Psst fish sticks12/31/2023 ![]() If you’re writing a memoir, of course, which person to write in is not an issue, since memoirs are always written in first person. So think it through before you start: can all the scenes you need to craft be written from the first-person perspective of one of your characters? If not, write in third person, or else alternate your chapters so you have a mix of first person and third (or multiple characters narrating in first person). This would have allowed her to make the scenes at the end either third person or narrated from the viewpoint of another character who knew what the boyfriend was doing. Of course, had she planned out the scenes of the novel before starting to write, she could have foreseen the problem ahead and constructed the story with several chapters written in third person, or in the first-person perspective of a second character. This problem caused the author to have to go back and do some substantial rewriting to overcome the difficulty her first-person narration had created. You either have to alternate the point of view consistently throughout the entire novel, or else stick with the same point of view throughout. ![]() What’s not okay is to suddenly, at the end, switch the point of view, or to switch it for just a small patch of the story. Alternating points of view is permissible, but only if you do so in a consistent fashion, switching back and forth throughout the entire novel. The author couldn’t simply insert a couple of scenes at the end, told from the third-person perspective. But she couldn’t write these using first person, because the girlfriend (main character), who was narrating the story, didn’t know what the boyfriend was up to! The problem was that she wanted to show the sneaky activities of the main character’s cheating boyfriend. ![]() Everything went smoothly until the very end of the manuscript, where she got stuck. She just liked the sound of present tense better, and thought the story would seem more intimate and personal written from the “I” perspective. She had written her entire novel in first person, present tense. Let me tell you the problem that one of my author clients ran into, which illustrates the difficulty. These are common dilemmas and ones worth exploring, because selecting the right tense and point of view from the start will save you getting stuck part-way into the writing, unable to make that choice work for the remainder of your story. How do you decide which tense you should use: past or present? In the case of a novel, you also need to decide whether to write in first person or third. You’re getting ready to write your novel or memoir.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |