POV has been on my mind a lot this year. I switched back to third person
for the seventh (and final) book in the Legacy of Androva series, after having written books five and six in first person. And now, for my new work-in-progress, I'm back to first person again. I thought I’d write a
blog post about my experiences with POV in the hopes it would reassure me that first person is right for this new book.
The
first four books in the Legacy of Androva series are written in third person, although I do tend to shadow one
character at a time in a chapter or scene and describe their thoughts and perspective in more detail. Whenever the main characters are in a scene together, I have to
guard against head-hopping, but the third person POV still gives me a lot of
freedom in terms of revealing personality traits, backstory, and plot
developments.
Books
five and six, Cal’s story and Galen’s story, are written in first person, which
was a change and a challenge I really enjoyed. I got to know both characters so well. In both cases, the difficult
part wasn’t just how to reveal story elements where my main character was
absent, but also the fact that secondary characters can only be seen through that
main character’s eyes. (However, it was fun being able to show what Cal and
Galen thought about Jax and Shannon!).
Here
are a couple of extracts showing the same scene in third person (close on Jax
and Shannon in Seeking Magic) and
first person (Galen in Surviving Magic). There is a whole lot more to Galen’s story than I was able to
show in Seeking Magic, but I thought it still made sense to keep the short crossover. He doesn’t
like Jax and Shannon very much in this scene, but he changes his mind later on!
Having
looked at the two points of view side by side, I can see there are advantages to both. And I stay so close to the thoughts of my main characters even in third
person that perhaps I won’t find the new book as much of a mental shift as I feared. Looks
like today’s blog post might have been very helpful 😊
What
do you prefer as a writer or as a reader? Is your writing style in terms of POV the
same as the books you enjoy reading the most, or is it different? Thank you for visiting my blog today!
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