What Point of View to Use?

I, you, he, she.  The dilemma of which pronouns to use when writing is much, much, more difficult than I anticipated.  When I first set out to write my book, I thought it would be in first person.  It’s based around one person – Cassie, the main character – and the very rough first several chapters I had written ages ago was in first person.  Then when I got around to actually writing the thing, I ended up deciding on third person.

Although I used to write solely in first person it seemed – I was a teenager and it seemed like all the Meg Cabot and Sara Dessen books were written in first person, and of course I basically wanted to be them –  I have gotten more comfortable with writing in third now that I’m in college.  Everyone in my creative writing classes seems to think that the difficulties with point of view arise when one writes in first person, and we were all challenged to challenge ourselves.  For my classmates, that meant first person.  For me, that meant third person.  I think that I am now comfortable with both.  Both serve different purposes and both can be successful.  Deciding which one to use, however (the debate is only between first and third in this case, no second person for me) has proven incredibly hard.

So far, I’ve been sitting comfortably in the third person department (as if the world of writing was a department store of some sort) and cleverly deleting every “I” in my first several chapters.  I’ve almost finished updating my first draft, though, and I still don’t know if that’s the best idea.  Why is this so difficult?

The book is, technically, a young adult novel.  Is first person a young adult thing?  When I was a young adult (who am I kidding, I still am) first person used to be the way all of the books I was reading were written.  But they weren’t historical fiction.  Now I read a lot of fiction that is primarily in third person.  Especially fiction of the historical variety.

And now I’ve come back to finish writing this post after just reverting the first chapter back to first person.  I haven’t gotten very far in the book, but I know that changing he point of view later on will be incredibly difficult.  I need to decide what to use now and stick with it.

I’m going to go with first person.

These are the things that I’m not sure anyone actually considers when setting out to write a book. Plot and characterization seems to come first.  Organization second. Perhaps some sort of outline comes third.  None of these take into account the point of view, though, which is incredibly important.  I definitely hadn’t put much thought into what point of view to use, and I’m just now realizing what a lapse in judgement that was.  Point of view almost needs to be considered first of all.  The person who’s telling the story is very important to the development of a story.

Oh well.  I’ll know better next time.