I'm thinking about changing the perspective to first person. Any thoughts?

[Guest]

I have a question on perspective. I'm working on a four book series. I wrote the first book in third person omnipotent and the second book in third person limited.

I have started the third book in third person limited as well, but, even though I'm already 20,000 words in, I'm thinking about changing the perspective to first person. Any thoughts?

[Alex]

I write only in first person. Suggested to me by another writer.

[Aria]

I think the person you write in, is a reflection on one’s writing style. Sure, you can try to go with whatever works better for a genre, or with the current market. I personally don’t think it’s worth loosing that natural flow of your writing. My advice is to stick with whatever makes sense to you.

[AJ~]

I prefer first limited, but it means a more concerted effort in order to work for the reader. Hold on... Maybe that's why I prefer it

[David]

Changing POV after writing can be a pain. I did it for my first novel and it took 40 hours (116k words) even though I cheated a bit on the first go and had the narrator introduce some sections that I hadn't changed. I changed them later, but I don't know exactly how much time that took because I was also working on other changes at the same time.

I don't regret making the change as I went from first person present tense to omniscient past tense. I felt the first version sounded immature and I'm a lot happier with the improved version. If you're confident you need to make the change I suggest you do it before you add too much more.

[Mukund]

Because it’s a series, I’d recommend keeping the same narrative style throughout. Even within a book, switching from 3rd to first can be jarring, unless the narrator switches from passive observer to active participant (Orhan Pamuk’s “Snow” is an example of this I can recall, and even here, I was ambivalent about the decision to switch.)

[Caelan]

It depends on the whole story you write as a series, and how strongly the books are connected to each other, so it's impossible to give you any useful suggestion blindly. There's one thing you can do, though. Imagine if the series were one single book and the currently separated stories were chapters in it. Would you change POV from chapter to chapter? How would you like your concept as a reader if it was someone else's book?

Hope it helps

[Batman]

More Topics:

• What is a query? What do I reply if it is in the beginning stages?
• You want to write a story about xyz?
• When you’re writing about a (real world) setting that you’ve never been to..
• Any tips on writing about revenge?
• How I Can Better Represent Different Races And People
• My Grammarly app has gone vegetarian