Writing Outside Your Comfort Zone: Changing POV

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by, and I hope you all had the most fabulous weekend ever. Me, I was celebrating my father’s birthday for three days straight… and I would like a nap. You know how it goes.

All month long, we’re talking about something that’s very important for us writers. We’re discussing some of the ways we can get outside our comfort zones as writers, and grow along the way. We all know how hard it is to grow as a writer when we’re locked inside our little box, the walls we’ve built around us of things we know and things we’re good at—and we all know that in every part of life, it’s important to step outside that comfort zone now and again, to stretch ourselves and become newer versions of ourselves. It’s like doing updates, but it takes more time and effort.

Writing Outside Your Comfort Zone: Changing POV

We all have that one POV we just love writing in, don’t we? There’s that one POV that calls to us, that flows from our fingers so easily that we hardly even know we’re writing when we’re doing it. And then there’s the others, that we know we can do, but that we really don’t like to do, and so therefore don’t work with them as often as we should.

Me? I love writing in first person. If you’ve read the Druid Novels, you’ll know though that I’m proficient in both first and third person writing. I like both. But first person is the one that just flows when I sit down to write it. I even have an entire series of science-fiction novels that are completely written in first person. They’ll be released one of these years… editing is a process, when your books are over two hundred thousand words.

Thing is, if I had the choice, I would always write in first person. Why? Because it’s the one I know I’m really good at. It’s the one I’m comfortable in, the one where I can just sit back and write without having to think about the words I’m using or the pacing or the timing or anything else that I always find myself thinking too much about when I’m writing in third person. But I write in third person a lot. Why? Because I know that if I only write in first person, that’s all I’ll ever want to do. That’s all I’d ever know. And I don’t want that to happen to me. I don’t want to be stuck in a rut, where I can only write first person—even for stories that really need to be written in third. I’m not even going to broach the idea of writing a novel in second person, though I’ll mention that I also make myself write in that POV from time to time as well, just to see if I can.

Point is, it doesn’t matter which POV you love. You need to know how to write either one, and forcing yourself to do so is a really good way to stretch yourself as a writer. If you’re like me and you love writing first person, maybe try doing what I did with the Druid Novels: have one character be your first person narrator, but write the rest of the characters in third. Mixed POV is, after all, something many readers greatly enjoy.

Growing as a writer is as much about stretching yourself beyond your comfort zone as it is learning to do things we might not always want to do at all. It’s about learning the things we don’t care much for or about, and discovering new ways to use them, to suit our own needs. Whether that means writing a full novel series in mixed POV (like I did) or making yourself as proficient in first person as you are in third, is entirely up to you.

Happy writing, friends!

[love]

{Rani Divine}