The point of view you choose for writing your book will have a significant impact on both how you shape the narrative and how your readers engage with your story. There’s lots of noise in online writers’ groups about which point of view is the best point of view. Know this: no one point of view is objectively better than another point of view. However, there may be better points of view to take in a specific story.
I’ve written a lot of nonfiction—in third person—and, more recently, fiction, most of which has been from a first-person point of view. (I’m not even going near second-person for narrative writing.)
We can debate until the cows come home whether first or third person is a better point of view for readers, and you will never have an answer. In this video, I’m sharing some tips on writing effectively in first person.
In first-person POV, the narrator is a character within the story, narrating events using pronouns like “I,” “me,” and “my.” First-person can offer intimate access to the narrator’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences, creating a strong sense of immediacy and personal connection with the reader. However, as the writer, the limited perspective offered by the first person can be problematic for you as you tell the story. To do it well, you have to stay in the narrator’s head, thus limiting the information that you, as the writer, might want to reveal. Remember, you can only convey through the character what the character—narrator—knows. You have to use other devices, such as dialogue with others, to tease out the story as others see it. Examples of popular and classic books written in first-person POV include The Hunger Games, The Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, Jane Eyre, and The Handmaid’s Tale, to name a few.
Here are some of the things I’ve learned about first-person storytelling.
Patricia J. Parsons 