On occasion I’ve heard people say they don’t like books written in the first person (often when praising a title in that narrative style that they’ve just read).  I wonder why the resistance.  Do they find it uncomfortable to be so intimate with the character?  Is it hard to suspend disbelief and be inside another person’s head whose world view, attitudes and experiences may be a long way from their own?  Personally ‘walking in someone else’s shoes’ is one of the things I love about reading.  Although when I’m choosing a new book I don’t consciously think about what the point of view is.  Other factors – the cover, the blurb, the first page of writing, people’s recommendations – are much more significant.

But when I’m writing, the first elements I need to pin down are character and point of view.  Some stories I know instinctively* have to be a sole first person.  I want that intensity and focus, there is no doubt about whose story it is and it’s not to be shared.  My Sal Kilkenny series uses the first person POV as does The Kindest Thing, a book about a woman who is tried for murder after she helps her husband end his life.  The novel I’ve just finished, Letters to my Daughter’s Killer, which explores the question of whether it is possible to forgive a murderer, is also a first person account.  Other stories such as the Blue Murder and Scott and Bailey series and standalones like Split Second suit several third person points of view.  As a writer I find it refreshing to switch from spending months in the almost claustrophobic world of ‘I’ to the variety and freedom of ‘he’ and ‘she’.  And in my most recently published novel, Blink of an Eye, I’ve used two narrators, both written in the first person.

Does it matter to you?

*And sometimes I don’t.  Credit must go to my novel writers’ group who on reading the opening chapters of The Kindest Thing all agreed the only viewpoint they were at all  interested in was Deborah’s.  And so it came to be.