First-person or third-person? How to choose your voice

So many writers - especially those who are just starting out - are afraid to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard because they’re not sure which voice to write their stories in.

Should it be first-person or third-person?

Look on any writers’ forum and the same question gets asked time after time, even though a perfectly valid answer would be “Whichever you like. You’re the writer.”

But the dilemma is real: who wants to start work on a 100,000-word novel if they set off on the wrong foot right from the first sentence?

While the choice may come naturally to an experienced writer, beginners or those who’ve perhaps cut their teeth here on Vocal+ and want to go for the big one, the blockbuster novel, may want to weigh their options first before committing all that time to the project.

Writing in the first person puts the reader right inside your main character’s head.

powerful

The reader shares his or her thoughts, sees everything through their eyes, their filter, and is given the chance to imagine what it’s like being somebody else, perhaps somebody radically different from the reader’s own life in every respect.

That’s a powerful tool, and why so many novelists have used it and continue to do so.

But it has limitations.

If your main character is a standard human being (we’re not talking about sci-fi here), they can only tell the reader what they can actually see, hear or experience, and what they think, but they won’t have an overview of what’s going on or see themselves in context.

That problem is solved at a stroke by going third-person.

Suddenly you, the author, get to play God. You’re omniscient, all-powerful, and in control of every aspect of the story: it’s your own little world, and you can do whatever you wish with it.

ploy

You can show readers that, while your main character may think A, the situation he’s found himself in is really B, but he doesn’t know it.

You can comment on the action and on other characters’ motivations in a way a first-person narrator can’t, and that gives you a scope that sit-com writers and writers of intricately-plotted novels appreciate only too well.

In the motion-picture Sleepless In Seattle, the two main characters are kept unusually far apart until way into the film - a ploy that simply wouldn’t have worked so well if it had been narrated by either one of them in the first person.

Our joy as viewers is to watch their separate lives slowly but surely coming together, something that could only be achieved by telling it third-person, and is all the better for it.

Would Sherlock Holmes have been anywhere near as gripping if Holmes himself had narrated it, instead of Watson, who was able to give us his own point of view as well as reporting on things that Holmes might not have been aware of?

mind-blowing

Some authors, most notoriously Agatha Christie, have played with the concept by giving us an unreliable narrator.

We see and experience everything through their eyes, but what if they’re not telling the truth?

No spoilers here, but when you read her unreliable-narrator novel with its twist at the end, you’ll know just how mind-blowing a tool it can be.

Other authors mix the two, telling some of the novel first-person, then parts of it third-person, which can put the first-person narrator’s words in context or even up-end them.

And as you become more confident as a writer, you can have as many first-person narrators as you wish, so long as you make it clear (not all do!) who’s talking at any one time.

But the most important voice in any novel or any movie script is... your own.

As the author or screenwriter, we readers rely on you for the plot, the pace, the characters, the description and everything else - so, no pressure!

• If you found this useful, please give it a heart on Vocal or share a link to it on social media, as that will encourage me to keep offering more advice.

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