The first person

When I was young, all my stories were told in third person. I didn't really understand the concept of being in someone else's head yet and my stories were in that stilted narrator voice of five year olds. You know the sort: "John went to school. He liked school. He saw his friends and they had fun because they were happy at playtime." As I got a little older, I discovered first person narrative. And boy, did I love it.

Everything I wrote from that point on was in first person. I wrote full-length, multi-chapter stories in first person. I thought it marked me as a writer. Turns out, it probably just marked me as a tween with a working internet connection, a big imagination and a cringe-worthy obliviousness to the lameness of clichés. Ouch.

A couple of years back, I decided that first person narrators were beneath me. Yeah, it was fun when I was a kid but really, who was I kidding pretending to be someone else while writing a story? Nobody believed in phrases like "Jenna's face was bright red with anger. I took a few wary steps back". It was just so stupid and childish and Terri? You could do so much better than that.

I started writing in third person again and didn't look back. I LOVED third person. It made me feel powerful, like a god of my own imagination, deciding the fates of these unfortunate characters. I probably went a little crazy with the power lust but that's for another post. The point is, my third person stories were simply mind blowing.

And then I hit a wall.

My new story started off in third person. That was how I thought it was going to be. But I've been doing more careful crafting with this, thanks to learning from my past mistakes and realised that third person didn't seem authentic enough. The story was more about how the characters stay afloat in a society that was rapidly crumbling around them - having a third person narrator removed the intimacy necessary for this. I re-wrote the first chapter and a half in first person and thought that would be the end of my worries. I was wrong.

Halfway through the story, this character disappears. The first person narrator would have to switch, because her disappearance from the story doesn't stop the plot from moving. It actually initiates a spiral effect of events that drastically change the direction of the other main protagonist's life. For this reason, I thought that perhaps it might be better if I swapped back to third person from the beginning, so readers wouldn't get too annoyed for their investment in the first protagonist to become contrived.

It didn't work. I mentally writhed around, debating what was the best thing to do. I asked countless fellow writers for advice, read about ten articles online about POV, thought about all the books I had read with dual perspectives and at the end of the weekend, I threw everything I had learned out the window and cried.

That done, I had made my decision. I was going to write the story in first person and switch to the other protagonist's perspective when the time came, reader outrage or not. I thought that if the decision was causing me so much agony then maybe I shouldn't listen to convention and what was expected of a writer. Maybe it was time I did my own thing.