I’ve spent the past couple of days wrestling with which viewpoint I want to use in my novel. The two most common viewpoint perspectives are first and third person, with omniscient after that (and second person completely out of the question).
I began writing my novel in third person, the point of view used by the majority of fictional works. By the time I got to chapter two, I got this crazy idea that the novel might be more fun to write in first person.
“I crept down the narrow pathway that led to the marina, with one hand on my flashlight and the other around my pistol’s grip.”
And it was fun to write that way… for a little bit. After re-reading chapter two, I realized that I had started at least half of my sentences with the word “I,” and the words “my” and “mine” appeared dozens and dozens of times throughout the text. “I did this. I did that. My mind was racing. I went here. I went there.”
All first person narrative doesn’t have to be written that way, of course, and after a bit of editing I got rid of a lot of those words. I changed “I saw there was a full moon” to simply “there was a full moon.” If the book is written in first person, it is assumed that the narrator saw it, so “I saw” becomes redundant.
I probably could have continued writing the novel in first person, but I quickly found that I was spending more time writing around the problems it was creating for me than I was simply moving the story forward. Based on that, I’ve made the decision to write the novel in third person.
Which means, at some point, I need to completely re-write the second chapter.
Right now, I’m just over 3,000 words, and beginning the third chapter. At that rate, I will have 33 chapters in a 50,000 word novel, which seems ridiculous. I need to make my chapters longer. I’ll work on that.
I’ve always had trouble writing fiction in the first person as I feel that the style comes off amateurish.
Many great books have been written in the first person: Moby Dick and A Tramp Abroad come to mind. But of course, Herman Melville and Mark Twain were masters of their craft.
By the way, this website looks great on mobile.
I agree, most any book could be written from either perspective, it just depends on the story you want to tell. While searching Google, I kept finding the same statistic over and over that said more books written in 3rd Person are sold than those written in 1st Person — then again, we all know that statistics can lie (for example, maybe more books are written in 3rd Person as well). If I had more time for the project I would consider 1st Person, but I quickly found it was taking me twice as long to write things that sounded professional in first person. Maybe I’ll try it on novel #2. ;)
I always find 3rd person easier because I can throw in background details that the character wouldn’t be aware of in 1st person. Plus 1st person gets too personal sometimes.