… Ramona, that voice in my head that stirs up all of my insecurities, is resting quietly in the attic.

So, all that was left to agonize over this week was whether I write this in the 1st person or 3rd person. I definitely have a preference when reading other people’s books. Whenever I find myself roaming around Barnes and Noble, randomly picking up a novel with an interesting cover or snappy title, I will fan through the first few pages just to see how other people are writing their stories. A lot of YA novels use first-person singular. It’s all “I peered into the wizard’s eyes as I unsheathed my sword…” But I always felt that somehow that was cheating. It probably goes back to my eighth grade English class when we had to long write essays and short stories. Somewhere in my impressionable, little psyche I heard the words “real writers don’t use I.” We know now that all of that was total bullshit and, in fact, people have been using FPS forever. In fact, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man wouldn’t be the same without the FPS narration.

I’ll admit, I did try a paragraph in FPS, but all it did was confirm for me that this book really needs to be from multiple perspectives. I need to be able to switch from the hero’s POV to the antagonists and back again. I need us to know what the hero is thinking, but still keep the antagonist present to throw off the reader’s scent. And I don’t want too much time to go by without knowing the bad guy’s modus operandi. Hopefully, it will up the spookiness. It should be a surprise that the eyes we are looking through are not the eyes we thought.

So I’m going with 3rd. But, boy, did that take some agonizing and experimenting. I’m glad I went down that rabbit hole because I think I would have always wondered if I got it right. I’m pretty sure now that I did.

This week I’m going to dive in with both feet and see how far I get. Wish me luck!