First person perspectives

The current YA novel I’m writing, The All Tree, uses first person perspective. I’ve not done a lot of 1st person POV, with the exception of the novella for Metatropolis. I’m a classic, when it comes to the nuts and bolts skills of writing, third person limited perspective writer.

But you stagnate when you don’t try new things, or add new tools to the box. And the voice of the protagonist, Kadie, spilled out on the page a lot easier for me when writing the initial concept up, when I was in 1st person.

Now that I’m halfway through writing in that, I’m a little bit daunted by the task. Because I haven’t used 1st person POV for that length of a project, I’m constantly reassessing the project on a line by line and chapter by chapter level. Plotting requires me to always move the character into the thick of things (which can be tricky, here’s a cool novel plot, but on the ground floor from the character’s POV, it can get hard to figure out how to naturally make their story fit. Why would they be in X location, etc). I’m also looking at the voice spilling in over into every line of narration and trying to make sure it matches the character.

All of which is good for the book. But makes for one heck of a tired writer. I can’t wait to get back into third person limited… said the weary author.

Filed under the topic Journal on January 1st 2010 at 3:36 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.