As I\u2019ve developed my writing style, I\u2019ve played with several different points of view in order to figure out what works best for my way of storytelling.<\/p>\n
For a long time, first person was my poison. It was easy to write that way \u2013 it helped me relate to what happened to the character. Besides, when I first started writing, I was writing about all of the adventures I wished I could have myself, so I was the star in all of my stories.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
As my writing matured, I realized how limiting first person was. If you want a scene in your story, your protagonist has to be there, or has to be told about it. You don\u2019t really know what other characters are thinking. How much can you trust your first person narrator to correctly interpret another character\u2019s words or actions? I also found it difficult to give the character his or her own voice. It always came out sounding like my voice, and all of my characters in all of my stories sounded the same.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve never experimented with second person.\u00a0As a rule, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s an effective way to write, at least not an entire novel.\u00a0I\u2019m reading a book right now that seems to effectively use second person \u2013 mostly because it\u2019s used intermittently and flows well. I won\u2019t say I’ll never never attempt second person, because maybe someday I\u2019ll find a story that needs to be told that way, but I don\u2019t find it likely.<\/p>\n
Nowadays, I\u2019m toying with different kinds of third person. The obvious next step from first person was third person limited: where the only character\u2019s head you\u2019re in is the main character. I like this because it keeps you close to the protagonist, it doesn\u2019t break the flow of the story, and there\u2019s only one voice to worry about.<\/p>\n
Since I\u2019m always trying to challenge myself as a writer, I recently experimented with a multiple point of view third person. It turned out well, however I don\u2019t think I will ever use quite so many points of view in the future. It was a huge challenge to make sure all of the characters had a distinguishable voice, and it was\u00a0also incredibly difficult to decide which part of the story should be told from whose perspective. I ended up with unnecessary points of view, in the end, so in the edit I have to decide how to tell certain scenes from other points of view. It\u2019s a tangled ball of multi-colored yarn to have so many different characters trying to tell the same story.<\/p>\n
I will continue to challenge myself as a writer, but aside from second person, I think I have exhausted all of the POV possibilities. I\u2019ll have to find new ways to challenge myself, and I will probably need to experiment with third person before I can decide what my actual preferred point of view is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I\u2019ve developed my writing style, I\u2019ve played with several different points of view in order to figure out what works best for my way of storytelling. For a long time, first person was my poison. It was easy to write that way \u2013 it helped me relate to what happened to the character. Besides, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[418,864,982,1161],"class_list":["post-3010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mechanics","tag-first-person","tag-pov","tag-second-person","tag-third-person"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3010\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}