1^st Person vs. 3^rd Person: Choosing a Perspective

The idea for this post was prompted by a recent review I got for Serpentus, in which the reviewer mentioned they don’t typically like 1^st person POV books in fantasy (though they liked how I wrote mine, yay!), and went on to say that Serpentus needed to be written in 1^st person. And I 100% agree.

While I love writing in 1^st person, I actually have almost an even split between 1^st and 3^rd in my written books (written, not published, though the written ones I’m counting will be published one day.) My tally looks like this: 10 written in 3^rd person (counting my current work in progress), and 9 written in 1^st.

But how do I choose which perspective I ultimately run with? There are perks and challenges with both, and I need the perspective to mesh with the planned storyline. But it’s not as simple as that statement makes it sound.

The Case for 1^st Person

With 1^st person stories, it allows me as the author to really get inside the character’s head. I’m able to consider their thoughts and the decisions that ultimately drive their actions. And I love that aspect of writing 1^st person.

But it also comes with its challenges. How do you create a compelling story without it sounding too mechanical? Using “I” too frequently at the onset of a sentence can irk some readers, and I’m one of them. I try my best to make the narrative sound natural, but I also find other ways to phrase things. It’s a skill that I had to develop over time and many, many manuscripts. It’s much easier to write that way now than it was way back when I first started.

And yes, my very first “book,” the one that eventually spawned the idea for Wraith and the Revolution, was written in 1^st person. I was 13 when I wrote it. It’s not good, and I will never publish it as-is. (Really, I can’t now anyway. I stole a few characters from it for Wraith.)

But back to the topic at hand. Writing in 1^st person can be a ton of fun, but it can also be incredibly draining. I’ll refer back to Serpentus here. That story is dark, it’s brutal, and there are a few scenes that absolutely gutted me to write. It took everything I had to write that book, and it messed with my head a few times. But in terms of emotional impact, it had to be written in 1^st person, because that’s what I was going for. Writing it in 3^rd wouldn’t have achieved that even half as well.

The Case for 3^rd Person

Big, epic storylines with multiple points of view typically work so much better in 3^rd person.

I personally struggle with keeping character voices distinct if there are more than two written in the 1^st person perspective, so when I go epic with my fantasy worlds, I prefer using 3^rd. Some authors are incredible at distinct 1^st person voices when multiple viewpoints are included in a story (Halo Scot is the first that comes to mind, with her book The Mortality Experiment, which I believe had five, all in first person, and all unique/distinct. I do not have that ability when writing 1^st person.)

With 3^rd person, it’s easier to have multiple distinct character voices, because their actions take center stage, while their thoughts are often more in the background (at least, that’s how it works for me.) There’s a bit more distance between the reader and the character with 3^rd person, which also makes some characters less of a challenge to write… And probably easier for the reader to stomach, too.

Take Dranamir, for instance. She’s one of the primary villains in The Relics of War series, and she’s not a pleasant person. Even with that distance I mentioned, there were certain chapters I had to really psych myself up for (watching that last Darth Vader scene in Rogue One helped a lot with Dranamir.) Writing a character who is inherently awful 99% of the time is hard for me, and I doubt I’d ever be able to write someone like Dranamir from a 1^st person perspective. I just don’t have it in me. (And for those of you hoping Colin will get to tell his side of The Caein Legacy one day, I hate to break it to you, but that’s not in the cards.)

My other big project, The Mage War Chronicles, is also written in 3^rd person. While each book has a different main character, all of those stories intertwine, and the series overall has an “epic” fantasy vibe when looked at through that lens. Because of that, I went with 3^rd for all of the books. (And my current draft is another instance sort of like Dranamir, although this character is very morally gray. I’ve found it difficult at times to get into his headspace, and unfortunately, Darth Vader doesn’t work for me here. This character has a completely different vibe.)

But how do I ultimately choose?

Sometimes, I don’t always know which perspective is going to work best when I begin a project. For instance, the first 3-4 attempts at what eventually became Exile were written in 3^rd person. But it wasn’t working for me or the story. When I made the switch to 1^st, everything just sort of…clicked.

But in other cases, I know right away that the story needs to be written in one form or the other. The Relics of War was easy: With 6 POV characters, it had to be done in 3^rd. With Serpentus, and again with Wraith and the Revolution, the opening lines sort of came to me… And I knew then that both of those books needed to be written in 1^st. I found the character’s voices with those opening lines, and there was no going back.