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.
I’m sure that there isn’t anyone—even people who don’t write—who hasn’t stumbled upon something someone once said that seems to resonate. For writers, it’s often something they read that resonates deeply with something they’re writing at that moment. Wouldn’t that be a powerful addition to your writing?
Well, sometimes it is. But there are a few important considerations about using quotes in your writing that might be worth reflecting upon as you select that powerful quote. Regardless of whether you write fiction or nonfiction, a well-placed quote can be precisely what you need to add power to your narrative.
I happen to love a good quote, so I’ve given a lot of thought to the who, what, when, where, why and how of using them.
For example, I often like this one from Allen Ginsberg:
“To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.” — Allen Ginsberg
It was probably the early 2000s. I was still a full-time university professor, and there was a newfangled thing in town: online learning. For as long as I can remember, the university where I taught had been at the forefront of what they called “distance education.” It was what we called “correspondence courses” in the early years. In the simplest of definitions, correspondence courses were those courses where the teacher and students communicated by mail―the old-fashioned kind. Picture it for a moment.
You are an aspiring writer living in a small town, miles from any place where you might be able to find even an evening course to learn something bout writing. You pick up a copy of Writer’s Digest magazine at your local newsstand, and as you’re flipping through those real pages, you come across an advertisement for a correspondence course.
An old advertisement from Writer’s Digest
You write to the company advertising the course, enclose your cheque to cover the course cost, and they send you course materials that contain instructions. When you’ve finished the first section of the course and completed the assignment, you put that assignment in an envelope and mail it to your instructor. Then you wait. (Not unlike waiting for an agent to get back to you, right? Perhaps it was good training after all!). The instructor grades your assignment and mails it back to you. Then you complete the next section, and the process presents itself until the end of the course. As I was writing this, I remembered that I had actually done this back in the early days of my writing career.
It was a novel-writing course, and the company promised to connect me with a fiction-writing teacher. The company sent me a binder full of materials, and I corresponded with the teacher, who critiqued my work all along the way. Slow but effective, in my view. Fast-forward to the twenty-first century and all our digital, online tools.
When my university began its foray into online learning, I was first in line in my department to begin the process of creating courses for online delivery. Courses designed to be presented in person don’t translate directly onto online learning platforms without significant alterations to how the content is chunked and presented. That’s why so many kids had so much difficulty with their schoolwork when their in-classroom learning suddenly moved online in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. I felt for them, knowing what I did about the differences between in-class and distance teaching and learning. However, a well-developed online course can be an excellent way to learn. And aspiring writers can learn so much from a really good online course. It doesn’t matter where you live anymore. You can find rich resources for online learning.
The online self-publishing space Kindlepreneur publishes a list of good online courses for writers every year. This year’s list, 16 Best Online Courses for Writers in 2022 [Free & Paid], includes courses for beginning writers, people who aspire to write children’s books, memoir writers, bloggers and much more.
Never let it be said that you can’t access or afford a course that might help you realize your potential to become a better writer. There are lots available.
And if you’ve ever considered writing a nonfiction book, you’ll need to write a book proposal. You might try this course…(you didn’t think I’d forget to plug my own course, did you??)
Of course, for my blog readers, I’ve created a special price that expires on June 17. Use the coupon code MAY2022BLOGREADER at this URL:
Patricia J. Parsons 