The First and the Third

When I wrote my first novel, I did it in third person. It seemed to work, although I think I knew all along that a sense of intimacy was missing from some parts. I started writing my next book and early on something just wasn't right. I was excited about the premise I'd come up with and the outline I'd done. I liked the main character, too, but when I read over what I'd written so far, it just didn't flow.

If my WIP had been a boy I was dating, I would have stated that it was time to make some major changes or call it quits. The problem with WIPs (and often, human boys) is that it's pretty damn difficult to have constructive conversations, and it seems like I'm always the one who does all the work. Since I liked the project- both for its own merits as well as what it added to my other story- and since it wasn't ever going to sit down with me, hold my hand, look me in the eye, and tell me what we were going to do to make this work, I decided to try an experiment.

I rewrote the first page in first person. I read it back to myself. And it sounded just so much more right.

So I switched all of what I had written so far (just a couple of chapters) and continued from there. The only problem now was that my books didn't match. Since these two novels are meant to be twins, following former best friends from the night one of the girls runs away, it seemed like they should either both be first person, or both be third.

But I couldn't change my first book now. True, I hadn't sent it off to an editor yet, and I was still meaning to make some changes... minor changes, like changing the neighborhood the MC's boyfriend lives in, changing her uncle's job, not literally changing 'her,' every single 'her' used to describe the MC to 'me' and every 'she' to 'I.' Still, I tried it. I rewrote the first section of the first chapter, and while I was changing the POV I also made it tighter. I started scrolling through the document, stopping at random pages and seeing how random paragraphs sounded in first person, and damn it, everything sounded better.

What really got me was stopping at a point where the MC is justifying why she stays in a bad situation. This part was especially important to me, something I really wanted to get right, and in the third person it just sounded like some psychologist's explanations for a hurt woman's choices. In the first, it sounded real.

I can't say I enjoyed going through the whole manuscript, repositioning the cursor every few centimeters and changing 265 pages worth of pronouns. What I can say is, I'm happy it's done. I know I missed some switches. The book is currently with my sister getting a read-through, and then I'm going to go through it again and fix it some more. Right now, I have no immediate plans for sending it to a professional editor (which is convenient, as my bank account has seen better days.) That's because lately I've been thinking that my first-conceived baby shouldn't be my first-born, which is to say, it might be smarter to debut with a different book.

So I better hurry up and get back to actually writing that other book, huh?